Games with Dropped / Expired Domains Still Work
Two weeks ago our good friend Eric wrote a nice tip “how to get a jump start on SEO for a new site” – one of the points discussed there was buying an already established domain for your new site. The point was debated in the comments – they say the tactic no more works, they say Google is great at spotting when the domain changes the owner and devalues all its recent authority.
Well, in a word, this is not true. The tactic is till very effective and works like a charm. Actually, it is still a major weapon of gray- and black-hat SEO because a good established domain really gives a jump start on rankings.
There’s a nice thread on WebmasterWorld forums that discusses the ways to outrank a spammer that got a hold of a UK bank’s old domain name and 301′d it to the spammy site.
Actually that old domain provided so much power that the rankings the spammy site got were stable and across the board (across hundreds of keywords). The power was so solid that rankings were never lost even weeks after the 301 redirect to the spammy site had been removed.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t recommend using this tactic for spamming (actually it is funny to publish this post one week after another Eric’s post on following the guidelines went live). What I want to say is that the trustrank of the domain still matters a lot, so go ahead and try to use this knowledge (for good).
Ann Smarty
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9 Responses to “Games with Dropped / Expired Domains Still Work”
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Totally agree!
Good thing to know! NOT to try, but to know
I agree your idea
I agree with you. But does this make a loss to the developers?
This is cool that it still works!
I know there are thousands of places to buy or find dropped/expired domains but are there some sites that stand out from the rest?
I would love to take advantage of this trick.
Maybe anybody can provide free websites to find dropped domains. I only found pay-sites. I had a useraccount one time, but no good results come up. What resources you use?
Buying expired domains with a good quantity of in-bound links isn’t black hat as long as you’re doing it in a logical and relevant fashion…and it will not hurt your rankings.
If a competitor goes out of business and I buy their website so I can redirect it to my own, that’s a perfectly reasonable and legitimate business practice. Buying an expired domain and pointing it to my own domain is the same act yet one step removed, so it shouldn’t be viewed negatively either. The issue is when there’s no relevance.
Google knows about every link your website has. If you suddenly pickup 1,000 links from websites that have little or no relevance to the websites that currently link to you, the “link spam siren” is going to go off. However, if you’re careful to only redirect related domains to your site, you’re not likely to trigger any alarms.
More importantly, someone who clicks on a link to the old domain might just find your new site useful. Remember, it’s not about anything more than the user experience. As long as you’re buying and redirecting relevant expired domains, you could build a nice little link profile with no penalty.
Now, as to the SEO benefits, I’m intrigued by the story on WebmasterWorld. I haven’t seen that these expired domains are great SEO boosts in my own work, but I haven’t ever tried building links exclusively through expired domains. Maybe that would be a good case study…
In any case, I would suggest buying expired domains that are relevant and viewing them as more of a low-cost advertising tool than a link-building tool.
I would love to take advantage of this trick.
its very rare this happens. how often do banks lets domains expire!!!