Does link equity still count after an expired domain is purchased?

[NAHL-1430]

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

[NAHL-1430]

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.

[max.favilli]

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.

[NAHL-1430]

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

[max.favilli]

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?