Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Buying Expired Domains with Decent DA/PA for SEO Purposes
-
Hey guys, i've seen some stuff about this before but I recently found an opportunity to put it into action and wanted to make sure I knew what I was getting into!
I am looking at buying a domain (expired and now only 10 dollars) that has a decent domain authority and has some keywords in it related to my clients practice. I plan on using a 301 redirect to pass "link juice" because this client is looking for a quick bump in rankings.
Thoughts? Benefits? Problems with this?
-
So interestingly enough, and without trying to identify the people involved, I have found a local SEO company that has somehow acquired a fully unrelated domain which supposedly used to have something to do with students and kids lives and was a resource of sorts back in the day.
This site has FOLLOWED backlinks (with the student resource context) from the United Nations, from cbs.com, and from a wide range of websites mostly referencing it as a student and kids life resource.
Given the looks and feels of their site, they seem like a shabby SEO company with rather grey or dark themed SEO tactics.
This company ranks on page 1 for City+ SEO combination of keywords for three to four MAJOR cities in the US.
I want to find out what you all think of this...
Is this ok?
How is this ok?
Is this going to cause them to be flagged eventually automatically for a penalty or purge?
Does Google have anything against this sort of thing at all?
Danke
-
what is a good resource to find expired domains? for instance a list or like wise instead of purchasing scraping tools.
-
I tried this procedure but was not very successful and the blog was penalized by Google.
What I did, I bought a fairly good command with AD and a good amount of back-links it was indexed.
I created new content for the blog and redirected all the old pages to the home.
I was punished because the content that the user should see is not the same as the search engines, not entendie well. -
In my opinion I have seen both tactics work, it really comes down to how much Google trust the domain and your web site. If you are going to do a 301 redirect, I would do a very in depth link analysis and make sure that nothing is spammy. Make sure you really dive into the quality of back links that the URL has as well as how diverse the link profile is from a link standpoint and anchor text standpoint. A buddy of mine thought a URL was good but got penalized because to many links were coming in from the same type of sources even though it wasn't the same source.
You also need to check your link profile and make sure it is well diverse as well. This will help the url blend in more natural. I agree with Moosa, I would only use this tactic one or two times. If you are thinking about doing a PBN I wouldn't recommend it. However there are plenty of legit ones that really build out great content and information and are legit, but in my opinion if your going to spend all the time and money doing that you could spend it on your website. Good luck
-
OoOPs! I forgot this is only white-hat forum/QA board. but buying domains in bulk and redirecting to main site is also blackhat. 301 was supposed to be a transfer, If your website is shifted from domainA to domainB then you can redirect 301 from domainA to DomainB. Anyways, Do make a try with your strategy. I've shared what worked for me
-
Thanks guys! I've got a solid checklist now to complete to qualify a site!
Though for anyone else reading this [email protected] like a very old-school, black hat SEO tactic! Not only do I doubt that would work short term, I KNOW it is something that Google will be looking to penalize. A link network/ link farm like that is not really a legitimate SEO practice and violates Google's guidelines.
-
Its a good thing, but I'd prefer to use expired domain as a backlink source.
Its called Site-network or Blog-network. Register 10-20 domains with different PR's and DA's. Put high quality content (related to your topic) and then link to your client's website with different anchor tags. then see Boom in rankings! I ranked a 52% Keyword difficulty keyword using this method in 1 month.. Exact! -
I never say No to it, unless you have like 20 domains 301ing to the main domain but one or two are fine in my opinion.
When buying an expired domain, having a decent DA is not enough, also check their links that are pointing the website and if they are fine, go for it otherwise, 301ing the domain to the main domain might hurt!!
-
I agree that this is a great idea, when handled properly.
Oleg pretty much covered everything but this 2013 post from SEORoundTable.com covers this tactic as well: http://www.seroundtable.com/competitor-domain-name-17032.html
-
- Check if domain is indexed
- Check the anchor profile of the domain - too spammy means it would affect your current site's anchor profile and possibly penalize it
- View the site via archive.org and make sure it was good site. Spam/porn/hacked sites will probably do more harm than good.
Also, the best 301 strategy would be to link individual pages to specific new pages on your site. I would focus on the pages that have external backlinks and do a catch-all redirect to the homepage for the remainder.
-
Hey,
This is good idea if implemented properly! You need to check few things before redirecting this domain
- Verify that there is not Manual Penalty to this domain (Verify it through Google Webmaster Tool )
- Check the back-links of domain if any. It might be victim of Penguin 2 & 2.1 (You can use ahref.com or Moz Explorer)
Redirecting this domain without above verifications could lead to further trouble!
Regards
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
When creating a sub-domain, does that sub-domain automatically start with the DA of the main domain?
