15 Ways To Show Google Your Amazon Affiliate
Website Is A True Authority Website
Intro
The internet is littered with low quality Amazon affiliate websites. If you can use strong trust signals to show Google your website isn't just another low quality poor content money grabbing Amazon affiliate website then you can build a passive cash cow website that will last for years to come.
Google's machine learning is now so advanced the Google engineers have literally said they don't even know themselves what some of the ranking factors are. So while we can't be 100% sure ever point in the list below is used as a trust factor, if you cover them all you'll be sure to get a boost in trust and in turn rankings.
And we all know, when those sweet rankings go up so does the traffic and in turn so do the earnings!
Let's go through some of the simple steps you can follow when building an Amazon affiliate website to show Google that you are a trustworthy website worth ranking.
Strong social presence
So first off while Google has consistently denied they use social signals as a ranking factor many prominent SEO figures have been releasing case studies that seem to prove otherwise. Even if you don't believe social signals help trust and Google ranking its still good to have a strong social presence as this traffic is free and normally converts well.
If people see their friends liking your posts it instills trust in their minds so they are more likely to trust your advice and buy the Amazon item you are reviewing.
Many SEO's see social signals as "the people's backlinks". If people are voting for your website by tweeting about it, or sharing it on facebook then it must be trustworthy.
Good SEO neighbourhood
If you buy cheap web hosting or use dodgy off-shore web hosting where all the other websites on the same hosting IP address as your website are porn, illegal activities or just spammy then Google may scrutinize yours further.
I mean, lets look at this logically. What are the odds of a true high quality niche authority Amazon affiliate website having to buy cheap $1 a year hosting? Very unlikely.
A good established trustworthy Amazon affiliate website will be on its own IP address or a quality shared hosting package with other trustworthy websites on the same IP address.
Avoiding excessive thin content
there is a trend in the affiliate space to pump out thin content and pack it full on Amazon links hoping to make money. Google caught on to this pretty quickly and although we don't know for certain that content length is a ranking factor we do know that long form content always seems to out perform short form content for the same keyword.
It might not be the length of the content itself, it might just be that longer form content has more LSI's (Latent Semantic Indexing) in it. Or maybe the increased dwell time (we'll cover this shortly) is a ranking factor. Either way long content buyer guide style articles are dominating the top most competitive Amazon item review keywords on Google.
Avoiding duplicate content
This goes without saying, if you copy other website's content then Google will quickly catch on you have nothing to offer of real value. Even if you are a non-spammy content aggregator you might have some value to offer but not much compare to websites that are making great unique interesting value packed content. They'll always rank above you and Google will always trust them more.
Expert content
If you can demonstrate you are an industry expert you'll naturally get all signals over time that you need to considered trustworthy in the eyes on Google. You'll get niche related backlinks, strong backlinks, good dwell time and strong social signals.
If you really are qualified to be reviewing an item make sure your readers know why. If you are an expert in a niche explain to them why you are an expert. People like to share and link to credible sources they feel like they can trust. Be one of those sources.
Niche related backlinks
When you do start link building, whatever method you decide to go with make sure that your links are niche related. Don't just buy "high DA backlinks" because they'll be from random websites that are not niche related. Niche relevance is now a massive factor in how powerful backlinks are. If many other websites in your niche are linking to you it sends a massive trust signal to Google for those niche related search terms.
Strong backlinks
We've covered how niche relevance is important in your backlinks, now lets cover why powerful backlinks are great. Trusted websites get a lot of backlinks. The more backlinks they get the more PageRank (yes this does still does exist its just only used internally at Google) flows through to them.
When one of these highly trusted websites links to you, it gives Google a signal that you can also be trusted.
In fact majestic seo works on the theory that Google has a set of seed sites and website trust flows down through backlinks from these seed sites. So the closer to are (through backlinks) to these Google seed sites the more trust you're website gets.
Clean spam free backlinks
So you've found a backlink seller to get strong niche related backlinks from? And its really really cheap too!? That's great until these "High DA 80+" links you get are all spammy mass generated forum links....
My point here is that its possible to get "strong" backlinks if you're measuring them by MOZ domain authority and other third party metrics.
However spammy high DA forum links and blog comments that are mixed in with hundreds of other spammy links will create a toxic (we'll cover this more) backlink profile and do the opposite of building Google trust.
Clean your backlink profile with the disavow tool
If you do pick up some spammy looking backlinks either through a cheap purchase, organically or through a negative SEO attack then make sure you use the Google webmasters disavow tool to remove any low quality backlinks from your backlink profile.
Keep that backlink profile organic looking, niche related and free of spammy backlinks.
Low bounce rate and high dwell time
Write eye catching, compelling content that educates readers, answers their questions without added word count increasing fluff and instills a feeling of trust.
If you can do this your website's bounce rate will decrease and their dwell time (how long they spend on the site) will increase. If Google do use data from Chrome and Google analytics as many believe they do then this is a great signal to show that your website can be trusted if people love spending time on it.
Direct and returning traffic
If you have a great website people will come back. Returning traffic is a great signal to Google that your website can be trusted. Lets think about this, if you have a low quality spammy website with poor content would they return again to it? Probably not. I doubt they'd even remember its name.
WHOIS information
Since GDPR came into play and many registrars how automatically hide your domain ownership details this isn't so much of a big one. But many people still insist that a domain where the owners details are visible can be trusted more by Google than one where those details are hidden.
Domain registration length
Many people believe that if you only register a domain name for one year it shows to Google you're not sure if you're going to be in business in a years time. There's also a pattern where nearly all churn and burn spammy domains are registered for one year only.
If you are building an authority website that you are sure will be around for years its worth paying that extra few dollars and buying the domain name for an extra few years.
Look like a real business
A website that is just buying content and no information about who/what the business really is, where they location and what they do doesn't look very professional. In fact I'd go as far as to say it looks a bit dodgy these days.
Here is a simple list of changes you can make to your Amazon affiliate website to make it look more like a legitimate business to Google.
- Contact page with address - A website with a contact page that contains a real address shows Google that you are more likely to be a legit business
- About page - About pages give users more information about your website which helps with confidence in your business
- Cookie prompt - If you take cookies seriously then you are probably a legit business, its could well be another trust signal to Google
- Privacy policy - Again if you take your users privacy seriously its a good sign to Google that you are a established business and not just another churn and burn low quality Amazon affiliate website
- Terms and conditions - The same as above, stating your website's terms and conditions creates a more professional image
Extended validation SSL certificate
SSL is a now a confirmed ranking factor, so if you're webpages are served to the user over an insecure connection Google will rank your website lower in the SERPs because of that.
Many experienced SEO professionals now also believe that an extended validation SSL certificate can boost Google's trust of a website.
For those of you that don't know extended validation SSL certificates are a form of SSL certificate that you can only obtain by going through a validation process where they confirm you are a real business with a real address.
Another plus of an extended validation SSL certificate is that you get the massive green secure bar in the top left of your browser. This can certainly help gain user trust.
Conclusion
We hope you've enjoyed reading our Google trust factors post. We'd just like to iterate some of these factors are somewhat speculative (but all are based on well know SEO's studies) as Google doesn't publish their ranking or trust factors. However none of these tips will have any negative effect on your website and all of them are great for a long term SEO strategy.