You can always bounce the links off of your server first to avoid this affiliate hijacking that Pinterest & others do. Post a link to a page on your server that has a javascript redirect to the affiliate page. This fools the Pinterest bot that follows shortened links looking for http redirects to affiliate URLs.
Interesting. The bit that they are talking about is this:
"In addition, you must not use a link shortening service in a manner that makes it unclear that you are linking to an Amazon Site"
First, your own server is (arguably) not a link shortening service as long as you don't offer that service. Second, if you were really worried about it, you could register a domain for your site called, for example, forwarding-you-to-amazon.com or fantastic-amazon-deals.com, link to it, forward from there. It seems to me that this would be compliant. That couldn't be any more clear that people are going to Amazon.com.
It's pretty common for sites to change referal links like this. I think the rationale is "my site, my bandwidth, my referral money." Can't argue with that!
Not exactly the same, but I remember reading (likely on HN) about some ISPs serving adsense-filled pages in case the DNS lookup couldn't resolve the address.
As someone who operates a free service, this is a very unintrusive way to get some extra revenue and I wouldn't complain about it if you want to see these kinds of sites stick around :)
very nice. made about $600 on pinterest this way before they started replacing affiliate ids. nice idea with using curated product lists, i was grabbing random products from a few selected categories (clothing, electronics, sports equipment, etc.) using amazon's own product advertising api. right now selling "user-friendly" GUI tools to do this sort of thing on "black hat SEO" forums seems to be a more lucrative business. i used my own python script which i later ported to c# for better threading support (this was before node.js was cool).
bitly won't work. pinterest follows and "strips" redirects to generate link title and thumbnail. you need to have your own url shortener with pinterest's crawler either blocked or served different content. an interesting idea would be to host the links on a domain/service they can't easily block (i.e. tumblr) and do the redirect to amazon using javascript.
i don't think hats are even involved here, unless we're living in a world where wget and SVN and incrementing query strings are considered crimes...wait...doh
When I looked into Amazon Affiliate codes recently I got the impression that you can only use them on your own site/service. Was that wrong? Can you just get an ID and use it anywhere you like?
I seem to remember that too, but if you signup with AA then you get a bar when browsing amazon.com that allows you to share links with affiliate tags to twitter and facebook, so presumably that's ok?
I've been considering a markov chain + tumblr/twitter to do this. Generate an "aesthetic" and then use it to grep for products/descriptions, as well as other "content" so as to appear like meat. The more interesting part is seeing if I can write code that acts like a tumblr user...
Imagine ISPs doing something like that.