As I mentioned earlier, I have begun working on some Amazon Affiliate SEO tactics. On solution to the outgoing anchor text issue that I am testing, is the idea of putting NoFollow tags in my Amazon Affiliate links. My idea here is that I can use Keywords for Anchor Text, and not give up the juice that those keywords hold for my page. Usually whatever you use as Anchor Text for a link, that anchor text will be associated with the page that you are linking to - not associated with the page that you created.
I haven’t been able to find anything that says “Yes, it will keep the anchor and associate them with your current page” - and I suspect that it may not be the case, but I have created a few test pages using NoFollow tags, and we’ll see what happens over time.
In the meantime, I have read some things that suggest the using “click here” as anchor text for your outgoing links will actually increase the traffic that you send to that link - and in the case of an Amazon Affiliate site, that is exactly what you want to do. My basic theory is to action for long tail keywords, talk about the item for a bit and then get those people to link over to Amazon via my site.
As a general update, my Amazon site got 2 visitors on Tuesday and 0 visitors on Wednesday. My Amazon Affiliate account says I have recorded 22 click-throughs, so I wonder if those are the result of Google following links where I didn’t use NoFollow, or if my reporting is so far behind that I have really had 22 click-throughs? It seems that I should be getting at least 1/20 conversion rate, so I’m thinking that these 22 click-throughs came from somewhere else… or actually it could be from another site where I posted one Amazon Affiliate Link - the Amazon reporting tool isn’t particularly useful.