A9: The Secret Search Giant

That Amazon has the third largest search engine in existence should come as no surprise, but it often does. Unlike Google, Amazon is not explicitly positioned to be a search business, but over 55% of all customers now begin their product searches through its websites.

Compared to the ubiquity of talk and analysis over Google’s search algorithm, how many of us are familiar with A9, Amazon’s algorithm? Moreover, how many of us can say we’re know how to optimise our products to perform well within it?

Perfectly timed to coincide with the worrying talk about Amazon rigging its search to push customers toward their own products, the fine people at Moz have published a guide to how to get the most out of Amazon search. Unsurprisingly, prices and sales play a huge role here, but there are still some simple optimisations which could yield positive results for your product catalogue.

Let’s take a moment to highlight one observation. Based off our own research (and corroborated by other sources), there’s evidence to suggest that over the past few years Amazon has not been indexing A+ content, meaning that it doesn’t contribute towards organic results.

Now, this isn’t a reason to feel A+ is any less important, far from it. Enhanced content is still indexed by Google and others, and Amazon themselves have produced reports detailing how A+ positively promotes conversion. However, this is something to keep in mind, especially when designing your A+, and exploring the benefits and costs of image-heavy content versus text.

Amazon tends not to advertise any changes to A9, and with the recent refresh to Vendor Central’s A+ tool, we’ll be looking at conducting some new research to see if the enhanced content remains unindexed, or if Amazon’s search is continuing to evolve.