Forum Moderators: martinibuster
As an SEO tactic, what are your views on purchasing recently expired domains and 301 redirecting them to your current site to transfer link strength and page rank?
have you had any experience using this technique? successes / failiures?
does google discout the link strength of an expired domain after the 75 day period where the domain is not available for public purchase?
thanks
As an SEO tactic, what are your views on purchasing recently expired domains and 301 redirecting them to your current site to transfer link strength and page rank?
People do it every day. It is a strategy that typically has a short life span. From what I've read here and at other fora, as soon as that domain changes hands, a flag goes up. The redirect is surely to be a second flag at which time something happens, I think it just doesn't pass any value from a PageRank™ perspective.
But, you have all those links out there that were pointing to that previous domain. You may be able to survive on the power of those for a bit longer than the PageRank™ thingy.
Try and snap them up before they expire. Then you've got something. DMOZ claims to be some sort of directory when in fact what it really is is a place for folks to go fishing for these types of sites :).
On a strictly "pay per click" basis, an expired domain may be a source of relevant and low-cost traffic. In other words, paying $10 bucks a year for an old domain may lead to hundreds of new visitors very inexpensively.
If you use the "wayback machine" you can see the old content and see if the site is related to yours.
The folks that make money from dropped domains like that IMO are the ones who will run ads on it. If they pay 50 cents a month for the registration but can make $1 in advertising clicks, times that by a bajillion and they make money.
I'm sure there's the exception that proves the rule but generally speaking I wouldn't be looking at expired domains as sources of type in traffic or the like. Get them before they drop while they're an old, diamond in the rough.
On balance, unless you continue with very similar content (with a very short break), it's pretty unlikely to be cost effective - unless it's a pretty special domain at a pretty special price!
Won't do any harm, however (so long as the 301s are set up right), and if buying them keeps them out of a competitor's hands, then the price may be worth thinking about.
But as the alternative to you is almost certainly an industrial domain parker, even buying to stop a rival may be wasted cash these days. Silly money domain auctions are almost certainly a futile way to waste hard earned cash.
I would question the purchase of an expired domain for residual traffic. If it had decent, targetted traffic, it likely wouldn't have dropped.
I understand where you're coming from but I've purchased a few that had a large amount of precisely targetted traffic.
Neither of the domains were a play for gaining PR and they didn't do well in search engines until I rebuilt new links to them. FWIW, I don't think in terms of gaining PR, so that was never a consideration.
[edited by: martinibuster at 9:03 pm (utc) on Oct. 9, 2007]
Archive.org doesn't index everything worldwide, does it?
