Why does expired domains still work for SEO?
-
Hi everyone
I’ve been doing an experiment during more than 1 year to try to see if its possible to buy expired domains.
I know its considered black hat, but like I said, I wanted to experiment, that is what SEO is about.
What I did was to buy domains that just expired, immediately added content on a WP setup, filled it with relevant content to the expired domain and then started building links to other relevant sites from these domains.( Here is a pretty good post on how to do, and I did it in a similar way. http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2297718/How-to-Build-Links-Using-Expired-Domains )
This is nothing new and SEO:s has been doing it for along time.
There is a lot of rumors around the SEO world that the domains becomes worthless after they expire. But after trying it out during more than 1 year and with about 50 different expired domains I can conclude that it DOES work, 100% of the time.
Some of the domains are of course better than others, but I cannot see any signs of the expired domains or the sites i link to has been punished by Google. The sites im liking to ranks great ONLY with those links
So to the question:
WHY does Google allow this? They should be able to see that a domain has been expired right? And if its expired, why dont they just “delete” all the links to that domain after the expiry date? Google is well aware of this problem so what is stopping them?
Is there any one here that know how this works technically?
-
Greetings, I am going to weigh in here, not because I am any kind of Yoda at all, but purely from a common sense point of view. I hope that's okay.
I would deduce that if anyone was able to know when a domain was released and how soon it sold thereafter it would have to be the domain registrar. So, let's say, hypothetically, that some domain registrar decides they are going to start publishing a list of domains that were released for sale and then sold immediately. Then let's say Google gets a feed of that list and just automatically, via the algorithm, discounts every single one of those domains down to PR 0, and strips them of all potential link authority value...
I'm sure you can see dozens of problems with that scenario. Here are just a few:
1. No one can really evaluate the new owner's identity or purpose without knowing who the new owner is. If registrars disclosed that information, I can't even imagine the number of privacy issues that would arise.
2. The assumption would be being made that the new owner is not the same, related to the old company. I'm sure there are plenty of cases where this happens.
3. Google would be making the assumption that the selling of the domain to a new domain owner was to end the business. Again, there are probably many many instances when this is not the case.
It seems to me that Google, nor any other search engine, can reasonably deduce the motives of a new domain owner. I mean, there are some smart folks at Google, but I don't think clairvoyance has entered the algorithm yet. Consequently, it probably seems more reasonable to let expired domains retain some of their value with the belief that most business owners are only going to buy domains relevant to their business and that end users will cast their "votes" for how well these new owners use the real estate by exhibiting either engagement or bouncing and viewing another site. Eventually, the algorithm will more or less accurately sift through the results and serve up results that visitors find engaging.
Sure, maybe it works for a year, two years, hell, even three years. So maybe this approach is viable, for now for a website or a page that just seeks short term benefits. But, if what you are building is a business that you want to last, a brand that you want to matter to people 20, 50, 100 years from now? Then I think there are far better uses of your time, effort and resources.
-
Please use that sarcastic tone some where else Keri. And I'm not asking for the algorithm.
I guess its me that has asked the question in a wrong way, I apologize for that. Let's take Google out of the picture completely for the most important question.
Is there ANYONE in the whole wide world that in some way can see if a domain has been expired and then been bought again just seconds later? If yes, HOW?
The next question would then be why Google doesn't just put the PR back to 0 and "block" all the linkvalue that the domain name had before it expired. Because its not very likely that its the same owner that buys the domain after it has expired (the domain doesn't just expire immediately, its sits in a quarantine for a few months). But as I said, don't ask yourself that yet, answer the first question.
Is there any technical yoda in here?
-
The only people who would know exactly how it works technically would be the people at Google who work on that section of the algorithm. They don't tend to hang out in forums and give away the inner-workings of how things rank, and likely are under many NDAs so they couldn't say even if they wanted to.
-
Thanks for the answers but I'm afraid that doesn't answer the question. How does it work technically?
-
With questions like this, I tend to look at it not from Google's point of view but from a person's point of view. The spiders are getting smarter after all and Google always says to write content and create websites for people not the Spiders.
So to answer your questions, you might want to ask yourself these questions:
- How am I supposed to know that the links on my website are broken, because a site I was linking to is now down?
- How do I know that the domain I am now visiting was down for a month or even a year?
- How do I know said blog is being used for black hat purposes? It it has relevant content and helps me, that's all that matters.
-
One reason it's difficult is that a domain may have expired because the owner forgot to renew it. Once it's expired, the owner quickly renews it. Should they begin from square one? Probably not--so that's why it isn't deleted (and may be the answer your looking for). If a domain has expired and no site goes up, it will eventually just gradually "disappear" (although may not fully).
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
More or Less pages helps in SEO?
