SEO
Amazon Raises Affiliate Commission Rates

Amazon announced that they are raising commissions on a small group of product categories for a limited time. The new higher payout rates arrives two years after Amazon lowered fees during the Covid pandemic as consumers switched to buying more items online.
Although the new rates are higher, some of the product categories are still several percentage points below pre-Covid affiliate commission rates.
Below is a list of how the new rates compare.
Amazon Affiliate Program
Amazon pays commissions to affiliate publishers who refer visitors that convert into sales.
Amazon is a trusted brand name and that (in the past) made Amazon a good affiliate partner to work with because a motivated referral had a higher rate of conversion at Amazon than it did being referred to a brand that is less well known and trusted.
That popularity changed in April 2020 as the pandemic changed how consumers purchased products and began buying directly from Amazon in order to comply with a lockdown and to avoid venturing out of the home, catching Covid and perishing.
Because of the huge supply of consumers, the need to pay affiliates became less urgent and Amazon did the commonsense thing and reduced the affiliate commission rate.
The luxury and beauty products categories saw affiliate commission rates collapsed by a total of 6 percentage point, falling from a 10% commission rate to only 4%.
Furniture commission rates also collapsed from 8% to 3%, while grocery commissions dropped four percentage points from 5% to 1%.
Amazon Raises Commission Rates
An email went out to Amazon associates (Amazon’s affiliate partners) announcing a limited time promotional commission rates that expire on May 4th, 2022.
The email states:
“This is a great opportunity to take advantage of increased commissions in popular categories. The more your audience shops, the more you earn.
Promotional rates effective until May 4th.”
Modest Increase in Amazon Affiliate Commission Rates
The increase in commissions is not across the board.
Amazon has raised the commission rates on the following categories:
-
- Shoes, Handbags & Accessories
- Office Products
- Kitchen
- Home
- Home Improvement
- Beauty
- Business & Industrial Supplies
- Health & Personal Care
Although the commission rates have increased the new higher rates still hover one to three percentage pages lower than pre-Covid commission rates.
For example, the Home and Home Improvement affiliate rates were raised from 3% to 5%, but that is still three percentage points below the 8% commission rate that products in those categories used to command.
Business & Industrial Supplies commission rates rise from 3% to 5%, which is just under the 6% pre-Covid commission rate.
Similarly, the Health & Personal Care commission rates goes up from 1% to 2%, but that’s still significantly lower than the pre-Covid commission rate of 4.5%.
Promotional Amazon Affiliate Commission Rates
Here are the new Amazon.com promotional commission rates:
- Shoes, Handbags & Accessories (old rate) 4.00% (new rate) 6.00%
- Office Products (old rate) 4.00% (new rate) 6.00%
- Kitchen (old rate) 4.50% (new rate) 5.50%
- Home (old rate) 3.00% (new rate) 5.00%
- Home Improvement (old rate) 3.00% (new rate) 5.00%
- Beauty (old rate) 3.00% (new rate) 5.00%
- Business & Industrial Supplies 3.00% (new rate) 5.00%
- Health & Personal Care 1.00% (new rate) 2.00%
Amazon Associates Program
Amazon is one of the world’s most trusted brands and even though the commission rates are low it still remains a viable affiliate partner.
Citation
Read the Current Amazon Affiliate Payout Rates
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SEO
New Updates To Google Page Experience Scoring Revealed At SEODay

In an online session at SEODay 2022, Google Search Advocate John Mueller spoke about the impact of page experience on search engine rankings and changes to how the search engine scores sites.
One of the changes revealed was that Google now bases desktop search results on a site’s desktop experience – and mobile search results on a site’s mobile experience.
He also discussed the three primary metrics the search engine uses in determining experience scores: largest contentful paint (LCP), first input delay (FID), and cumulative layout shift (CLS).
“This is not a tie-breaker,” Mueller said. “It won’t make or break your website in terms of search, but it is a factor that comes into play in regards to ranking between different results.”
Google has also added a new page experience metric, “interactivity to next page,” or INP.
Google initially announced INP at I/O 2022, and while Mueller was clear that it is not a direct rankings factor, he discussed INP as something that may play a role in the future.
Search Console Insights Provides Easier Way To Track Search Rankings
Mueller spent the first part of his presentation discussing the benefits of Search Console Insights. Using Search Console data, alongside analytics, users can generate custom reports and get a different view of the data.
He specifically mentioned using BigQuery and Data Studio as “a way of connecting different data sources together and creating really fancy reports.”
Google is also working on expanding its Search Console APIs, Mueller said, which will allow users to connect these APIs to code on their sites.
Possible uses Mueller mentioned include monitoring top queries and checking to see if specific URLs are indexed.
Videos & Images Take On More Prominent Role In Search
At I/O earlier this year, Google previewed a set of video reports coming to Search Console: a response to a growing appetite for this type of media in search results.
“We see that people love videos and authentic images in search results, so we try to show them more,” Mueller said.
In this growing trend, he included web stories, a collection of pages that often have videos. To facilitate their use, Google now offers a WordPress plugin for creating them.
Authentic Product Reviews Factored Into Rankings
Ecommerce has been trending upward, with the global market expected to surpass $5.5 trillion this year. In its algorithm, Google includes what Mueller termed “authentic reviews” to accommodate digital shoppers better.
“People have high expectations of reviews they find online, so we’ve also worked specifically on updates to algorithms with regards to ranking these product reviews,” he said.
Other Updates From Mueller
At SEODay, Mueller said Google has slightly changed its terminology, with the term “title links” now being used to refer only to the title of a search result.
The search engine giant has also added a new robots meta tag, “indexifembedded.”
Users can leverage the meta tag when embedding content on the main page and want to control the indexing of that embedded piece of content.
Mueller also said Google’s blog was the best source of information on any SEO-related topic.
“With any kind of bigger update… it’s sometimes really tricky to tell folks what they should be looking at specifically,” he noted. “So we have a fairly comprehensive blog post .”
Featured Image: BestForBest/Shutterstock
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