Amazon may be the daddies of affiliates and have some of the best affiliate tools on the web, but sometimes they just get it wrong, wrong, wrong. The beauty of having a blog that allows comments is that whenever someone adds a comment it adds content to your website. With affiliate programs like Adsense and Amazon you can use this content to generate affiliate links, which in turn generates money for you (or in this instance, me).
However, sometimes the words on your website left by commentators aren’t always the sort of words that lend themselves to affiliate links… that is of course, until Amazon’s contextual advertising kicks in and picks out some utterly random and bizarre phrases.
For some reason Amazon has automatically picked out the phrase ‘bunch of complete twats’ from one of the comments left on my blog, and has linked it to the product of the Brady Bunch on DVD.
Why would Amazon have done this? Is the word ‘bunch’ sufficient for Amazon to pick out the product? Has someone at Amazon inserted the keywords ‘bunch’ and ‘twats’ together in the product entry for the Brady Bunch?
Whatever the reason, I don’t think I’m going to get any conversions from this particular link from Amazon.
Darren Jamieson, aka MrDaz, is the Technical Director and co-founder of Engage Web and has been working online in a career spanning two decades. His first website was built in 1998 and is still live today.
