What are the advantages and disadvantages of using an aged domain for your amazon affiliate site?

[RMcdonald]

Hey Guys,

The title pretty much says it all, I have seen a few posts in here with some people opting to go for an aged domain whilst others begin with a totally fresh domain.

What do you think are the pros and cons?

If you are pro aged domains, Who do you use to purchase them?

 

[GoldMarketing]

Useful article - https://www.serpwoo.com/blog/analysis/domain-age/#BuSo

Domain age is universal SEO factor no matter the monetization method.

IMO the main reason why Google is favoring aged domains is to make black-hat/gray-hat SEO guys less likely to get to the top of rankings. Back in the days, there would be a great portion of SEO guys who would create a bunch of sites, spam cheap links, get to the top, profit and burn. Now it is significantly harder, since the capital you need and the risk/reward ratio isn't so good anymore. The algorithm prefers older properties which have already withstand the test of time. By buying aged domains you can still game it in a way AND get the link juice, content.

As to the pros & cons when buying aged. The upside you get with buying established domains - as explained above. Possible cons - you can buy old, spammy domain. The domain name may not be that good, relevant.

Fresh ones - quite obvious - the free choice of fitting domain name. But you a start with a blank slate.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Cons of Aged Domains:

• You don't get to create a brand name
• You can encounter issues with indexing and ranking that have to be cleared up
• Google may not award all of the past age and metrics to the new site

Pros of Aged Domains:

• If the domain was never dropped, you can skip the long "ramping up" stage Google forces us all to go through
• If you repurpose it in the same vertical, you can retain a lot of old link juice (the main reason to choose an aged domain)
• If you repurpose it in the same vertical or niche, you can recover a lot of old content that used to sit on the domain and make use of it
• The domain may have a decent amount of type-in traffic or residual traffic from old links

My Opinion:
The way I see it, if you can afford the time and money to track down a great aged domain (or an aged, decent quality site that's still live), you should always begin a project in that way. Many of us get attached to creating our own baby and all of that, but when you get down to the nitty gritty it's all about making money, and there's no faster way in SEO to make money than to start the journey with a wad of links, content, and age. Not to mention that when you buy it bundled like that it's 100x cheaper.

I'll never start a new big project on a brand new domain ever again. Maybe not even small projects. My preference is to buy a live site that's aged and has some links but isn't optimized and seeing its potential. I'd optimize the existing content before beginning to add commercial-intent content and building links to those pages and missing easy opportunities to the homepage. If I couldn't pull that off in a reasonable amount of time, I'd buy an aged domain with existing links that has a clean history behind it.

 

[RMcdonald]

Cons of Aged Domains:

• You don't get to create a brand name
• You can encounter issues with indexing and ranking that have to be cleared up
• Google may not award all of the past age and metrics to the new site

Pros of Aged Domains:

• If the domain was never dropped, you can skip the long "ramping up" stage Google forces us all to go through
• If you repurpose it in the same vertical, you can retain a lot of old link juice (the main reason to choose an aged domain)
• If you repurpose it in the same vertical or niche, you can recover a lot of old content that used to sit on the domain and make use of it
• The domain may have a decent amount of type-in traffic or residual traffic from old links

My Opinion:
The way I see it, if you can afford the time and money to track down a great aged domain (or an aged, decent quality site that's still live), you should always begin a project in that way. Many of us get attached to creating our own baby and all of that, but when you get down to the nitty gritty it's all about making money, and there's no faster way in SEO to make money than to start the journey with a wad of links, content, and age. Not to mention that when you buy it bundled like that it's 100x cheaper.

I'll never start a new big project on a brand new domain ever again. Maybe not even small projects. My preference is to buy a live site that's aged and has some links but isn't optimized and seeing its potential. I'd optimize the existing content before beginning to add commercial-intent content and building links to those pages and missing easy opportunities to the homepage. If I couldn't pull that off in a reasonable amount of time, I'd buy an aged domain with existing links that has a clean history behind it.

Hey man, thanks so much for the insight into all this.

I can definitely see a greater benefit if you can find the right domain and think it would be a great start for me as I am looking to make my first Amazon Affiliate site and think this sounds like the best option for me.

The next thing I would ask @Ryzukai is where would you recommend to purchase the domains from?

I know you mentioned about sites that are still live but need optimising, so where would you recommend for these also?

I really want to do some research and look out for any domain/site that is already aged and will fit well inside the niche I want to target.

Again thanks for the advice on the post and to everyone else who commented

 

[Cash Builder]

I was also thinking the same thing, where is the best place to find expired domains? And is there a good way to tell if a domain has never been dropped?

As for buying live sites, you could try Flippa. Just make sure to do your due diligence as there is a lot of trash on there. Empire Flippers and FE International are another two brokers, although they sell more established sites which are more expensive.

 

[MrMedia]

I got a 13 year old brandable domain in the vertical I was looking for at godaddy for 425 buck.

 

[Calamari]

Unless you really know how to pick a good aged domain at auction I would start with a new one. There are so many factors and it's fairly easy to overlook something.

The only time I would recommend building on an aged domain for someone that is new to sorting domains is if the domain you're buying already has traffic.

