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
-
Recently re-built our site and changed domain. Now I want to go back to old domain - it it a bad idea?
About a year ago I rebuilt our website and changed our domain name. We rent villas in Tuscany, we used to be 'invitationtotuscany.com'. Then I started doing the same in Provence, and in the italian lakes, so i had further sites called invitationtoprovence.com and invitationtotheitalianlakes.com. But maintaining them was awkward and I wanted to have one site. So I put them all onto invitationto.com and did 301s from the old domains and sites. Now I'd dropped off organic search results and I've also realised that invitationto.com is far less clear as a business address. My inclination is to go back to invitationtotuscany.com - Tuscany is still 80% of our business and have the other areas in there too - optimised for SEO for Provence etc. I'm being told its a really bad idea to change domain, 301 the old one, and then revert to the original domain. But I'm suffering anyway, so I wonder if I sjhouldn't just bite the bullet. A lot of my old good backlinks still point to invitationtotuscany.com (BBC, Sunday Times, etc) and the DA is 33 against 22 on the new one.. All help gratefully received! : )
Technical SEO | | DanWrightson0 -
Links from a nonexistent domain, what do we do?
Our website is receiving 15 links that I believe are negatively impacting us. The problem is, this website linking to us no longer exists. The domain is not even hosted. The website linking to us is: thepurpleelephantboutique . com/ How do we fix/resolve this issue?
Technical SEO | | spadedesign0 -
How can you promote a sub-domain ahead of a domain on the SERPs?
I have a new client that wants to promote their subdomain uk.imagemcs.com and have their main domain imagemcs.com fall off the SERPs. Objective? Get uk.imagemcs.com to rank first for UK 'brand' searches. Do a search for 'imagem creative services' and you should see the issue (it looks like rules have been applied to the robots.txt on the main domain to exclude any bots from crawling - but since they've been indexed previously I need to take action as it doesn't look great!). I think I can do this by applying a permanent redirect from the main domain to the subdomain at domain level and then no-indexing the site - and then resubmit the sitemap. My slight concern is that this no-indexing of the main domain may impact on the visibility of the subdomains (I'm dealing with uk.imagemcs.com, but there is us.imagemcs.com and de.imagemcs.com) and was looking for some assurance that this would not be the case. My understanding is that subdomains are completely distinct from domains and as such this action should have no impact on the subdomains. I asked the question on the Webmasters Forum but haven't really got anywhere
Technical SEO | | nathangdavidson2
https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/webmasters/1Avupy3Uw_o/hu6oLQntCAAJ Can anyone suggest a course of action? many thanks, Nathan0 -
Sub Domains and Robot.txt files...
This is going to seem like a stupid question, and perhaps it is but I am pulling out what little hair I have left. I have a sub level domain on which a website sits. The Main domain has a robots.txt file that disallows all robots. It has been two weeks, I submitted the sitemap through webmaster tools and still, Google has not indexed the sub domain website. My question is, could the robots.txt file on the main domain be affecting the crawlability of the website on the sub domain? I wouldn't have thought so but I can find nothing else. Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | Vizergy0 -
How About Moving My Site to Another Domain?
My website has been hit by a Google Penguin penalty. At this point, it seems very few websites have recovered from this penalty even after it was lifted. That said, I'm still wondering if I should start a new website or my current one to another domain. When I started my website, I registered the domain name http://www.thewebhostinghero.com A few years later, I bought webhostinghero.com as it became available. Actually, webhostinghero.com redirects traffic to thewebhostinghero.com at the registrar level. There are barely any links pointing to webhostinghero.com. TheWebHostingHero.com is quite a big website with over 1400 pages and some very useful tools (http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/free-tools) that took me so long to develop, I just can't believe I'd have to throw it all out the window. So that said, do you think it would be possible to move all or some of the content from thewebhostinghero.com to webhostinghero.com? Would that make sense? Would webhostinghero.com come out as a copy of thewebhostinghero.com since the domain is similar, etc.? Of course, moving the content from thewebhostinghero.com to webhostinghero.com would have to be done without any 301/302 redirects to avoid passing bad link juice. At the same time, I don't want to end up with duplicate content on both domains.
Technical SEO | | sbrault740 -
Domain structure for US Local Sites
We are planning on opening localized versions of our website throughout the world and in the US. For countries these websites will be: www.site.co.uk www.site.fr etc.... For the US would it be better to add the states onto part of the domain name or use a sub-folder. What is the advantage/disadvantages of each? Meaning, should it be: nj.site.com or site-nj.com
Technical SEO | | theLotter0 -
Two Sites - One Domain
I just want to be sure, but if I install a Wordpress blog in a subfolder of a HTML site, Google will see that as one site, not two different sites, correct? Even if there is two index files?
Technical SEO | | jshiraz0 -
Redirecting domain to the main domain (hosting cost?)
Hello Everyone, I have the following situation. There is main domain and a secondary domain that is related to the page on the main domain. I want to integrate the content of the secondary domain into the page on the main domain and redirect the secondary domain via 301 to that specific page. As i understand I can do it via .htaccess using rewrite mechanism. http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection But the question is does it mean I have to keep paying for the hosting for the secondary domain? Because htaccess has to be located on the web server so I would need a hosting plan for it? Is that true? Is there any way around it? P.S. to avoid any confusion - I am talking about hosting plan - not domain registration fees
Technical SEO | | SirMax0