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Seems to me the largest use of expired domains is by UltimateSearch and other companies that use them to present ppc listings. Since these ppc are usually sourced from FindWhat, I wouldn't be surprised if this single move by Google makes a noticeable dent in FindWhat's revenue.
Another use of expired domains is that brokers buy up generic ones and then sell them to companies in the same field with branded domains. These companies then use domain pointers to from the generic expired domain to the branded one. Clearly, Google has devalued the expired domains, so brokers will suffer and companies with branded domains will lose a source of traffic.
None of this would really bother me except for the fact that Google is increasingly in the business of selling traffic themselves. By filtering out expired domains, they have reduced the market of lower-cost traffic providers.
I wonder if Google factors expected impact on their ad sales into their prioritization of search changes. Certainly, there are far bigger problems than expired domains that deteriorate SERPs
By and large what's left are semi-legitimate uses that had provided a fairly low-cost option to drive traffic. For example, if I sold auto parts at figment88s-autoparts.com, and a broker came to me and said, "hey top-autoparts.com just expired and is getting 200 visitors a day do you want it," and I bought it and pointed it at my original domain, why is that so horrible?
Sure, I'll say from the surfer's point of view it might be might be marginally better to filter expired domains. However, compared to all of the new and old forms of mirroring, cloaking, and keyword stuffing, expired domains don't seem to distort SERP's too much.
When you look from the perspective of other stakeholders, there are differences in impacts.
By decreasing lower cost sources of traffic, AdWords and Overture are slight winners.
Providers of lower cost sources of traffic are big losers.
Marketers who benefitted from those lower cost sources of traffic are slight losers.
You could basically buy immediate page rank Webmasters bought up every domain they could with pr 4 and above to gain pr without spending time doing it themselves.
Exactly. And because the inbound links that produced that PageRank were intended for the old site, transferring the PageRank to a new site would be a disservice to the user and a threat to the credibility of PageRank.
For example, transfering PageRank of an expired domain to a new one is only a "disservice" to the searcher if the new site is not relevant.
In addition, I was trying to expand the discussion beyond the perspective of just webmasters to that of other stakeholders (e.g. Google Ad Sales, Users of Expired Domains, etc.).
The main point of my original post was that of all the things Google could have done to improve the quality of their SERPs, they chose to prioritize a relatively minor one that has a side-effect of negatively impacting some of their competitors.
what effect has the new filter had in your industry?
The main point of my original post was that of all the things Google could have done to improve the quality of their SERPs, they chose to prioritize a relatively minor one that has a side-effect of negatively impacting some of their competitors
You can't really say that if your not a programmer/manager working on thier algo. None of really have any idea what they are prioritizing. GoogleGuy was just nice enough to let us know of one filter they added to thier algo. This is just one of many filters they are adding and tweaking on a monthly basis Im sure.
And on the idea of it being minor, i don't think so. A whole industry has risen up around the idea of buying and selling expired domains and the PR associated with them. This of course is something Google wants to get rid of. Not that they want to put anyone out of biz, but it is thier job to try and create an algo that cannot be manipulated manually with ease.
The expired domain pr issue was a very big flaw in the pr idea. Without this filter people could artificially inflate thier pr and for the most part hotwire thier ranking.
JMHO
By and large what's left are semi-legitimate uses that had provided a fairly low-cost option to drive traffic.
It all depends on perspective. It's one thing that always had a huge potential for abuse and was abused alot. Since it affects everyone, it doesn't change the playing field that much, except that those who tried to short circuit the system have one less tool to do so. If there is going to be less traffic flowing through those channels, there will be more flowing through others, Overture and AdWords, sure, but if people were clicking on search results that included expired domains and those domains aren't there, they'll get a real search result on a real site.
It's a great move and its overdue.
Better search results means we can all search faster and more effectively; better results means that people will be more apt to go online in the future; with a more level playing field companies will find it more profitable to do business online; websites will continue to have to strive for excellence in order to build incoming links; the whole infrastructure of the Internet, which in a lot of ways is pretty crappy, will improve somewhat.
Granted, all of these will be *slight* effects because it's a small change to the algorithm. But I am a great believer in code. The best code should always win. The day Google can't improve its algorithm because entrenched "stakeholders" might be negatively affected is the day it dies and begins fossilization.
Almost nil, the expired domain spammers are still having a field day. A few minor players with recently purchased domains have been removed, but expired domains that were acquired a few months ago are still going strong. These are domains which have absolutely nothing to do with their new usage, and the backlinks are all unrelated, but rather they were bought only for PR value.
