alt Hacker NewsYes, this is a horrible practice. Not just Amazon… most major e-commerce platforms set up fake pages for products they don’t offer to try to get you to the products they actually do.
Google needs to ban this practice because it makes their results garbage.
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Google doesn't care about you. If you have to close one website that is infested with Google's ads/tracking because it doesn't actually have the product what you want and you're forced to search for another website that's also infested with Google's ads/tracking that's much better for Google's bottom line. That's what Google cares about.
Is that the "Amazon Tax"? I thought the Amazon tax was their goofiness practice of taking a very large % of all sales in their site, and banning companies from selling their same goods for less on any competitor site.
Meaning if Amazon takes 30% of the sale and Walmart online can only take 15% with those savings being passed on to the customer, the company is not allowed for that lower price to be on Walmart.
Google used to explicitly ban this and the very similar practise of keyword stuffing - they even delisted some high profile company sites (BMW is one that I remember) over those practices. They stopped caring about that sort of thing quite some time ago, and right now as they are in danger of losing what little most they have as people move to AI solutions where they are not the leader that they have historically been in the more traditional search space, I doubt it'll be any sort of priority for them in the foreseeable future.