Amazon API announcement - no more publishing Amazon reviews?

Mail just received:

Did I understand this right, that we will no longer be able to display the content of reviews on our site, but rather just a link to reviews on the Amazon site? The Large response group also includes reviews - presumably this will cease to return them too?

I can sort of understand this move, if I have understood it right - reviews are a huge slab of user-created content for Amazon, presumably they don't want affiliates using it to outrank them in the SERPS. But there are a lot of plugins, scripts etc. out there that display Amazon reviews. Chaos round the corner...?


UPDATE: Just found this in the developer docs - "The Reviews reqeust group no longer returns customer review content. Instead, it returns an iframe URL that contains reviews which you can embed on a web page." Yeuch! confirms what I thought though, they want to keep review content for themselves in future. Personally I think maybe that's a good thing, Amazon reviews were causing too much duplicate content out there. We will have to make an effort to create more unique content

 

Personally, I think it's a poor decision not to include that extra content to users. A lot of what makes people want to use amazon is because they include this user-generated content in their api.

 

I guess they must have weighed things up and decided it was in their interest. Like I say, the content is an attraction to affiliates, but Amazon aren't getting value from that if these affiliates are outranking their own product pages in the SERPS. Plus, have you ever Googled for a random sentence from any Amazon review? There are literally thousands of pages duplicating this content, which makes me wonder if it was worth having reviews on my pages anyway...

Well, it is a bit of a blow, but I guess I am used to EPN jerking us around, so this is pretty minor by comparison

 

I'm sure that's why they are doing it, but if referrals die off, I hope they at least are tracking to see if it makes a difference and would re-evaluate the decision.

 

My guess is that they will not re-evaluate the decision. I can only guess that this came as a result of people changing what actual reviewers said when the content was exported.

I guess this just about puts products like ReviewAzon out of business overnight. That's too bad.

 

Yes, I thought of ReviewAzon... I guess it's time to adapt, you can never put all your eggs in one basket in this game, someone can come along and change something and your livelihood can be gone overnight...

 

TheNicheStoreBuilder blog posted up a list of tools that "might" be affected:

* ReviewAzon
* Amazon AutoPoster
* Amazon Product in a Post
* Amazon Machine Tags
* phpZon
* Amazon AStores
* Store Stacker
* Keywords 2 Websites
* CompariPress
* Niche Site Platform
* Last Amazon Review
* WP Zon Builder

It's going to SUCK for a lot of people.