I don't know if they ignore it. I have nearly 13,000 pages indexed on my main site (which was recently majorly changed) and nearly 40,000 on my static site. It definitely doesn't hurt. Without getting into specifics, I made 3 times as much with AdSense on my site as I did with Amazon last quarter. Also that was my best quarter on Amazon ever.
haha hobbydeals.com has been deindexed... i need to edit the templates and perhaps redo the url scheme.
It's not a matter of the search engines recognizing a script, but they do recognize content and penalize for duplicate content, so the client-side code and page format for each site should be different. That's where the customization is important. Theoretically, the script being used should not matter at all. I've set up five Amazon sites in the last two months and two of them are starting to bring in some coins. The hardest part is customizing the customer reviews with Amazon sites. That's what's triggering the penalties for duplicate content. You could always write customized reviews for about a million products and you should then be in good shape.
I've got a job/careers-oriented vBulletin site, and I've just about finished a custom AWS script to grab books from Amazon that would benefit the users of my site. There's still a few more things I need to do with it, then I have to go back through it and make sure the SEO is decent... But have a look anyway, you can get an idea of how different a custom script and be from all the "generic" AWS sites out there: http://www.discusscareers.com/amazon_store.php
Another resource would be to do a book search based on the title of the current thread and provide a link to the first book that is returned.
I prefer not to. Otherwise the script can take on the look of other AWS scripts which is something I try hard to avoid. Here is a great example of the same script but twisted apart to be even more suitable. http://www.foremangrills.com/store/page/1/george/foreman grill/ The node pages are the same but I worked on the listing pages pretty well. This site gets 300 uniques a day now and just 30 days ago it was 20. I made 8 sales this week alone and the adsense does well also. I have not even advertised the site anywhere. I will look to sell foreman when I have at least 60 days of consistent stats. Someone is gonna be happy on this one.
Try to take out spaces in the URL (Like use _). Some older browsers will give out a 404 error message.
If someone can't even afford to get an updated browser I sure wouldn't want him visiting my sites. I've never understood those comments of "don't do this or that because older browsers won't accept it". Who cares about old browsers?
You never know, that visitor with the 1.2 Netscape Browser might be the the one that makes a $34,346.95 order that nets you a few thousand bucks!!
Good luck but I think the AA sites are better served by having more original content to boost their rankings and indeed, visitor count.