Dropping Domains With SEO Value - What To Look For

I see people buying, selling & talking about dropped domains with SEO value and it makes me cringe.

I've seen some people say expired domains have no SEO value and they're a waste of time.. google treats an expired domain like it never dropped, it has exactly as much value as it did prior to dropping so as with any normal domain it's value and ability to rank is in the quality of its links

The problem is people buy/catch rubbish thinking it's gold that's turned into rubbish, but in reality it's always been rubbish.

One thing I can't stress enough ignore the visible pagerank

A domain might show as PR4/5 and you might be tempted just from that, don't be, often pagerank can be very misleading.

I've seen domains show as PR5 purely because they were being redirected to a PR5 domain prior to expiring (I'm not sure why that is, but it seems to be a thing)

A much better metric to look at is open site explorer page & domain authority (remember to put in both www. and non www. into OSE because it will show different results)

Generally I wont even look at a domain unless it has at least above 40 page authority.

Then the important part.. it's links. Look at the linking domains and "pages on this root domain" and click filter.

When I look at a domains links I want to see links from authoritative sites I will recognise, I want ac.uk, bbc, .gov, national news papers and magazines etc

I do not want to see freedirectory.com, placeyourseolinkhere.com, freesubmit.com, trash. Even if OSE says it's page authority is 50, it's still trash.

After you identify it has some quality links, manually look at a few of the best ones, make sure they're natural given links and not just something like comments. You can use SEO spyglass free version to check all it's links are still in place and not nofollow.

I think that's basically it, but you must check the quality of the links and that they're still in place, please do no buy domains just because they have a high pagerank or OSE, Majestic or any other metric.

Any questions feel free.

 

Great post Murray

 

Good info. Thanks for taking time post this!

 

Great post. Thanks for sharing.

Yes I have a question, if the domain name was willywhackerwhackedawilly.co.uk and it had a 60 authority with quality links what do you expect the reseller value of said domain to be? In other words how much per authority/backlinks is a domain worth?

 

I don't think you could have any real standardized pricing, would depend from domain to domain, niche, links, traffic

People don't seem to like to pay as much as they might though, seeing as how much is spent on SEOs who never get close to the quality of links you can get from an expired domain.

 

Great post Murray, thanks. SpyGlass, a good tool. Got the upgrade today.

 

It's kind of amusing to see the made up examples you've posted, since we actually own freedirectory.com

 

Maybe you cold do some consultancy work for Nokta?

 

Thanks for having a look at one of my domains Murray. Maybe you could make a SEO site sharing your knowledge,is this is a good idea or not?.

 

Amusing that this post was updated at a similar time to this other post of yours Murray

http://www.acorndomains.co.uk/searc...-search-engine-optimization-2.html#post474763

 

Very true about pricing and very true about people undervaluing these. I think these are decent but not enormous interestso far - http://www.acorndomains.co.uk/fixed-price-domain-names-sale/122420-pr3-domains-50-each.html.

 

It says when I last updated it 18-11-2013

Not 100% sure of the point you're trying to make though?

 

Good initial post Murray, exactly how I look for quality of domains with any existing links/authority

 

Rand Fishkin tweeted about this on 31st Jan:

https://twitter.com/randfish

It's an offer here: http://www.blackhatunderground.net/...bc-cnn-etc)-from-as-far-back-as-1997/msg2295/

 

Interesting product model.

 

Ive found two domains today with links from BBC, one also has links from Scotsman and the telegraph.

What would you do with them? redirect them to a money site, or create some kind of mini network linking to the money site.

 

Depends on the niche, is it related to your money site? I wouldn't redirect to your money site either way unless the existing links are related to your theme. Even then it is risky and not a good long term strategy in my opinion. Build some content on the site, let it rank for its main term (if it does) then use for linking out to other tiers!

 

thanks for the info