u/oneman
Asking for a friend… IF (my friend) was to buy an expired domain for reasons, how fast do they need to redirect the existing backlinks to the new homepage before someone (Google) is aware the site is gone?
Title, basically. Again, my friend is interested in buying an expired domain or ten, purely for scientific, non-ranking specific reasons and instead of buying fresh ones at the auction, they are thinking about buying recently (hours? a few days?) expired domains with backlinks.
Are the backlinks still good if they can quickly redirect them to the new homepage, or do backlinks cease to matter after a domain expires? How much time to they have is what I am asking?
21
One of my friends hypothetically did this with about 15 domains.
What "we" found was that the only ones that ever showed up in Google webmasters were the ones that were redirected to subpages recreated to look very similar to the original(took about a month). We then internally linked from those to wherever on the domain we wanted to boost. Homepage redirects never showed up. They did not seem to do crap for ranking. Had expired domains that were dofollow linked from quite a few high Domain Rating (DR) pages… heck… i even had a link from playboy to my pron site via 301 : )
Maybe you will have better results.
My… friend was just gonna put up some decent WP blogs, a redirect for all the live links to the home page, and let it ride to glory.
Sucks for me… I mean, them. I'm not trying to make this a whole thing. Thanks for the post.
WebLinkr
Once a domain (or page) is 301'd or redirected, it's gone. Or it's "goneness" begins. However, regardless of this state of gone, how much/many continue to push through is up to Google. It's not about if Google thinks the old domain is gone, the links don't deserve to carry through – that's not Google's motivation or prerogative. There's no likely reason that Google would have some kind of test based on the domain being acquired but more to see if the links are relevant after x time has passed. In other words, if say Company "AAARoadSite.com" rebranded because it was acquried (for WHATEVER reason) as "AAATransportRescue.com" – and 301'd domain A to B, how/why/when would Google Adjudicate whether its a new, old, or phoenix – it doesn't matter. It would just be impossible without some kind of massive human effort on a case by case process.
infinitetk
You can take your time with it, links don't disappear over night.
I always build sites with these kinds of domains. And i never have to build any more links since the domain already is powerful. I get at least 800 Referring Domains (RD) domains, Domain Rating (DR) 40+. Been ranking for years but there is a whole investigative process involved. Keep reading
You have to spam check the domain for any signs of abuse. Check archive history, hosting history, especially at points where domain changed ownership. If you see the website changed or irrelevant content history, let it go. Also check anchors to see signs of spam foe viagra/casino, foreign language anchors need to be translated and checked to see if they make sense.
Scan the Google index for any left over spam type content. Pay attention to organic traffic trend in Ahrefs or SEMrush. If it went down drastically at some point, investigate that and see if there was any shady link building. Also check historical links in Ahrefs to get a complete picture.
If you are not going to take these steps, and not make sure the domain is clean then you are wasting your time since most domains are spammed or abused and this is why people complain that it didn't work for them.
Now after all these checks, since you already have the domain connect it to Google search console and see if there is a manual penalty. If not and everything else above checks out then you have a good domain.
However, you are still not done here. To leverage the authority of the backljnk profile you will have to restore the domain, resurrect it as if it is coming back to life. If you change the niche or build a different site then it will all go to shit. You need to execute this in a way that it looks like the old site has come back.
restore content for pages with incoming links, then have someone write an article with the same search intent so you are not violating copyrights. Once restored, 301 all old pages to the new urls on page level. Let the site sit for 30 to 60 days.
Now your domain is ready. It is still not a free for all frenzy. Proceed with the website as if it is growing naturally with more RELEVANT that fits the niche. If you are going to add stuff that is not related then again you're risking it.
This works for me every single time.
Good Luck!
Word. Thanks.
No problem. Just because you have a domain with links doesn't mean it will rank for everything under the sun. You need to still do keyword research and build topical relevancy. After the first 6 to 8 months your website will start overtaking others weaker site, and in time better ones as well, it all depends on your link profile and content quality, and of course if you put time in finding good rankable keywords
Krizzlin
There's actually a pretty clever service that will automate a lot of this for you. The.domain.name gathers all the expired domains along with their content before they expired, allowing you to pick the ones you want and immediately buy and rehost through them. You then upload the zip file of the old site before it went down and can even edit it on the fly through their visual editor, so you jam in a few juicy links to your other sites and its all been shockingly easy
So you're promoting your service? it looks absolutely bottom tier. Work like this cannot be automated, it has to be done manually. I would advise everyone to proceed with caution when people like this start spamming their garbage all over Reddit.
Krizzlin
It's nothing to do with me. I used it years ago at an agency I worked for that needed links at volume, working in a particularly spammy industry. I just thought it was an interesting concept. There was a lot of shit to sift through though.
Use your own judgement as to whether it serves your needs. I merely highlighted that it does some of the work listed above for you
rejjacska
Thank you for this beautiful explained reply. Recently i bought an expired domain, the old urls was ugly so i needed to recreate the site on WordPress with new url structure. O sorted out the top linked posts/urls and made 301 redirect to my new SEO friendly urls with rewrited content(the subject remains the same). The problem is that there is more than 500 articles (there are also some low quality short articles) so the rest of old.urls was redirected to homepage. Also the old urls was www. my new is non-www. Can you tell me please if my procedure is correct? Thank you very much
It's good you went with a better URL structure, it's not uncommon for domains to have bad URLs, page level 301s is exactly what you need to do. So you're good there. Non www is fine as long as you are redirecting.
one of the things I take into account is how many pages have incoming links. ideally, you want the majority of the links going to the homepage. If there are 500 posts with links then that is a lot of work. Your domain better be worth spending that much time on redirects. I would build majority of the pages and maybe redirect the weakest 20% at the most to related and home page.
rejjacska
Thank you for your response. Really matters for me.
Majority of my page backlink are from Wikipedia and nofollow(i think). So the question is if those nofollow links are counting so if my work worth it? Thank you
infinitetk
Wikipedia links are always good. Look man it sounds like you are pretty new to this. I don't think you're going to be able to vet the domain properly unless you have a few years of SEO analysis/troubleshooting experience. If I were you, I would start with a fresh domain so you know it is clean for sure. Good luck!
