Affiliate Disclosure | Fish Hook Labs

That paragraph is the required disclosure and it is the operative one. Everything below is the plain-English version: the actual mechanics, written out, so you can verify the claim rather than take it on faith.

Amazon Associates

Fish Hook Labs is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. Our associate tag is fishhooklabs-20, and you can see it in the query string of any Amazon page you land on from here. Buying through one of these links costs you nothing extra.

What a commercial link actually is

No page on this site links straight to a retailer. Every commercial link points at an internal path of the form /go/<id>, where <id> is the catalog id of the part. That path redirects to the tagged retailer URL.

Cloaking this way is not about hiding anything. It buys three specific things:

One place to change destinations. When a product is discontinued or an ASIN is finally verified, one redirect entry changes and every link on the site follows. Nothing goes stale in the body of a guide.
One place to enforce the rules. Because every commercial link is the same shape, the required attributes can be applied uniformly and checked automatically rather than remembered by hand.
Auditability. A test can walk every link on the site and confirm each one resolves to a tagged URL and nowhere else.

How the links are marked

every affiliate anchor

rel="sponsored nofollow noopener": sponsored declares the commercial relationship to search engines and to anyone reading the markup. nofollow means we pass no ranking signal to the retailer.noopener is a security measure so the opened page cannot reach back into this one.
target="_blank": The retailer opens in a new tab so your build is not lost behind it.
data-astro-prefetch="false": Link prefetch is deliberately disabled on affiliate links, and site-wide prefetching is off by design. Left on, your browser would quietly fetch/go/<id> as the link scrolled into view, follow the redirect, and log an affiliate click you never made. That inflates clicks against zero conversions — bad data for us and exactly the pattern that gets an Associates account flagged. Turning it off costs a few milliseconds of perceived speed and keeps the numbers honest.
data-affiliate="true": Marks the anchor so both our own tests and anyone auditing the page can find every commercial link mechanically.

Inside guide prose, affiliate links are additionally styled in amber with a trailing arrow, so a paid link is visually distinct from an ordinary one before you click it.

Where a link goes

If a part has a verified ASIN, the redirect resolves to that specific Amazon product page with our tag attached. If it does not, the redirect resolves to a tagged Amazon search for the product name instead. We do not guess ASINs. A wrong-but-plausible product page sends you confidently to the wrong item, which is worse than a search page that makes you pick.

Ranking cannot be bought

The order of parts inside the component picker is produced by spec matching against your current build and target species. The inputs are dimensions and ratings. Commission rate, price, retailer, and whether an item has an affiliate link at all are not among them — the scoring code and the link-building code share no state, which is why the disclosure above can say the engine has no idea what anything pays.

The practical consequences:

There is no sponsored slot and no paid placement of any kind.
No manufacturer has ever paid for, previewed, or influenced a catalog entry or a rule.
Parts with no affiliate link sit in the catalog next to parts that have one, ranked by the same rules.
A cheaper part that clears every check will sort above an expensive one that does not.
Diagnostics fire against items we earn from exactly as they fire against items we do not. The engine will tell you not to buy something we would be paid for.

Prices

Prices, ratings, and availability shown on this site are indicative and can change at any time. Every price here is an approximate street-price estimate maintained by hand and rendered as ~$X — it is never a live Amazon price and is not scraped from any retailer. It exists so a build sheet can total roughly. Always confirm the current price on the retailer's page before purchasing.

Other programs

Amazon Associates is currently the only affiliate program in use. If another is added, this page will be updated before any link from it goes live, and links from it will carry the same attributes and the same separation from ranking.

Questions

If any of this does not match what you observe on the site, that is a bug and we want to hear about it: contact@fishhooklabs.com. See also how the catalog and engine work.