The new filter is a good idea but it still needs a bit of work.
The stale results problem (from the user side rather than the management side) probably killed more search engines in the last few years than any other single problem (apart from management). I've lost count of the domains that have been snagged a certain Hong Kong based squatter that are still in other SEs. Google seems to be pretty good on identifying and purging such operations though it is a relatively trivial thing to do from a data/analysis point of view.
The way Google is solving this problem is perhaps the only way to do it with a search index of that size. It does stop the people who want to trade in Google's PR as a commodity.
Regards...jmcc
This technique should also help those people that buy an expired domain that has a penalty on it. This should allow Google to drop the penalties at the same time.
As I see it there are basically two categories of deleted-domain-re-registration:-
1) Hijacking - re-registering purely for the traffic/PR value to then present the user with a subject totally different from the theme of the original site.
2) Redevelopment - re-registering for the purposes of legitimately redeveloping the site, either as a totally ne theme, or on theme with the original site.
In the first category there is really only one option in my opinion, wipe the slate of any previous benefit and let the site fend for itself.
In the second category though a little more thought needs to be made. The question revolves around whether the domain is being actively developed or left to stagnate. And if it is being redeveloped is it on theme with the previous site and therefor are the links to the previous site still relevant?
It is a complex situation but one I am sure could be addressed with some judicious programming. Therefor I am wondering what sort of themeing is being done on deleted domains and whether any comparison is being done before applying penalties. And also, whether the penalties are a negative factor, which means a lot of work for the new webmaster to claw back to zero before gaining any positice PR, or just a resetting of the PR for a site back to zero so the new webmaster can start afresh.
I am also wondering whether any old links are reapplied as the new webmaster developes the site and gains new links. For example, lets say a deleted domain had a good number of links and decent PR. It is re-registered and the new webmaster goes about redeveloping the site in the same theme and starts to work on getting links. Previous links would still be relevant and so perhaps should apply to PR calculations as the site developes. Perhaps some system could be developed so that as a site tagged as having been deleted starts to gain PR in it's own right then a relative proportion of the old links be added back into the equation on an ongoing basis, ie, rewarding the new webmaster for his work. Make sense?
Just a few thoughts.
Onya
Woz
I must own 1-200 domains but only a few are active the rest dormant, now occassionally I will build up one of the domains and perhaps if need be transfer it to one of my companies.
That means the Whois not only changes names but perhaps even countries.
When I asked GoogleGuy about this in the other thread (announcement thread) he said that should be OK.
I personally do not see how this could work.
If someone owns a book store which is on the corner of Oxfird Street in London, and someone buys it and continues it as a book store, are customers expected not to go there for a while, or will people stop recommending it.
I would have thought that perhaps if there is a whois change and a dramatic change in topic, then perhaps Google can do something there, but if it remains on topic, but just changes hands I do not see why Google would want to do anything.
I am also wondering whether any old links are reapplied as the new webmaster developes the site and gains new links. For example, lets say a deleted domain had a good
number of links and decent PR. It is re-registered and the new webmaster goes about redeveloping the site in the same theme and starts to work on getting links. Previous
links would still be relevant and so perhaps should apply to PR calculations as the site developes. Perhaps some system could be developed so that as a site tagged as
having been deleted starts to gain PR in it's own right then a relative proportion of the old links be added back into the equation on an ongoing basis, ie, rewarding the new
webmaster for his work.
I think this really highlights the value of relevance or context Woz. The previous links were to a site with different content. However if the new content was the same as the old then they would, to some extent, still be relevant.
The other factor that Google and the big SEs may run into is that only a small percentage of the web is actually current (or continually updated). In the case of everyone's favourite Hong Kong squatter, the vast majority of the links pointing to the website of one particular domain that they snagged were never updated. Many of the pages with the links have not been updated since they were first posted.
Just from running a SE covering all the .ie websites and domains, I'd guess that about 70% of website content has not been updated this year. I'm not sure about the figures for .com/net/org websites in general but I'd be surprised to see more than 25% of existing websites (over one year or so) having been updated on anything approaching a continual basis.
