I got an email early this morning announcing the launch of Amazon’s Context Links Beta. I was hoping somebody would do a nice writeup that I could link to but I didn’t notice anything when I went through my feed reader.
Amazon Context Links Beta works by dropping a bit of code into your sites template. Then whenever a page is displayed, Amazon will read through the page and add some links to the text. The links will lead to Amazon products that match the context of the phrase in the link.
It is a cool concept that might even actually work pretty well.
From the description, it looks Google would not want it on pages with Google AdSens since it is a contextual program, but I might be wrong. Since the ads are embedded into text links rather than the common ad blocks server by Google maybe you could double dip. If anybody knows anything about whether they will be allowed to play on the same page, please let me know.
The only annoying thing about the ads is that when you mouseover the link, it pops up one of those little mini Amazon images that show the picture, name, price, etc. of the product that they are advertising. I’m not a fan of things popping up when you mouseover them.
One area that the Amazon Context Links Beta program might work for bloggers even if Google doesn’t allow it on pages with AdSense would be to put them on the Amazon Context Links on the front page of the blog. My front page AdSense ads are worthless. I might try to remove the Adsense ads on the front page of one of my blogs and try the Amazon Context Links instead and continue using the AdSense ads on the single post pages.