Person using expired domain and its links to drive traffic
-
Hi, I know about people using expired domains to drive juice to their primary site but what about people using AN expired domain as their primary site (totally changing that site into a trashy affiliate-marketing vehicle)?
The site I'm looking at is thegunzone.com. It has, according to Semrush, almost 38K links. It used to be a legit 17-year-old firearms hobby site, and this is what it originally looked like:
http://web.archive.org/web/20120213184627/http://thegunzone.com:80/
Here is its last page before it closed and the domain purchased by the affiliate marketer:
http://web.archive.org/web/20170315084035/http://www.thegunzone.com/
It closed around February of 2017, and some affiliate marketer bought it and all its backlinks. However, all those backlinks, which were previously to various articles, are now directed back to those articles (which don't exist anymore) but the homepage, including Wikipedia links. Here's an example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygonal_rifling
At the bottom, in the 7th Reference, there's a link to an article called " "Learning About Shooting . . ." but if you click on the original link, it just goes to thegunzone.com homepage. Again, the site's totally different. And there are just thousands of such backlinks to former articles that don't exist anymore but are redirected to this schlocky site's homepage (and it's passing its juice through too).
My question is this: this cannot be kosher with Google backlinking policies, right? Is this prevalent on the internet? Why hasn't thegunzone.com been found out and its rankings penalized yet? And how do I report him? I see tons of other sites using this basic strategy too on search results with various hunting keywords. (Disclosure: I do own a hunting/firearms blog, but I don't do any backlinking at all.)
Any help would be sincerely appreciated.
-
I think that it is extremely risky. The more work and money that you have invested in the website that will be the recipient of the redirect the greater the risk.
This is a methond for people who do not have a big investment in their website and are simply looking for a low effort way to gain a small amount of ephemeral juice.
-
Can we get a 2019 update on expired domains.
Do you think it's a good idea to research and find high powered DA expired domains to point back to a website or page?
Do you think it's a good idea to research and find high traffic expired domains to point to website or page to generate more traffic?
Does Google look at buying expired domains as a negative. Anyone got feedback on expired domains and what they recommend etc.
-
Thanks, EGOL, for your advice. Yes, I will follow it (i.e., spend time on creating the best site I could). On thing, though:
"Is expired domains against Google's webmaster guidelines? I don't think that it is."
Well, Google has punished private blog networks on the past, and this site is sorta like a PBN except it's only one site. However, like a PBN, it took an expired domain's backlinks and redirected to itself (i.e., it uses another site's backlinks--the previous thegunzone's backlinks--for itself). The two incarnations of the site are totally different. This is what irritated me. The guy didn't at all earn those backlinks, esp. since almost all of them go to articles that don't exist anymore (but are redirected to the homepage).
Oh, well, whatever. I'll follow your advice. Thanks!
-
We can look at almost any SERP and see people doing things that we don't like, things that we think that Google should be slapping down. Sometimes what they are doing is directly against Google's terms of service. Sometimes they are not against terms of service and Google really doesn't care. Is expired domains against Google's webmaster guidelines? I don't think that it is. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en
You can use them too if you want, but I would not use them because I don't think that they are a good bet. I think that my skills are better spent on building something right from the beginning and working long term.
Crime? Not crime? Either way, inside and outside of Google people get away with things all the time, but if they do enough crime or sneaky stuff or shortcuts, things usually fall apart on them or they get caught. I can look back at "who was in my SERPs" over 15 years and about every five years there is almost a complete changeover - but the people working to make a great site remain and get stronger. Crime and sneaky stuff gets weeded out. Some sites that used to be good get weeded out because they take their foot off the gas or start taking shortcuts.
If these things bother you, then you are probably doing your best to run a good site. So just keep working, doing a high quality job. Spend 100% of your energy there and waste no energy thinking about people getting away with stuff, because, in the not very distant future, people doing the sneaking, the crime, the shortcuts will drop to below competitive positions, if they do not disappear completely. Hang in there!
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
-
Looking for a way to crawl and test validity of affiliate links at scale. Ideas?