I would not recommend any particular domain broker to do your due diligence for you. You're going to want to be able to do your own without taking someone's word for it.

The age of each individual piece of content is more important than the domain. Just get something going and start building the site with quality content asap.

 

[Potatoe]

I've been using aged domains exclusively for a while now, but not for any kind of SEO boost and not because of the age itself.

Admittedly, I didn't even look into the backlink profile or history of the last few names I've built upon, or purchased for later use.

If the name is perfect for the project, you can overcome a lot of hurdles. You might be starting a step or two back if the domain was spammed in the past, and you might be able to start a few steps forward by getting a name with a quality backlink profile, but I'd still rather have a premium name > metrics if the site is long term.

I had a shift in my perspective over the past year.

I decided if a site isn't worth investing in a premium domain for, it's not worth my time to even start it, so "MyDeckCleaningGuideHQ/com" doesn't get built, but "CleaningHouse/com" does, even if it's only about cleaning decks initially.

I appreciate the benefits and the head start you can get by choosing a domain that already has some juice, and ESPECIALLY a domain name that already has relevant traffic, that's huge.. but big picture, long term, I still care more about the brand.

If it's a site that doesn't benefit long term from having a stellar domain name, that's a big sign to me that I shouldn't focus time on it in the first place.

This is just a rule of thumb I use, tons of exceptions, there are plenty of incredible authority sites out there on 'bad' domains, (but I imagine if the owners could go back in time and spend a few hundred for a premium name, most of them would?)

Some of it's vanity, too, but I think a great name just leaves more doors open for you.

A great name AND a solid backlink profile would be ideal tho, a lot of this post is going on the assumption that you're going to have to sacrifice branding in order to find a name that sites your project with great links, which isn't always the case.

 

[DarkRed]

And what about buying the domain with the ugly name and 301 to a new good name?

I found a pretty good site with 800 referring domains and 37 DR.

The site is about 14 years old and was never dropped. Same owner the whole time. The site is ugly as shit, is the typical blogspot layout. It has some traffic (1k/month) but I'm pretty sure that it can get so much more than that. SEO is pretty bad in general.

The name is brandable, but I don't like it.

It's focused on one huge niche, but I want to create a more broad brand to be able to expand into other niches (example: site is about cats and I want it to be about pets in general).

It has a lot of content (5k posts!) so it would be pretty hard to migrate and to keep the link juice I guess.

It includes a FB page with 6k fans too.

He asked for $1.700. I think is a good deal. What do you think?

 

[Ryuzaki]

And what about buying the domain with the ugly name and 301 to a new good name?

I've done it, it can work, as long as it's in the same vertical at least. It doesn't have to be laser-focused close, but close enough. Like a domain about printers and fax machines could work for a site about Wordpress plugins.

It has a lot of content (5k posts!) so it would be pretty hard to migrate and to keep the link juice I guess.

What would be the point at all if you're not going to retain the juice, unless the majority of the links are to the homepage. But I'd still resurrect every post that has worth while links pointing to them. That's the entire point, to get that huge head start. If all of the content is decent, I'd bring back the entire site, links or not [because of the next point]

SEO is pretty bad in general.

It would be a giant pain in the ass but if you could throw this in Search Console and get some data about which terms are sending traffic for each post, you could identify easy-to-boost terms for each post and re-optimize every post. It would take forever with 500 posts but if you kept it simple and chose one term for each post and made sure it was in the title, H1, an H2, and an alt tag, and once in the body (something like that, something simple), you could train someone to fly through these.

I'm sure there's spidering software that can check all those HTML tags too so you can check the workers quality and see where they missed anything. If it's 5k posts of worthwhile length and quality with good links to the domain, but piss-poor on-page SEO, that sounds like the perfect buy to me. I'd fix up the old content first, then I'd start adding buying intent content and interlinking to it from around those 5k pages. Once you get past the initial hurdle, it sounds as close to "free money" as possible in this game.

 

[DarkRed]

Thanks so much Ryuzaki!

Yes, the idea is to resurrect the best pages in terms of links and traffic. Maybe group the similar ones with a 301. In 5k pages a lot of the posts must be about the same thing or pretty close.

The domain is clearly in the same vertical. It would be like buying ilovecats.com and 301 to a brand new ilovepets.com (something like that). But the name is pretty boring and focused on only one aspect of what I want. So the 301 is a must.

The content is not bad but very short, mostly images. The titles are short and not seo focused. For the body it has a H1 and that's it.

More than 50% of the links go to the homepage
and 30 pages get almost 90% of the referring domains

 

[Ernest Dancy]

Aged domains offer you a few benefits, especially if you are lucky to get a healthy domain.

• You can exploit existing reputation and ranking factors of the domain (e.g. social media shares). It takes time to reach that level with a new domain.
• There could be existing backlinks (makes your work easier as you have some links to get you started). However, be careful to confirm that the links are healthy and give the domain a good profile.

• Your new domain could be devalued in the first months as search engines calculate trustworthiness. This is not the case with an old domain.

When you choose to buy an aged domain, make sure it carries a good reputation and has not incurred any penalties in the past. A clean aged domain will make your work easier while developing an SEO strategy.