Buying Expired Domains
-
Recently i was looking to buy some good quality Expired Domains.
But while performing site and links query on such domains in google, none of the domains are showing any links or pages indexed in Google but the same domains are showing hundreds of links in opensiteexplorer for that domains.
So does Google has started devaluing expired domains or will expired domains recover all their rankings after re registration by us.
-
You need to be careful when purchasing a dropped domain that appears to be too good (short name, no hyphens, competitive keyword phrase)
a) take a look at what the site used to be in archive.org (the wayback machine) and take a look at if anything shady was going on
b) if you are buying it as a regular domain and not paying a premium price, set up a dummy site and get it indexed then see if it ranks for it's domain name and also using the site command site:domainname.com. If it's not ranking it's penalized, if it's not getting indexed it's banned.
c) If a site has been hit by Google it's done, at least until someone unwinds the penalty. Just dropping it and picking it up doesn't change the fact that it was penalized, otherwise everyone would be doing that to get out of penalties. So just be aware of that if planning on buying a premium domain so you don't get burnt.
If links are pointing to a expired domain it's like they are 404'ing but once the site goes live again those links are passing PR to that site.
-
This depends on the domain and the aftermarket process, can be hit and miss, the question should always be is this investment going to get me a return on my time and money. I often ask if I am doing this why is nobody else after this domain and if there is not keyword, cpc and other data to justify a purchase I'll back away. Keyword related expiring domains would be a better bet than just expiring domains with links.
-
Hi Amit,
I have owned a ecommerce domain since 2004 at times due to financial issues I had turned the site off (redirected everything to a maintenance page), for 6 months to even a year and half once. Oddly enough after the year and half time, I turned off the maintenance page and within 24 hours I already had customers buying from me again.
That isn't the same as expired since I always renewed my domain, but I was surprised on how quickly customers returned after such a long time being down. Hope that helps a little.
-
It's not a good practice, so be careful and only pick relevant ones.
Whether or not they loose their ranking depends, but if they aren't indexed anymore, then their rating is probably gone.
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
-
301 a whole subdomain to main domain
Hello, we have our website in two languages. The subdomain cs. for czech and main domain for english. Somehow this has caused google not to rank our main domain in local CZ SERP for many english keywords and we have not found out a reason other than it might think of them as duplicates or that we at the start had put targeting for the cs. domain to CZECH. (Its been 4 months, english keywords in Czech serp are easier and still it ranks them on the very last place, yet for example.com ranks them in google.com co.uk, fr etc in top 10) We will close our cs.example.com subdomain and use only example.com hoping this will not cause google to display only one domain and raise it in CZECH rankings. **Can i 301 redirect cs.example.com to example.com and all the categories of cs.example.com to relevant english categories. This should be ok? **
Technical SEO | | advertisingtech0 -
Help: buy domain from Tradenames.com?
Hello to all, I'm Silvia. I am writing to ask if any of you know this site: tradenames.com. It is a domains broker. They contacted my client and would like to sell the .com business domain (my client currently has the .it). Does anyone know them? Thanks you for your help.
Technical SEO | | advmedialab0 -
Domain vs Sub Domain and Rankings
Hi All Wanting some advice. I have a client which has a number of individual centres that are part of an umbrella organisation. Each individual centre has its own web site and some of these sites have similar (not duplicate content) products and services. Currently the individual centres are sub domains of the umbrella organisation. i.e. Umbrella organisation www.organisation.org.au Individual centres are sub domains i.e. www.centre1.organisation.org.au, www.centre2.organisation.org.au etc. I'm feeling that perhaps this setup might be affecting the rankings of the individual sites because they are sub domains. Would love to hear some thoughts or experience on this and whether its worth going through the process of migrating the individual centre domains. Thanks Ian
Technical SEO | | iragless0 -
Merging Domains
Hi, Everyone, My company is currently working with a client that has multiple websites and is interested in merging them into one. One is a primary corporate site, the other is a site for a single line of products. They obviously want to merge the product site into the corporate site. The interesting thing is that the product site outperforms the corporate site. It has the highest traffic, and it has far more links/linking domains, a higher domain authority (although only by two points), and much more social activity. However, their reasons for wanting to merge the two are completely valid - less management, URL would match print collateral, etc. They're asking our opinion on whether or not to move forward with the merger. I'm leaning toward no simply because of the fact that the site they want to merge is outperforming the other. I'm curious, though, to get some other opinions on this. Would a merger be worth the work in this case? Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | PapercutInteractive0 -
How to force a trailing slash after the domain name
My campaign analysis is predictably listing domain.com and domain.com/ as repeated content. I've searched and searched but cannot find a way to force a trailing slash on the end of the domain name unless there's a file or directory after it.. Is there a way to accomplish this using .htaccess
Technical SEO | | JollyBoy0 -
301 Redirect Domain or 301 Redirect Domain + Interior Pages
Hello - My company acquired another company in our industry and our IT team immediately set up the acquired companies domain name as a an alias to our site. This created a duplicate version of our website under another domain name and Google started ranking interior pages from the aliased acquired site for several top keywords that were previously held by our real site. Should we 301 redirect just the top level domain name of the acquired site to the real site or 301 redirect the top level domain name and the interior pages on the acquired site to help ensure that our real domain will take back the rankings it once had? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Room2140 -
Default.aspx and domain name difference
I am getting duplicate page content and duplicate page title errors for www.mydomain.com and www.mydomain.com/default.aspx. I thought that they were the same page, so I'm not sure how to avoid getting the duplicate content and title errors. Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | DMacy0 -
How do i deal with duplicate content on the same domain?
I'm trying to find out if there's a way we can combat similar content on different pages on the same site, without having to re write the whole lot? Any ideas?
Technical SEO | | indurain0