Review sites are in for a big hit in the next coming months as Amazon.com announced major changes to the affiliate API.  Starting in November Amazon will not longer let you pull full reviews from their website on products that you want to promote as an affiliate.  Instead they will be replacing this with a link back to the full reviews on Amazon.com.

Many website developers, including myself,  build small niche review sites where they pull in Amazon.com products as well as the reviews of these products to display on their own sites.  It’s these reviews that help drive the popularity of these review sites up in the SERPs.  This of course creates a ton of duplicate content that Amazon.com often losses out on.

Amazon.com, I’m sure, is  tired of the lost revenue because of it and has finally decided to keep that very valuable content to themselves.

Many software products that are available to website developers will be effected by this and I’m sure we’ll be seeing new updates very soon.  Some of these products that could be affected are:

• ReviewAzon
• phpzon
• Keywords 2 Websites
• WP Robot
• Comparipress
• WP Zon builder

and a lot others

Mark Hansen has a great post about this on his blog.  Check it out its a great post.

I know many developers of these products are scratching their heads trying to figure a work around.  And all will be making updates soon to reformat how Amazon.com products are displayed or creating another way to pull in reviews, if its possible.

For now, just be aware that this change may effect any of your websites pulling in content from Amazon.com.  What are your thoughts on this? Do you this this is crap or do you think it was just a matter of time before Amazon.c0m put the breaks on some the spammy sites out there.   Is this the end of the free ride for some on the coat tails of Amazon.com?

Related posts:

1. No More PPC Directly to Amazon.com
2. ReviewAZON Review – Do We Really Need Another Amazon Plugin?