You probably found this blog from the keyword “googhydr” either ending in -20 or -21. This is an Amazon affiliate id and the -20 indicates US market while -21 is the UK market. I too did some digging into this after researching keywords and SERP listings and Adwords listings and kept seeing this Amazon affiliate linking directly to Amazon. Being an Amazon affiliate myself it was easy to figure out the affiliate ID googhydr-20 from the link.
The name is kind of ominous if where googhydr is pronounced “Goog Hider” which could mean “Google Hider”, so is the associate trying to hide from Google?
I had been contimplating doing the same thing this googhydr character is doing for some time. It seems so easy why isn’t everyone doing it? I started digging around and reading up on Amazon’s rules.
This Adwords listing by the Amazon affiliate was doing exactly what is prohibited to Amazon associates to do. In the Amazon Associates Operating Agreement, section 7:
“Prohibited Paid Search Placement” means an advertisement that you purchased through bidding on keywords, search terms, or other identifiers (including Proprietary Terms) or other participation in keyword auctions. “Proprietary Term” means keywords, search terms, or other identifiers that include the word “amazon,” “Kindle,” “myhabit,” or “Javari,” or any other trademark of Amazon or its affiliates ( see a non-exhaustive list of our trademarks), or variations or misspellings of any of those words (e.g., “ammazon,” “amaozn,” “kindel,” and “javary”). “Redirecting Link” means a link that sends users indirectly to the Amazon Site via an intermediate site or webpage and without requiring the user to click on a link or take some other affirmative action on that intermediate site or webpage. “Search Engine” means Google, Yahoo, Bing, or any other search engine, portal, sponsored advertising service, or other search or referral service, or any site that participates in any of their respective networks.
If you do a search for Googhydr you might come across this website http://www.googhydr.com/ where the page claims to be an independent reseller who has tagged every possible Google search keyword. The page then goes onto to convince you to click on a link to buy a book on “Exploiting Amazon and Adwords PPC”. I can tell you that the claim on the website is false and a scam.
Googhydr is Amazon itself running its own Adwords campaigns.
It might not seem fair that Amazon who already dominates the organic search engine keywords for just about every product also adds itself to Adwords keywords and the same time won’t allow any of its associates to do the same. Well as they say life isn’t fair.
A few related discussions about this topic include
- http://forums.prospero.com/n/mb/message.asp?webtag=am-associhelp&msg=32189.1&search=y
- http://www.warriorforum.com/main-internet-marketing-discussion-forum/289507-google-amazon-affiliate.html
Late to the party, but I didn’t know about this referral-using-PPC approach until now and came across your blog.
To me, the “hydr” in the ID doesn’t suggest “hider”, but “hydra”. Which seems likely to a reference to the mythical beast, and “goog” to mean either that it’s google’s bot, or that it’s meant to be a “google hydra” in that it uses AdWords’s power to achieve its domination goal, and it may not be Google at all. Some say it’s Amazon, but really it could be anyone.
I did the research on this already, it is for a fact Amazon’s own PPC through Google. It could mean Hydra but in any case it is still Amazon, anyone else trying to do the same PPC with their own Amazon associate account will find themselves booted out of the program as soon as Amazon finds out.