Registering expired domains
-
Hi there,
I've found a good domain that is available for a new project. It has been expired for about 4 months or so. It has a couple of links, with the domain name as an anchor, nothing horrible. Will buying a domain like this be safe from an seo perspective? I'm guessing it would be treated the same as buying a new domain that has never been registered before, Would I be right?
Peter
-
Here is an interesting addition to this folks.
I am reviewing some backlinks on a new clients site and found loads of old blogroll links from foreign language sites. It would seem that these links were paid links as it went but as I dug in I found that in fact, this was a domain that had expired and that these links pointed to the old site.
Now, this domain was unregistered for a while, so it was not a case of dropping the domain and re registering under another name. In fact the site used to be for a Portuguese music band and now is something wildly different.
So, some thoughts on this.
1. tons of these links showed up in webmaster tools so were clearly being acknowledged and still assigned to the domain despite it's being dead for a good while
2. These links all ended up being for the brand of the new business as it matched the old band name but from wildly off topic sites in another language
It is my thought here, that in cases like this, where the domain was dead for a given period of time and the site is clearly not a rehash of the original site but a bricks and mortar business, in a totally different area, in another country that you should be able to use a domain like this even if it had a slightly dodgy past.
But, how would you go about this? Well, my thoughts would be a reconsideration request stating that you are the new owner and giving all the details.
I have nothing to back this up, but my thoughts would be that you should not be penalised here for the past history of a domain. Heck, if I moved into a house where someone was murdered, that does not make me a murderer.
I tried to find some evidence of this and found various mentions, much like the domain reset thing but not much hard evidence but Matt Cutts does detail this here on the back of his domain conference that if you buy a bad domain, then just submit a reconsideration request.
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/trip-report-domain-roundtable-conference/
With the manual review of the domain, it should be fairly easy to see if this is an attempt to shed some old weight or is just an honest acquisition by the 99% of the world that simply would not give the domains history a second thought.
Obviously, there are some caveats here and if the domain was doing something really nasty (porn etc) then it may not be worth it but we do have to balance up good domain with dodgy background vs really crappy domain sometimes so there are a lot of moving parts.
Anyhow, would be interesting to see if anyone has any experience here or thoughts on this.
Also, here is a post detailing how Matt Cutts states domains are reset but... there is little in the way of detail:
http://www.johnon.com/543/mattcutts-domainroundtable.html
Cheers
Marcus
-
Great answers, Thanks Marcus and Irving
-
I would agree that they are not simply 'reset' hence the need to take a look at the history but... I have seen plenty of discussion relating to this over the years that you will get no credit (good or bad) from an expired domain.
Personally, I would not hang my hat on a domain with a dodgy history but likewise, don't expect to get any positive credit from an expired domain with some OK links either.
If it seems clean, if it has no dodgy backlinks, if it has a safe history on archive.org etc - all of these can help you make a decision.
-
Go to archive.org and take a look at the history of the site and what it used to be.If you see it was a shady site and also has a shady incoming link profile I would avoid it. My guess would be that a lot of really good domain names (short, keyword rich names) were dropped because of penalties.
Dropped domains are not simply "reset" or owners would just let their penalized domain expire and pick it up again under a different name.
-
Hey Peter
It should, pretty much be like buying a new domain. The only caveat there would be if there was lots of negative equity, bad links etc hung on the back of the domain but if you have had a good solid look then I would not sweat that.
Additionally, when a domain has a new owner, Google claim they 'reset' the domain so any previous link equity, good or bad would be removed. I am not sure how well that works with Penguin etc but again, if they domain looks clean I would not worry about it too much.
Some useful further reading here:
http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/015966.html
Hope that helps
Marcus
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
-
Domain Masking SEO Impact
I hope I am explaining this correctly. If I need to provide any clarity please feel free to ask. We currently use a domain mask on an external platform that points back to our site. We are a non-profit and the external site allows users to create peer-to peer fundraisers that benefit our ministry. Currently we get many meta issues related to this site as well as broken links when fundraisers expire etc. We do not have a need to rank for the information from this site. Is there a way to index these pages so that they are not a part of the search engine site crawls as it relates to our site?
Technical SEO | | SamaritansPurse0 -
Old Redirected Domain is replacing my current domain on SERPs
Hello everyone, All of a sudden a 2 year old redirected domain is replacing my current domain for 2 weeks now, my site is apitus.com and my old domain is aptitus.pe (the redirect is still working), however this only happens on my country google results (google.com.pe), if you check my site on google.com, everything looks ok even with a sitelink, which I no longer have on my country search results. Back to the issue, the first thing I thought was go to Search Console and take it out from the index, so I asked for access by uploading a file but since everything on that old site redirects to my current site I can't make such action. While still waiting for such access, is there anything else I could do?. Thanks in advance. PD: I'm adding the images of my SERPs CmzN8kY G3zZwwj
Technical SEO | | JoaoCJ0 -
Best use of an old domain?
