Does link equity still count after an expired domain is purchased?
-
Hi guys,
We've recently noticed a (very) minor competitor competing with us, as well as some of our industry's biggest names, in the Google SERPs - and the reason why has us absolutely stumped.
Aside from an awful website from an aesthetic/UX point of view, their on-site content is horribly over-optimised, with keywords on the homepage even STRONG TAGGED for crying out loud! A backlink check using OSE and Ahrefs found 19 linking domains - most of which were just trash - but there were 5 that boasted some decent DA, the highest being 43.
The thing is, these 5 sites are all very generic industry-relevant "blogs" that provide exceptionally poor quality content. The thing is, they have some very high quality backlinks (the BBC, the Guardian and CNN to name just three) acquired when the websites were something different entirely. The competitor has basically bought expired domains, turned them into basic websites related to our industry and linked them to their main domain.
My question then is: is this competitor benefiting from the very high quality links that are pointing at sites that are then linked to their main domain? I found an article from 2009 that suggested old links stop counting after being purchased by someone else, but we are stumped as to why they could be otherwise.
Thanks in advance everyone!
John
-
Thanks Massimiliano. That particular domain still has a DA of 43 so perhaps they haven't quite got around to it yet..
Appreciate the response.
-
In theory they should discount it.
Usually it takes time. I have a domain I bought to test this technique two years ago, it had DA56, now it's DA20, that's giving you an idea of how slowly they do.
But I have also seen domain being bought, content changed, and still retain their value.
No one knows what is in the mind of google algo.
-
Hi Massimiliano,
No, the competitor has replaced all of the old content with new content that is targeted towards their keywords. The website in question is this one:
http://www.the-hutton-inquiry.org.uk/
It used to be a website dedicated to The Hutton Inquiry (funnily enough...) but is now just a generic blog called 'Personal Injury UK'. In total they've done this with 5 different expired domains, in the exact same way.
Is this just one of those things that Google claim - and may even usually - they'd discount but that might actually just slip through the net? The rest of their backlink profile is very poor and their rise through the rankings seems completely inexplicable.
John
-
That is a very common and old gray hat/black hat technique.
You buy an expired domain with a good backlink profile from godaddy auctions, or some other similar website. There's few online services screening expired domains and offering you directories of them filtered by topics/DA/PR etc...
Once you bought the domain, let's say with a DA of 50 you can just 301 redirect the domain to your website or build some content and link to your website to pass juice.
The problem is google doesn't consider that legit. In both cases google algo have been instructed to discount the value of the juice passed, because it does detect the change of ownership and more important the change of content.
But it may still work.
The cleanest way of doing it is to replicate the content after you bought the domain. You buy foo.com, you download the old content from web.archive.org and keep serving it, then start to add content targetin the keywork you are after and linking to your domain. Doing that way google usually doesn't notice the change and doesn't discount the juice value.
Is that what your competitor is doing?
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
-
# of links and how it impacts ranking
Hi everyone I was running a competitor analysis in Moz Pro of my site and 3 competitors that are ranked above me. One of the things I noticed is that my # of total links is very high compared to 2 of my competitors(please see attachment). Other seo tools are telling me the same. This is mainly due to a few affiliate sites that have us in their footer. I was wondering if this could impact our ranking if some of these sites have very low domain authority and have thousands of backlinks to our site? I am looking into starting the disavowing process. Walau
Competitive Research | | wdsguy0 -
Building a high-traffic website in a jobs-related domain
Hi, We are currently planning upon starting a website that’s targeted towards people looking for government jobs in India. Here are the primary / base keywords that we are targeting: Sarkari Naukri Government Jobs / Govt Jobs Latest Government jobs Banking Jobs Bank jobs Railway jobs Employment News IBPS SSC We’re confused that how should we go about ranking on top for these / long tail keywords around it? Because, we think that this is not a domain where you can write long and information-oriented posts (1400-1500 words) to crack SEO. People come to websites under this domain to look for latest jobs and that might or might not be around the high-traffic keywords mentioned above. Secondly, it might not be possible to write a lot of long & information-oriented content around these newer job posts. How do we go about building a high-traffic website in this domain? Thanks...
Competitive Research | | Shalin.TJ0 -
Competitive Link building
Hi Folks According to Site Explorer this link ... www.quotationspage.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=12032&p=98500 .... has a page Authority of 42 and a domain Authority of 87. Looking at this it seems to be 3 links embedded in a forum comment. What I would love to understand is... how valuable is this link? (Especially with Panda and Penguin?) ... How do i decide if I should also peruse a similar link for my site? Thank you in advance
Competitive Research | | PHD0 -
Ecommerce seo - competitors are using spammy links to rank HELP
After setting up SEO Moz and whilst waiting for it to crawl my site i have checked out my competitors who are ranking for the keywords i am going after. It appears from what i can see in OSE that they are ranking with back links from spammy looking sites and lots of exact match anchor text. I have tried to match a few links with what they have currently without getting myself into anything too spammy but i really don't want to follow how they have done it exactly. The niche i am in is pretty boring but the rewards are great but i am finding creating content and distributing it correctly difficult which is why i need some help. My site is roughly 9 months old and the product descriptions are hand written trying to give as much info as possible with a hint of personality so no cookie cutter back of the box descriptions. i have matched a few of the links from competitors which weren't too spammy and as relevant as i could get to my niche, i have also created articles for some article directories - all of which isn't really getting me very far and i am running out of ideas on how to create new content & the types of new content to help me get back links naturally. If any of you friendly guys could offer me some assistance in setting up a basic seo campaign which would help me target my keywords i would be very much in your debt
Competitive Research | | GarethEJones0 -
Open Site Explorer Twitter and Facebook Links
I was using Open Site Explorer to compare some of my site's links to a competitor and I noticed that my Twitter page is not counting as an incoming link, whereas theirs are. From what I can tell, we have the same kind of setup on my twitter page, listing the domain in the company information... but no luck. Any suggestions on what I may be able to change? For reference: twitter.com/mediamegamall ... I know I need to work on the twitter presence... one thing at a time 🙂
Competitive Research | | Ask_MMM0 -
C Block Links in Open Explorer
Hi there, Wondering if anyone can help me with understanding the advanced reports in Open Explorer. I'm looking to create a list of competitors links to go after but don't want to create loads of links from the same c blocks for blog posts, articles etc. In open explorer it says my competitor has 451 linking C Blocks but when i download csv's using advanced reports with the filter of 'links that come from the same C block', the csv only has 26 links. The same happened with the filter 'from the same ip address'. How can i download and analyse the links so I can see all the linking C blocks and know which sites I want to use and which ones I want to avoid? Thanks, Ross
Competitive Research | | Will_Craig1 -
What is a Competitive Domain Analysis In Laimens Terms?
Hello all, I know what a Competitive Domain Analysis is, essentially, as a Developer, aspiring SEO master like Danny Dover, or Rand; LOL, I wish, those dudes a serious geniuses! I was looking for the Trifecta Tool, in SEOmoz, tools, but it seems to be gone??? So it looks like I will be using the "Competitive Domain Analysis", to assist my sales pitch. My Question is how would you explain it to a Client, or my Head Sales guy, for a pitch to a prospective career making client. Many thanks to your thoughts.
Competitive Research | | smstv0 -
Should I pursue this LINK?
I can get a link from this site, but it has a DA=39, Dmr=3.37, Dmt=3.39 and a Page Rank=0
Competitive Research | | b4tv0