We have a website with a high DA and we are considering sub-folder or sub-domain. One of the great benefits of a sub-folder is that we know we get to keep the high DA, is this also the case for sub-domains? Also if you could provide any sources of information that specify this, I can't see to find anything!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Saba.Elahi.M.0 -
SEO implications of moving fra a sub-folder to a root domain
I am considering a restructure of my site, and was hoping for some input on SEO implications which I am having some issues getting clarity in. (I will be using sample domains/urls because of language reasons, not an english site), Thinking about moving a site (all content) from example.com/parenting -> parenting.com. This is to have a site fully devoted to this theme, and more easily monitor and improve SEO performance on this content alone. Today all stats on external links, DA etc is related to the root domain, and not just this sub-department. Plus it would be a better brand-experience of the content and site. Other info/issues: -The domain parenting.com (used as example) is currently redirected to example.com/parenting. So I would have to reverse that redirect, and would also redirect all articles to the new site. The current domain example.com has a high DA (67), but the new domain parenting.com has a much lower DA (24). Question: Would the parenting.com domain improve it's DA when not redirected and the sub-folder on the high-DA domain is redirected here instead? Would it severly hurt SEO traffic to make this change, and if so is there a strategy to make the move with as little loss in traffic as possible? How much value is in having a stand-alone domain, which also is one of the most important keywords for this theme? My doubt comes mostly from moving from a domain with high DA to a domain with much lower DA, and I am not sure about how removing the redirect would change that, or if placing a new redirect from the subfolder on the current site would help improve it. Would some DA flow over with a 301 redirect? Thanks for any advice or hints to other documentation that might be of interest for this scenario 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Magne_Vidnes0 -
Move domain to new domain, for how much time should I keep forwarding?
I'm not sure but my website looks like is not getting it's juice as supposed to be. As we already know, google preferred https sites and this is what happened to mine, it was been crawling as https but when the time came to move my domain to new domain, I used 301 or domain forwarding service, unfortunately they didn't have a way to forward from https to new https, they only had regular http to https, when users clicked to my old domain from google search my site was returned to "site does not exist", I used hreflang at least that google would detect my new domain been forwarding and yes it worked but now I'm wondering, for how much time should I keep the forwarding the old domain to the new one, my site looks like is not going up, I have changed all the external links, any help would be appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fulanito1 -
Do low quality subdomains affect the ranking performance/quality of a root domain?
Hi, Late last year the company I work for launched two new websites that, at the time, we believed were completely separate from our main website. The two new websites were set up externally and were not well-planned from an SEO perspective (LOTS of duplicate content) - hence, they have struggled to rank on Google. Since the launch of the new websites we have also noticed that our main website (that previously ranked very well) has suffered a decline in visitation and search engine rank. We initially attributed this to a number of factors, including the state of the market, and ramped up our SEO efforts (seeing minor improvement). We have since realised that these two new websites have been set up as subdomains of our main website, with MOZ displaying the same domain authority and root domain backlink profile. My question is, do poor quality subdomains affect the ranking performance of a root domain? I have not yet managed to find a definitive answer. Please let me know if more information is required - I am quite new to the whole SEO concept. Thanks! Amy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | paulissai0 -
Membership/subscriber (/customer) only content and SEO best practice
Hello Mozzers, I was wondering whether there's any best practice guidance out there re: how to deal with membership/subscriber (existing customer) only content on a website, from an SEO perspective - what is best practice? A few SEOs have told me to make some of the content visible to Google, for SEO purposes, yet I'm really not sure whether this is acceptable / manipulative, and I don't want to upset Google (or users for that matter!) Thanks in advance, Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Unique domains vs. single domain for UGC sites?
Working on a client project - a UGC community that has a DTC model as well as a white label model. Is it categorically better to have them all under the same domain? Trying to figure which is better: XXX,XXX pages on one site vs. A smaller XXX,XXX pages on one site and XX,XXX pages on 10-20 other sites all pointing to the primary site. The thinking on the second was that those domains would likely achieve high DA as well as the primary, and would passing their value to the primary. Thoughts? Any other considerations we should be thinking about?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | intentionally0 -
NEw domain extensions, are they worth it seo wise?
Hello I am curious if all of these new extensions for domains are worth it? So say you are a home builder and you bought homebuilder.construction - where as construction is a new extension, does this help seo? Or is it all just a big sales gimmick? Thank you for your thoughts
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Berner1 -
Does domain WhoIs Privacy affect SEO efforts?
Hi guys, I got a hopefully quick question. I am designing a site currently that is made up of many different domain names as part of a network. I've heard that Google will penalize however is linking is passed back and forth between these domains if the registrant information was the same. I have WhoIS privacy information on all the domains to stop telemarketers and spam as well as (hopefully stop Google from getting suspicious). I'm not doing anything bad or against Google rules but I can see how they might think that if I have a huge network and links are being passed between these. It's a friend of mine who owns like 2000 domains and he wants to put legitimate information on each one and rank them higher, it's an interesting concept but I won't go into to much detail. So my question is basically, does having WhoIS privacy on all these domains, will it affect me in anyway in the SEO process? Will google count the links passing back and forth as legitimate? Or might it get suspicious and think I am spam? Are there ways to see what server it's coming from? Should all these sites be on different servers? Any help is much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | itechware0