Hey all, I'm on the hunt for a service that will crawl our affiliate links and let us know when they return an error. I need to know that the last URL in the chain is returning a 200 over thousands of pages and links on a continual basis. The hitch is that most crawlers like Screaming Frog will return all of our links as working because it's only testing the first step, and this really requires a cloud solution anyway. Anyone happen to know of something? Edit for clarity's sake: I need something to check entire redirect chains in bulk that isn't a Wordpress plugin, isn't a website where you plug in a URL and it cuts you off after the first 100 results, and has the ability to crawl the site and provide reporting on a continual basis. Bi75jku
Affiliate Marketing | | BradsDeals0 -
Low value link building to sitemap.xml
During some competitive research recently I discovered one of my clients competitors sites had an interesting backlink profile. Looking at the top-pages report in Open Site Explorer the home page was the #1 page (as you'd expect) with 2.5k links from about 500 linking root domains The second page was the sitemap.xml (~1.5k links, 400 linking root domains) and the third was their /feed page (again, ~1.5k links, 350 linking root domains). Links to these two pages aren't something that would happen naturally (particularly the sitemap.xml). There's a whole load of evidence for nasty low quality link building such as over-optimised keyword rich anchor text, comment spam, and even some blog/article based link networks. It's a pretty nasty niche with lots of cut-throat affiliate marketing. My guess here is that someone may have made a mistake using an automated link building too, but I'd be interested in what you might think? Have you seen this before? (Sorry, I can't reveal the domains in question as I'm bound by an NDA.)
Affiliate Marketing | | DougRoberts0 -
Find all affiliate links in a custom CMS
I have a custom CMS. I offer a few affiliate products through my site. Now I need to update all my aff. links and I'm not sure how I can find all the pages (posts) on my site that have affiliate links. What's the best way to do that?
Affiliate Marketing | | VinceWicks0 -
Links exchange - Penguin update potential ??
Hi Everyone, If site A and site B exchange links in the past, it used to be kind of voided. So it is a practicve that we had pretty uch put on the side. But with the new penguin update, do you guys think that if 2 web sites are contacting each other to share a link in the interest of the user that it might be a new best practice to implement? Example, Car site contact car suspension site to exchange a link on relevant content such as blog articles or specific content on a page. What are your thoughts about that ? I am curious to know if anyone is wondering abouot that... Thanks, Alex
Affiliate Marketing | | webit400 -
'legitimate' link wheels
I was wondering what SEOMoz' thoughts are on the mega legitimate link wheel sites that are out there. TechMediaNet have been buying up massive news/media sites which arent really monetised (adsense) like http://www.space.com/ http://www.ouramazingplanet.com/ livescience.com and others and generating, admittedly good quality, curated content. Then seeding them with content with backlinks to their money site, toptenreviews.com which in essence is a review site with thousands of pages loaded with affiliate links no better than any of the other site out there. e.g. http://www.livescience.com/9755-bing.html due to the scale of what they're doing pretty much any keyword search i do with review in it (the last thing i wanted to purchase was a usb 3 hub) ends up with toptenreviews.com dominating the serps presumably due to the high PR the viral nature of the media sites are working with. Do you think Google will crack down on this, or do you think it's capitalism in action? TechMediaNet have invested millions in this project and just gotten another $33 million in funding recently.....
Affiliate Marketing | | idimmu0 -
Does Google look at Domain Registrar owner information when counting links into a site?
Question: If the domain registrar owner info is the same on two websites, will Google/other search engines discredit any linking between the two sites when calculating page rank? We have two company sites. One is our main ecommerce domain which we have been linking into from information domains in the past. We recently cut ties with the company that hosted them for us and wish to host them ourselves to preserve the inbound traffic. We are worried, however, that the traffic will be discredited now that we own both domains. Thanks for looking!
Affiliate Marketing | | tennisexpress0 -
I need some feedback on the value of affiliate aggregators like Link Share
My company decided to start a Link Share affiliate program at the beginning of this year. I've had serious reservations about the value of the program since the beginning but was overruled. Here are my concerns: The majority of publishers seem to be coupon scraper sites or borderline link farms I am told the biggest revenue earners in our network are publishing articles about my company with links back to our site but if they are Google Alerts sure isn't finding them and a manual search hasn't turned up anything either. This makes me think these publishers are using some sort of unsavory way to drive traffic to our site or maybe even cookie traffic that was coming to our site anyway in order to get credit for the sale. Most of all I'd like to hear from anyone else who has used Link Share in the past. Secondly I realize there's not a lot of information here but I'm wondering if this passes the smell test for anyone else. Any feedback would be appreciated.
Affiliate Marketing | | eTundra0 -
Big Affiliate Site vs. Small In House Software For Link Value
Hi, I have a client who sells consumer products and is interested in affiliate advertising. Of course, they can get set up with something like CJ.com. They are also interested in possibly using some third party software to take their affiliate effort in house and be able to offer publishers simple urls. The idea is that this might help the link profile for SEO as well. Here are my questions: Does anybody have any experience with the complication level associated with third-party software for link value path? So, relative pluses and minuses. Can anyone recommend an affiiate software that is reliable and easy to use? Any opinion on one big site to go with... CJ, GAN, someone else? Thanks!
Affiliate Marketing | | 945010