To make good money from amazon there is some tips that will work for me and it will work for you as well. 1) Take products with high price. I will recommend products which are more than $500. 2) Make a website around particular niche and start writing comprehensive researched based reviews on that niche products. 3) Start collecting emails and build a email list. 4) On big events like valentine and Christmas, send emails related to these products and you will surely make some big bucks. 5) Make two website: A low price product website which will increase your commission to 8% and a high price product so you can get 8% on these products.
The key to making big money with amazon is selling big products. It's not that hard you just get targeted traffic towards high paying products and get a higher payout.
What do you mean "Google kills them"? Google kills what? Your site? Do you mean that in a good way or a bad way? Ie; "I killed it" or "I'm making a killing". Or bad way as in Google deranks and deindexes your site? If the latter then there will be a legitimate reason for that. I see no reason why Google wouldn't rank your page high for a lifetime provided it has quality unique content and backlinks.
Google kills them = Google deranks them B/c the sites are autoblogs where the content came directly from Amazon. But I read some posts that some people are doing well with Autoblogs.