Amazon Sniper Sites

Google won't know whether your site is hard selling or not, they aren't that smart. Yes these types of sites can and do work still if done properly. You need to make it look as legit a site as possible and not too thin, you also need to make it good for the customer by offering something a bit more than every other low quality 'review' site out there. Try and think outside the box, instead of just a generic article why not create an interactive video for example where you put the product through it's paces (assuming you own / can afford to buy it) or compare it to a similar product and see what's best.

Ranking might be your most difficult task assuming you plan to focus on SEO. I'd look at other advertising methods if I was you.

Okay for what?

Okay for ranking in Google based on SEO?

That depends on the competition you face for the keywords you are trying to rank for.

You would find more help posting in the Adsense / PPC / SEO Discussion Forum


Or do you mean okay for conversions?

Or do you mean okay with complying with Amazon ToS?


A "sniper" site doesn't gain any benefit (or penalty) for being a 'sniper" site. They are just smaller, quicker to build and easier to maintain.

So you can build 10 sites in one month and drop the 7 that fail leaving you with three. As opposed to building one larger site a month and taking 10 months to build 7 failures and 3 successes.


You can drive traffic by all the traditional methods.

For SEO and ranking in Google it depends on the competition in the niche and for the keywords.

Google doesn't really "punish" sites, unless they are in violation or have malicious code. Then Google could de-index.

But they may not score well if there are other competitive sites.

Look at the SERPs results for the keywords you are targeting and see what sites you are competing with.

If you see big authority sites with age and backlinks in the Top 10, then it may be too competitive to expect to rank quickly with a sniper site.

But if you see Amazon product pages, Squidoo lenses or other low-value sniper sites then it may be something you could rank for.

But when you are talking about being "penalized" by Google you are talking about SEO.

There are many ways to drive free traffic that do not rely on SEO:

YouTube Videos
Pinterest posts
Facebook pages
Free PDF on doc share sites
PPC / PPV
Banner ads

Amazon sites are not like Adsense sites. Adsense sites can be punished (de-indexed, ads removed or adsense account closed) for violating Google's ToS because Google owns Adsense.

Google does not care about ToS violations for Amazon sites because they are Amazon's ToS, not Google's.

For an Amazon sites you are concerned about SEO, not getting your account banned.

Of course, if you violate Amazon ToS, Amazon may care....

If you're wondering whether you can rank them high up in the search engines, the answer is yes. The real question is whether you'll profit. You can spend a fortune on SEO, but at some point it's not profitable.

Assess the competition and the few pages you do publish, make them good.

The key is developing a system for attaining good backlinks efficiently that will actually work.

Of course you can drive traffic in other methods, but I suspect most people building sniper sites do so with the intention of getting traffic solely from the search engines.

I have a few "sniper" type sites and they earn. It takes a bit of learning. I focus on larger sites and blogging, but sometimes I just can't resist making a few small sites and seeing if I can make them profitable and earn on autopilot.

I recommend to look for really good offers. I don't promote Amazon with any sniper sites because Amazon is ranking really well these days. My sniper sites promote products/services that pay huge commissions (huge frontend and/or lucrative recurring). This way I can invest some decent money in SEO.

Note, I use the term sniper loosely here. I still build backlinks, which I believe is something the Gsniper method suggests you need not do if you target the right keywords. I'm using sniper in the sense that they're very small and focused sites. I invest quite a bit of time on the content for these sites though.

Note my dabbling in this model is only a fraction of my online biz. I think I'd be pretty nervous only building these types of sites.

If your sites are informative, useful content, and visitors use it as a trusted and valuable point of reference then they would do. If you have only a few pages, tons of adverts, low quality reviews, then other than not ranking, it also wont be shared, and therefore will never really rank.

The one thing is, Google is now moving towards ranking sites higher that have traffic coming from places beyond just the search engines. This is why it needs to be good content, and get shared, as that then proves that this is a quality site, not just some SEO'd site that doesn't really interest people.

While I am not sure why you're concerned with Google pertaining to building Amazon sites, it leads me to think you're confusing Adsense sites with Amazon. If you are clearly building 'thin' sites with the intent of housing several Adsense campaigns as your primary arsenal, you will likely have some problems.

Many of the once greatly established Adsense marketers have been hammered hard by Google, many whom have lost 'chunk-size' incomes as a result of relying on 'thin' Adsense sites. These are the sites Google punishes -Not Amazon sites

Personally I'd look to build a large authority site (over time) that contains lots of reviews of products in a large niche or market (with reviews added regularly). Start in one area of the larger market then gradually build out from there.

An example would be an authority site that is more general and also branded then with different categories pertaining to the different sub niches and products within the market.

Example: site reviewing gardening products which will cover all sorts of different products that you could review (lawn mowers, trimmers, lawn products etc) along with ebook guides and other things like that. You could just start with lawnmower reviews and your blog at first then add more categories of reviews as you get going.

As well as all your reviews that would grow over time, you could have a fantastic blog on the site offering gardening tips, how to's, FAQs, videos, interviews, image examples of amazing gardens etc etc

Your audience would love this and keep coming back to the site, sign up to your list, follow you on social networks and share and link to your content. If done right you will build a BRAND and an AUDIENCE and relationships with other influencers in your market - things that Google is really paying attention to.

You will just have the one site to manage as you will have quite a few different categories where you could expand into for your money pages and your content marketing strategy would be a lot more open and geared to the audience.

Build an audience and you can sell to them over and over again and they will also do a lot of your SEO and traffic generation for you once you have a big enough audience (links, shares etc).

Once your site is a good, branded authority site, everything you post will rank and attract traffic far far easier which in the long run could be a lot better for you than trying to rank and manage lots of 10 page mini sites. You will also be in a stronger position in regards to Google updates (so long as you are not doing anything dodgy).

Just my 2 cents (or pence in the UK!)
Scott

I prefer to build larger authority style sites than sniper sites. But both will work. If you use outsourced articles or Amazon PLR stuff you can enhance the content and value of your website.

What I sometimes do is build a sniper site and after it ranks I add more content.