Hi all, I have gone through some articles where less pages are suggested and they claim that they will be favoured by Google. I'm not sure as with limited pages, we can only target limited keywords. There might be threat from Google in-terms of doorway pages for more pages. But one of our competitor has many pages like dedicated page for every keyword. And their website ranks high and good for all keywords. I can see three pages created with differnet phrases for same on keyword. If less pages are good, how come this works for our competitor? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Effect of same country server hosting on SEO
Hello all, my question is if my website targets a country abc and I have server in the same country abc compared to suppose I shift my server to country xyz can it effect SEO and ranking of my website ?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | adnan11010 -
Wanna see Negative SEO?
One of my clients got hit with negative SEO in the past few days. Check it out in ahrefs. The site is www.thesandiegocriminallawyer.com. Any advice on what, if anything, I should do? Google disavow? Thanks.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mrodriguez14401 -
Can anyone explain some below SEO questions ?
Can we do link building like directory, article, press releases, classifieds, business listing, social bookmarking etc. We need to check DA, Alexa, Page Rank, cBlock IP before publishing any kind of Link but how much Max or Min. no. should be for consider any website like DA should be min 20-30-40 etc.. How can consider a natural links? Which type anchor text should be in any kind of links may be directory etc. In website interlinking we should put Exact Links or no need to put any links For.ex.my website is abc.com.au then we can put link for Website Design keywords or Should be long tail keyword. How can we do content marketing means we should post blog in internal website or need to create External Blog like BlogSpot, WordPress. In blog we should put any keyword link OR should be post without links. We can put link on no follow website. Why more website coming on Google first page but they are doing Spammy links like exact keywords links, unnatural links etc.. Thanks, Akhilesh
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | dotlineseo0 -
Removing/ Redirecting bad URL's from main domain
Our users create content for which we host on a seperate URL for a web version. Originally this was hosted on our main domain. This was causing problems because Google was seeing all these different types of content on our main domain. The page content was all over the place and (we think) may have harmed our main domain reputation. About a month ago, we added a robots.txt to block those URL's in that particular folder, so that Google doesn't crawl those pages and ignores it in the SERP. We now went a step further and are now redirecting (301 redirect) all those user created URL's to a totally brand new domain (not affiliated with our brand or main domain). This should have been done from the beginning, but it wasn't. Any suggestions on how can we remove all those original URL's and make Google see them as not affiliated with main domain?? or should we just give it the good ol' time recipe for it to fix itself??
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | redcappi0 -
Why are "outdated" or "frowned upon" tactics still dominating?
Hey, my first post here. I recently picked up a new client in real estate for a highly competitive market. One trend I'm noticing with all the top sites they are doing old tactics such as:
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Jay328
-Paid Directories
-Terrible/Spam Directories
-Overuse of exact text keywords for example: City name + real estate
-Blogroll/link exchange
-Tons of meta key words
-B.S. press releases blog commenting with kw as name Out of all the competition there is only one guy who is following the rules of today. One thing I'm noticing is that nobody is doing legit guest blogging, has great social presence, has awesome on page, etc. It's pretty frustrating as I'm trying to follow the rules and seeing these guys kill it by doing "bad seo". Anybody else find themselves in this situation? I know I'm probably beating a dead horse but I needed to vent about this 😉2 -
SEO expert advice needed :)
So I have a niche site that I'm pretty sure has received an over-optimization penalty. This was about nine months ago or so. I haven’t really done much with the site since however I’d like the site to start appearing in the serps again, as I am adding fresh content and trying to create a really useful resource. I don't appear in the serps for any keywords related to my niche anymore. The site IS still indexed though. I didn't get any messages telling me that I was penalized so I don't think it was manual. I didn't use any spam or anything like that but I believe the penalty was probably for anchor text over-optimization and/or too many links to non-home page urls in comparison to the total amount of links the site had. I know removing these links or changing the anchor can help but the thing is the site only has about 30 total linking root domains pointed at it. So I was wondering if I could just add more links to other pages/the home page and add more links with varied anchors/naked urls to change the ratios and make it appear more natural. Now, would/could this fix my penalty? I am frustrated that I even received a penalty at all because much of my competition is ranking for fairly competitive terms with no real solid links pointed at their site and tons of comment spam. I have some relevant links/quality links so I am hoping that fixing this penalty could help put me back where I was before I got knocked into oblivion. There is one example of a competitor with a PR0 site getting good traffic and ranking for some nice keywords with only a bunch of self-set up web properties (and some comment spam) containing one only page for the purpose of linking back to their money site (blogspot, wordpress, weebly, mywebstarts ect). On top of that a lot of the sites I'm competing again are MFA, garbage sites that are written by non-native English speakers that offer zero value to the visitor. I need to start out ranking these spammers again. What should I do? thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jmckiernan86_gmail.com0