Does Amazon help my website SEO

No.

But let’s revisit this story with a few more details. I was recently asked by a customer if listing their products in Amazon gave them any actual SEO benefit to their main site. My initial thought  was “no” but I don’t like to give answers without having an investigation. There were three factors I thought I’d investigate before answering the question:

1.) Does Amazon link back to the website anywhere from the Amazon storefront of the seller? No – doesn’t look like it to me.

2.) Does Amazon mention the website without a link – so proving at least referral traffic, if not actual SEO link juice. Again no – not as far as I can see. The user could find a product in  Amazon I suppose and then use the seller’s name in Google to find the actual website but I doubt that happens very much.

3.) Has anyone written blogs about this question before? I searched for anyone else asking the same question and couldn’t find anyone mentioning it.

This of course doesn’t mean that it’s not worth doing. After all Amazon itself has a magnificent SEO practise and products listed in Amazon are very likely to be found… It’s just not going to  help your own SEO.

So what is this magnificent SEO that Amazon themselves have?

Two really strong features spring to mind:

1.) The Amazon Afilliate Program which encourages other websites to place links to products on Amazon on their own website in return for commision on sales.

and then the one that my colleague Damian who is the office nag/bore/evangelist/guru for user generated content will like…

2.) Amazon’s user generated product reviews which generates large amount of unique content on each product page.