8 Reasons Your Amazon Affiliate
Site Doesn't Rank On Google
Intro
On every internet marketing forum, every SEO guru's website, every Facebook SEO or Amazon affiliate group and just pretty much anywhere where people can ask SEO and Amazon affiliate related questions you'll see these frequently asked questions.
- Why doesn't my website rank on Google
- How do I get more traffic to my Amazon affiliate website?
- When will my website be out of the sandbox?
- How can I rank my Amazon affiliate website faster?
- Why do my competitors rank higher than me on Google?
- When will my Amazon affiliate website start making money?
The list just goes on and on but most of the time the reason your website isn't ranking is pretty simple. So let's take a look at the most common 8 reasons a website doesn't rank well on Google.
Google sandbox
Google has something most SEO's call the "Google sandbox". It's almost like a filter / dampener Google place on a new domain so that it doesn't appear in its results unless its almost an exact title search match.
This is simply because Google doesn't trust your website yet. They need to build a level of trust around your website first before they can start ranking it first page unless there are no other websites that match the users search query.
The Google sandbox typically lasts between 6-9 months depending on the niche and a few other factors. Many people believe high quality backlinks from other highly trusted domains can help get you out of the sandbox quicker. Other people even believe social signals help.
Our advice would to consistently create great content and point hight quality niche related backlinks at it then just be patient, if you have a great website with great content that other websites love you'll pop out of the sandbox in no time.
Low quality content
Many Amazon affiliate website owners want to just pump out content as quickly as possible. They take the very simplistic view of "more content = more traffic" which to some degree is true.
However if your website consists only of poor quality content such as copied content, spun content, content filled with grammatical errors then Google will catch on pretty quickly. Your bounce rate will be high and your page's dwell time will be low.
Your content might still rank for long tail searches but you won't rank on Google for competitive terms with poor low quality content. It will also dramatically lower your click through rate to Amazon. People simply won't trust you.
Poor keyword research
Keyword research should be the foundation of any website. It should be conducted before you even buy a domain name and enter a niche. Often people just pump out Amazon affiliate reviews without knowing if people are actually searching for reviews for those Amazon items.
This "if you build it they will come" style of content creation can ultimately be a huge waste of time. If you see a cool looking item on Amazon and write a 5000 in-depth review but it turns out there is no real search volume for reviews about this Amazon item thats its pretty much a waste of time.
The simplest way to see if there is at least some search volume is to type your Amazon item for example "toaster 2000" into Google and see if Google returns "toaster 2000 review" in the auto suggest. If it does you know there is probably a decent amount of search volume for reviews for this product.
If you want a more detailed report of keyword search volume and other keyword ideas then you can use free services like Uber Suggest or paid services like KeywordTool.io.
Not enough backlinks to your website
Unless Google trusts your website to some degree you're going to have a hard time ranking for anything these days apart from very long tail search queries. As we covered earlier strong high quality backlinks that say to Google "hey! these trusted websites are telling you they trust OUR website!" will help you break out of the sandbox fairly quickly.
Poor quality backlinks to your website
We mentioned that good quality backlinks will help you break out of the Google sandbox earlier qhich is very true but often people try and get these backlinks on the cheap from places like fiverr or even use automated tools like GSA search engine ranker.
The type of links you buy from fiverr or create using automated tools like GSA SER and RankerX are only good for churn and burn projects, parasite pages or established websites that already have a balanced backlink profile. If you point these low quality backlinks at a brand new website it won't help much.
It may even damage your rankings.
Algorithmic Google penalties on your website
Often new website owners are so desperate for traffic they over optimise their content and backlink profile. Let's take a look at a few ways website owners often over optimise their websites which costs them traffic.
- Keyword density - We all know that if you mention a keyword often in your content it helps Google understand what your content is about. But did you know Google have also said that if your keyword density is unnaturally high (how often you mention your keyword in the content, e.g 7%) then it'll gradually have a negative effect on your rankings as it increases above what they consider a natural keyword density percentage.
- Anchor text ratios - For those of you that don't know what your backlink profile anchor text is, every time a website links to your own website the link (if its a normal text link) will have an anchor text for example the anchor text in this link Google is Google. The anchor text in your backlinks helps Google figure out what your website is about. However if people are trying to rank their website for "best toasters in 2019" they'll often build 300 links with the anchor text of "best toasters in 2019". This looks extremely unnatural to Google and they'll either flag your website for a manual review or apply an algorithmic penalty and drop your rankings for that keyword.
Poor on site SEO
Content is king and backlinks are queen but people often forget about basic on page search engine optimisation. Your website might not be ranking on Google because Google can't figure out what your content is about.
You might write an quality blog post about cooking but if you only mention the keyword "cooking" once and don't include it in your description tag and title tag then Google will struggle to work out the post is actually about cooking.
Remember to include your target keywords in your title tags, description tag, h1 tags, alt tags and have a nice natural keyword density of 1%-3%.
Poor user experience
You might have a website thats a year old so its out of the Google sandbox, its got plenty of great niche related backlinks, its got amazing content but.... its still not ranking where it should be.
You might want to start looking at your user experience. If your website is very slow to load because its filled with ads then Google will rank you lower in their results because they know the user will have a poor experience on your website relative to the other websites appearing for that search term.
Google crawls
One final little factor to check. If you still feel like you should be ranking well but you're not. Make sure Google can crawl your website ok, if you have a complex site structure or strange 301 redirects everywhere or a single page application, log into your Google webmaster tools and request a crawl of a few key pages and Google webmaster tools will show you how it see's your website/webpage.
This is great for diagnosing Google crawl issues.