SEO and expired domains

[webber]

It’s pretty easy to determine why so-called “black hat SEO” folks are willing to go through all the trouble: Building a domain from scratch, filling it with high-quality content, waiting for people to link to it, and doing everything by the book takes for-flippin’-ever. Finding a shortcut that shaves months, if not years, off the process and adds the ability to make a quick buck?

Interesting article you can read here: https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/23/seo-scammers-buy-expired-domains-vexing-google-trust/

 

[dazc]

'When the IP address changes, SEO experts claim that Google temporarily “punishes” the domain by dropping it in the rankings.'

Stopped reading right there.

 

[webber]

The article is clearly targeting a wider audience who might be less technical/knowledgable in SEO domains and is explaining things in more layman terms – perfect for someone like me
I don't think they use IP in the literal sense but maybe as host or other backend changes.
Obviously Google doesn't punishes websites for IP changes, but later in the article it is suggested Google is monitoring the Whois of domain names and taking note of changes of ownership/registration date which might impact its rankings.

 

[Ben Thomas]

No, Google doesn't care about your IP address. That being said, if you think about it, an IP change could have a knock-on effect on SEO. Let me explain how.

Imagine you're hosting your website in Ireland, your customers are based in Ireland. Makes sense, right? Your website IP resolves to Ireland, there's barely any latency between customer hitting your websites server and your website being served to them. However, this hosting company just went bust and you don't really know anything (hypothetically) about hosting. So you Google good hosting providers, you find GoDaddy, "Wow, that's cheap and nasty you say', "Just what I've been looking for!", as you guzzle down your tenth can of Monster of the day. So you've set up your website now, but the IP address has changed, "Wait, what's this? My IP is based in Florida now?". Suddenly, the time it takes for your customers to see your website has increase by 2 whole seconds. In SEO spacetime – that's a lot. Gradually, over the next 6 months, your ranking decreases. But what happened? Your bounce rate increased exponentially.

How else could you lose visitors? Email marketing. Your new IP address has been abused by spammers in the past and now your email reputation is 0. All of your previous marketing emails that were landing in your customers inbox are now in the spam folder.

So there's a lot to think about. SEO is a complex beast.

 

[seemly]

By contrast, I could be a digital marketer that has deep technical knowledge that allows me to spin-up and maintain my own high-powered (fast) environment on digital ocean to keep my costs at a minimum, sign-up for a free account and configure my whole site (or private blog network) to route through cloudflare, ensuring my website sits on the "edge", ensuring my website experiences as little network latency as possible no matter where in the world a visitor is from.

I can then register expired tld domains, and take advantage of previous registrant efforts and hard work to get indexed quicker using that domain directly, or 301 redirect traffic to an alternative domain/website.

Regarding email marketing, if you are generating revenue from your website(s) through email marketing, chances are you're not distributing that email marketing list without using a 3rd party service, which isn't going to be hosted on your server (so not the same IP address).

Personally, I think there is too much conjecture around ranking signals, and how intelligent Google is. I'm certainly not saying that Google doesn't implement the things mentioned, but there are an awful lot of things bandied around as "fact" when from a technical standpoint, it wouldn't make sense to use it as any kind of ranking signal as it is too inconsistent or impossible to determine definitively one way or the other.

Ping times from different countries around the world using:
https://hostingchecker.com/tools/ping/

acorndomains.co.uk (not using cloudflare)

domainsaleshistory.uk (using cloudflare)

 

[Ben Thomas]

Of course, both sides of the coin exist and always do.