I've discovered that my clients website used to have another domain name, which they still own but don't use. It's doing OK considering its not been used for a few years - almost 6,000 backlinks showing on Majestic. So what's the best way of using this for SEO? I'm presuming some kind of redirecting? A simple redirect of everything on the domain to the new domain index page? Or going trough all the old pages and redirecting them one by one?
Technical SEO | | abisti20 -
Domain not ranking in Google
https://www.buitenspeelgoed.nl/ is a domain acquired by our client. Previously this website was on http://www.buitenspeelgoed-keupink.nl. With the old domain they were ranking top 30 on 'buitenspeelgoed' in google.nl. Now with the new exact match domain they aren't ranking any more (for months). However, the website is indexed, as you can see on http://1l1.be/nz I don't know what to do anymore. Need some advise. What we allready have done the last months: made adjustments to the 301-redirects (this was originaly setup wrong by the webdesigner (de) optimized the homepage on 'buitenspeelgoed' (strange is the fact that the Moz robot can't access the site). Checked the robots.txt to see if the website was blocked for Google Checked the meta robots to see if the website was blocked for Google Disavowed some spammy (old) links which linked to the old domain Checked Search console > Fetch as Google if there isn't any Malware of some kind (and to see if Google can access the site) Checked Search consol to see if there manual spam actions (isn't the case) Checked for duplicate content by copy/paste some texts in Google and see if any other results are showing up (isn't the case for most of the texts) Please let me know what we can do.
Technical SEO | | InventusOnline0 -
Different Domains on Same IP
Hello I'm just wondering how much of a difference it makes having links to a site from 2 separate domains that are on the same IP, compared to if the domains were on separate IPs? Thank you! Sam
Technical SEO | | wearehappymedia0 -
To 301 redirect or not to 301 redirect? duplicate content problem www.domain.com and www.domain.com/en/
Hello, If your website is getting flagged for duplicate content from your main domain www.domain.com and your multilingual english domain www.domain.com/en/ is it wise to 301 redirect the english multilingual website to the main site? Please advise. We've recently installed the joomish component to one of our joomla websites in an effort to streamline a spanish translation of the website. The translation was a success and the new spanish webpages were indexed but unfortunately one of the web developers enabled the english part of the component and some english webpages were also indexed under the multilingual english domain www.domain.com/en/ and that flagged us for duplicate content. I added a 301 redirect to redirect all visitors from the www.domain/en/ webpages to the main www.domain.com/ webpages. But is that the proper way of handling this problem? Please advise.
Technical SEO | | Chris-CA0 -
Can I do a redirect to a new domain name only a couple of weeks after having redirected to another domain?
I have a client with two website with very similar content. Both had a lot of inbound links and performed fairly well in SERPS. We recently combined both sites and have redirected one of the domains to the other. The traffic dipped slightly initially, but is recovering nicely. Now the client registered a new domain name he would like to use for the site. Should I wait a few weeks for everything to settle down after the first redirect/consolidation of sites before doing a new redirect to a new domain name, or should I not worry about having any issues with doing it right away?
Technical SEO | | Drewco0 -
Google refuses to index our domain. Any suggestions?
A very similar question was asked previously. (http://www.seomoz.org/q/why-google-did-not-index-our-domain) We've done everything in that post (and comments) and then some. The domain is http://www.miwaterstewardship.org/ and, so far, we have: put "User-agent: * Allow: /" in the robots.txt (We recently removed the "allow" line and included a Sitemap: directive instead.) built a few hundred links from various pages including multiple links from .gov domains properly set up everything in Webmaster Tools submitted site maps (multiple times) checked the "fetch as googlebot" display in Webmaster Tools (everything looks fine) submitted a "request re-consideration" note to Google asking why we're not being indexed Webmaster Tools tells us that it's crawling the site normally and is indexing everything correctly. Yahoo! and Bing have both indexed the site with no problems and are returning results. Additionally, many of the pages on the site have PR0 which is unusual for a non-indexed site. Typically we've seen those sites have no PR at all. If anyone has any ideas about what we could do I'm all ears. We've been working on this for about a month and cannot figure this thing out. Thanks in advance for your advice.
Technical SEO | | NetvantageMarketing0