If you read Progress Report 1, you’ll know that the blog I set up for this case study is Cheap Electricity Options.

To recap, Week 1 of the blog development involved keyword research and identifying if the niche wasn’t too competitive and that there were enough products for it to advertise. Week 1 closed with the installation of the blog, selecting a theme and adding a home page and article. The blog is set up to use a static home page.

Week 2 saw the preparation of some articles for the site that were scheduled to be posted over the next 2-3 weeks. I also created a report to entice visitors to sign up for the email series that is also being added, on an ongoing basis, to the site.

So now to week 3…:

Week 3:

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Following on from Amazon pulling the plug entirely on associates in Colorado in March this year due to a Sales tax measure introduced in that state, yesterday they fired out an email to associates about an upcoming change to their API which will affect a huge number of associates who use various plugins to add products and customer reviews to their sites. Here’s what they said in their email:

On November 8, 2010 the Reviews response group of the Product Advertising API will no longer return customer reviews content and instead will return a link to customer reviews content hosted on Amazon.com. You will be able to display customer reviews on your site using that link. Please refer to the Product Advertising API Developer guide found here for more details. The Reviews response group will continue to function as before until November 8 and the new link to customer reviews is available to you now through the Product Advertising API as well.

What this means is that Amazon will, as of Nov. 8th 2010, no longer be providing customer reviews through their API. So you won’t be able to add customer reviews to your posts and articles as you have done in the past. Amazon, instead, will provide a link to an iframe that you can include on your site. Since search engines can’t parse the contents of an iframe, there’s no SEO benefit from including them on a page. Visitors will, however, still be able to read the customer reviews in the iframe on your site and your associates ID is encoded into the iframe so you will still earn commissions on sales.

So why are Amazon making this change?
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