From a search engine operator point of view, it is both a fundamental flaw in a simple ranking algorithm and a very useful aspect in detecting dead and squatted domains. A simple ranking algorithm, without a time element, would not detect that most of the links are aged links on old pages. However introducing an 'aged link' factor into the ranking algorithm would allow such squatted domains to stand out because they may never acquire new links. But a redeveloped domain would begin to acquire new links, (theoretically), thus differentiating it from a mere squatted domain. The problem with all this is in the timeframe used for the algorithm. I think Google may have sufficient data to adjust its algorithms with a time based factor. (Just some late night theorising. :) )
Regards...jmcc
Right now , google doesn't seem to recongize old links with new links. I have registered an expired domain and develop it. I have exchange a lot of links with
other websites but with this update it seem to remove all the new links too and give it a pr0. This seem unfair. Is there anyway to get the new links to show
up?
If Google is just resetting the PR for a domain on expiry, the new links should show up after your site and the linking sites are crawled in the next Google Dance. Though if Google's expiry algorithm has no timebase factor, a lot of redeveloper webmasters may be very upset with the new index. But since redevelopment also involves getting inbound links, the chances of a redeveloped site getting back into Google's results are good. I don't think that Google is actually deleting the expired/reregistered domains' websites from its search index.
Regards...jmcc
Visit_Thailand, I don't recall Google talking about domain changes or transfers, just expired domains. Presumably they have access to some kind of datafeed that identifies these. I can imagine that people who inadvertently let their domains expire and have to fight to get them back might be hurt by this policy, though.
[edit - in the other thread on this subject GoogleGuy says they won't penalize sites whose owners let the registration lapse. He didn't specifically mention domain hijacking, but it suggests they've thought the thing through, anyway.]
The above applies even if the location was empty for 3 months between tenants (although of course the goodwill has diminished in value by then)
Now map the above onto the Web.
Google is saying "Hey, if company A has a site about product X at domain acme.com and then they go away and a while later company B puts a site about product X at domain acme.com, we're not going to pass on any of the goodwill associated with that domain"
Surely, there HAS to be an element of relevance checking for this policy to work. If you just blanket penalize all expired domains, you're cutting off a lot of legitimate uses for many domains! You're basically saying "Unless you sell a live site as it is while it's still running, we're going to place a NEGATIVE valuation on it in future"
Remember, you can only get 1 link from Yahoo!, Dmoz, Looksmart etc. so if the domain you bought/picked up off of expiry had listings already, you're starting off WORSE than if the domain had never been registered.
Let's take a specific example...
If "Books.com" expired and I beat the masses and managed to grab it when it did so, Google is saying "Hey, build a bookstore on Books.com for all we care - but we're going to penalize you for doing so!"
Does that seem right? Hardly!
A much better way to proceed would be to *temporarily* penalize domains that resolve to the *same* page. So that e.g. the speculator who points 10,000 expired domains at a links page would get a PR0 on all 10,000 domains - but when the spiders visit a particular domain and find real, unique content on it, they should start calculating the PR for it again.
Google is saying "Hey, if company A has a site about product X at domain acme.com and then they go away and a while later company B puts a site about
product X at domain acme.com, we're not going to pass on any of the goodwill associated with that domain"
I'm not sure that the situation is like that. In some respects, with Google's PR, the whole thing resembles a food/restaurant guide. If restaurant A gets a high rating and then goes bust, then it will be removed from the guide. If restaurant B then takes over restaurant A's old premises and opens up there, it does not inherit restaurant A's standing or entry in the guide.
A much better way to proceed would be to *temporarily* penalize domains that resolve to the *same* page. So that e.g. the speculator who points 10,000
expired domains at a links page would get a PR0 on all 10,000 domains - but when the spiders visit a particular domain and find real, unique content on it,
they should start calculating the PR for it again.
This kind of thing is dead easy to spot when you are a search engine operator (I am though not quite on the same scale as Google ;) ). Normally this kind of linkswamp would be detected in the pre-Index and would be deleted from the main index. At a guess, Google may well do this (the discussions about bad IP ranges/neighbourhoods) would tend to confirm this.
Regards...jmcc
I think Woz and Edwin are right. Google is creating unfair, negative valuation for an expired domain if there is no expiry policy in place for their new filter.
That's a new term for me. I love it!
All Google are doing is considering expired domains to be a blank slate, which they are. Why should a website rank higher just because another site once used the same name?
<added>Google considers links a vote for a site. If a domain is expired and reregistered it becomes a site that the original linking webmaster never intended to vote for. Also, if you link to a site that is about furry widgets, the domain expires and is bought by a child porn site, do you want your link to still count given the trouble that could cause you?</added>
Also, what about the issue of directory listings? Would those be reset? You can't be listed in Yahoo and Dmoz twice! How would that work?
