Choosing the right domain for your amazon affiliate site is of critical importance.
You do not want to choose an exact match or partial match domains.
For instance, if you are building a site about twin mattresses, you do not want to register a domain name like ‘twinmattress.com’ or ‘twinmattresses.com’.
That would be an exact match domain – and those are not suitable for affiliate sites.
Exact match domains would be suitable for local SEO. If you are a dentist in Dallas, you could have a domain like dallasdentist.com. That would certainly be a good thing to do.
Typically, local SEO sites are small, 5 to 10 pages sites and in general, they do not have a lot of links. A domain like that would be suitable for small, local websites.
But when you are building a much larger site – like a 50 page or a 100 pages affiliate website, choosing an EMD would be a terrible thing to do.
It would make link building an extremely complicated task and one misstep could result in a penalty the site might never ever be able to recover from.
A lot of links will be naked URL links. Those are generally the safest kind of anchors. But for an EMD, even those might become dangerous. For an exact match domain, even naked URL links can result in an over-optimization penalty.
It would also make naming your pages a huge challenge.
For instance, if you own the site ‘twinmattress.com’ and you name a page about ‘best twin mattress’, the URL of that page will be
http://www.twinmattress.com/best-twin-mattress/
That again might be asking for an over-optimization penalty. You do not want the words ‘twin mattress’ to occur twice in the URL.
Likewise, you would not want to choose a partial match domain either.
You do not want to name your site bestmattress.com or softmattress.com. You do not want the word ‘mattress’ in the domain name.
A partial match domain might not result in a penalty, but it would make link building a challenge.
You would want to choose a domain name that does not have the word mattress in it.
Something like sweetdreamz.com or happydreams.com would be much, much better than bestmattress.com or twinmattress.com.
You could even choose a domain name like sarahstips.com, agns.com or something like that.
Something like agns.com would be really good – assuming you can find a domain like that.
If you have trouble deciding on a domain name, pick a phrase like ‘a good night’s sleep’, or ‘good night and sweet dreams’. Then pick the first letter of each word and you have a good domain name – agns.com or gnasd.com, or gnsd.com.
As far as possible, stick with .com and .net domain name extensions.
Never, ever choose EMDs or PMDs for your amazon affiliate site.
You do not want to register a domain just because you like it and it happens to be available. That would be like playing the SEO equivalent of Russian roulette.
A lot of webmasters buy domains and spam them to death. And these get penalized sooner or later. Once the domain is penalized, these guys do not renew it again. The domain gets deleted and becomes available for registration again.
If you register a domain that has been penalized in the past and build your site on it, your site might never, ever rank – no matter what you do.
You might feel it’s a new domain, but it’s not – it’s a penalized domain that got deleted because the previous owner who spammed it did not renew it.
It’s really critical that you know how to check whether a domain has been registered or not in the past. If a domain had been registered and it got deleted and is now available for registration, you do not want to register it. It doesn’t matter how really “cool” the domain name sounds – you would not want to register it.
Let’s now see how to check whether it would be good to register a particular domain or not …
To start with, let’s list a few names we think would be good for a site about mattresses …
Now, let’s go to namecheap’s bulk domain registration tool and check which of these domains are available.
Ok. Here are the results. Only these domains are available. These five domain names are available. The rest is taken.
Now, we need to check the history of each of the available domains. And check whether any of them had been registered in the past and since then have gotten deleted.
Let’s check this one first
What we want to know is whether the domain was registered at any time in the past. If the domain had been registered in the past and then got deleted, you should not want to register it.
The best way to know whether a domain was registered in the past or not by using this tool – whois.domaintools.com.
Now, this costs $99 a month. You can cancel anytime you want.
If you want to check less than 5 domains a day, you can do it for free. But if you want to check more than 5 domains in a single day, you might have to sign up for this.
But we only want to check these 5 domains now, and register the first one that’s safe to register. So, we might not have to sign up – not unless all of these happen to have been registered in the past.
There is no free alternative to this. A lot of free tools out there claim to have accurate information about whether a domain was registered or not in the past. But the information is not always correct. You want information that is 100% accurate all the time – and only domain tools has accurate information.
Let’s start with this one first – sweetdreamsz.com.
It says the domain has been deleted in the past and is now available for registration.
You do not want to register this domain.
There’s no perfect way to tell whether Google has penalized this domain or not.
You will not want to register any domain that was registered in the past. It got deleted and is now available again for registration.
Not all deleted domains are penalized or spammed. But you can never be entirely sure whether a deleted domain has not been penalized.
So the only safe thing to do is not to choose such domains.
Let’s now check this one – happydreamsz.com
This one has never been registered in the past. So it’s perfectly safe to register it.
Now, let’s check this one – sarahstips.com
This is also a deleted domain that is now available for registration. You would not want to register it.
We found one that’s safe – happydreamsz.com. So let’s go ahead and register it.