An Newish Approach to SEO

If any of you are interested in SEO can I suggest ttying this (they have a $5/$10 offer on):

http://qualityexpireddomains.com/huffington-post-expired-domains/

You'll need to read all the blurb on the site re page rank and stuff, and why they reckon it works.

All I can say is I've tried it and it seems to work very well. I'm sure there are other methods, always helpful to have more tools in your arsenal.

 

If you're looking to buy expired domains for not too much I have to say here on Acorn is pretty good

People offer strong domains fairly regularly

Buying blind because a domain may have 1 link from the huffington post seems silly to me.

 

Yeah I think it depends on how you look at SEO - if you look at it in the old fashioned way then it doesn't make sense.

For me, with all of the Google link penalties I thought "ok, so what I need are fewer links with much more power, but what links would those be?"

Since PR isn't updated anymore, and was open to manipulation, i.e. you can see it, the spammers can see it, and so in their eyes they try to get links from pages / sites with PRX and above, then what other measure might Google use, that isn't promoted and isn't easily measurable.

I thought a better way to think of it might be "if I could have a link off anyone, who would I love to get a link from?", and that made the process a whole lot easier - I'd like the BBC to link to me please, in the top 100 sites in the world (Alexa), unspammable, can't buy links from them, don't advertise, don't try to manipulate rankings, etc.

In Googles eyes they are prefect - can be 100% trusted, have 100% reputation, authority, etc.

Since the olny way to get that link is to buy a domain with an existing BBC link and use that to link to my sites (in some way or another) I did that.

So I bought some domains that have BBC links (and have since bought some others with CNN, proper .gov's, etc) and the results have been great.

I think it works, I think you need to look beyond the "huff post link" - if you still measure the value of a link by PR, TF, CF, DA, PA (which let's face it, Google DO NOT use those measures) then you are going to struggle, and I guess it's a footprint too, if your links all come from high PR/TF/CF/PA/DA etc pages / sites.

I think when you hear Matt Cutts banging on all of the time about trust, authoirty, reputation - that's what Google want to rank sites on, but there is no active measure of those values that we can see, so you have to read between the lines and see if you can find a fudge that is likely to satisfy those criteria - and what better than the best news sites in the world that don't do advertising, etc?

 

I heard that Google check the registration date of the domain against when the link to that domain was first awarded. If the registration date is newer than the link weight isn't passed in full. It was an easy fix to stop people using dropped domains? I thought this was old news?

 

Nope they don't seem to do be doing that at all.

That wouldn't work for a lot of com, org, net etc either because they're put to auction and keep their original registration date.

 

Damn, maybe one of my sites with multiple links from BBC, including their technology page is worth more than I thought

 

Ah, I thought this was expired/caught domains with links. Not domains sold with original registrations.

 

They could be, I have no idea, but co.uk's I've caught with new registration dates google treats like they've never dropped.

 

Have you managed to rank for anything significant using dropped domains solely? I mean real rankings for competitive phrases, not just appearing on page 3 for something.

 

Yep, well, significant in their individual circumstances

2000-3000 uv a day on one for example

 

I bought a couple of high volume (search) domains that had dropped and forwarded them onto the main site and the links show in WMT. One from guardian and one from BBC. Never bought them for this reason (didnt know they had backlinks from these sources) but the site ranks really well. Any correlation? Im not sure, but I'm not complaining!

 

I was under this impression until I picked up a domain in August last year. The domain belonged to the semi-official site for a popular UK tourist attraction/destination.

The domain dropped and was caught for me. It took me a while to get a copy of the original website, but once I put it back online, Google treated it like it had never been gone (despite the fact the domain expired and was re-registered, and the site was offline for a month or so).

The site still ranks in the top five for thousands of terms around the destination, a handful of them fairly competitive.

I've bought a few similar domains since, and they've all done the same thing once I've put a site back on them.

 

Nothing new, this has been working for years.