SEO A to Z - part 6 - "E-commerce to Expired Domains"

Hello and welcome to SEO is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of keywordspeopleusecom, the place to find and organise the questions people ask online. I'm an SEO developer, affiliate marketer and entrepreneur. I've been building and monetising websites for over 20 years and I've bought and sold a few along the way. I'm here to share with you the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years. With you, the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years. Hello and welcome to SEO is not that hard. It's Ed here, as usual, and we are now on to part six of our SEO A to Z, where we're hopefully going to get from e-commerce to expired domains today.

So let's start with e-commerce. This is quite a simple one, really. Yeah, any website that sells physical products online generally is seen as an e-commerce site, though you could, I guess, count any site that takes any payment for a product, so digital products could also count as e-commerce, but most people consider it as physical products. It's been noticed recently that e-commerce sites are doing an awful lot better in Google. Since the helpful content updates. It seems that google seems to be promoting the actual e-commerce merchants over and above affiliates nowadays, so I've seen lots of people talk about transitioning from being affiliates to being e-commerce sites, because, essentially, if you're ranking, you can rank an affiliate site, then you can probably rank an e-commerce site as well. But obviously, with e-commerce, you've got a lot more things to worry about. You've actually got to start taking payments, you've got to start selling products, sourcing products, creating products. It's a bit more complicated, but yeah, e-commerce quite a simple one to start.

Next we have easter eggs. Now this might. If you're not aware what easter egg is in terms of um software, then this is going to confuse you. When I say easter eggs, to start with, it's not a big chocolate egg, see. An easter egg is a hidden feature placed in software, and there are many easter eggs hidden in google, so here's a few for you to try out. So this is just for fun, really. So one, do a barrel roll, two solitaire and three, try searching for askew and you'll see Google do some weird things for you. So that's Easter eggs.

We've got editorial link Right. So this is the kind of link that Google wants to reward. So an editorial link is a backlink that your website receives which is not solicited in any way. Also, as organic links, those that are given organically by a third party. So these are the kind of links that google likes to see you receive and will help improve your rankings. So these are literally just where you know someone has come along, found your site, found some resource or page or tool on your site, has liked it and has decided to link to it themselves, off their own back. You've not solicited link, you've not paid for the link, you've had no say on what the anchor text of the link is, which page it's pointed to and where it's coming from. So they're completely editorially placed and these are kind of the gold standard kind of link that you want to try and achieve.

Next, we have EAT, which stands for Experience, expertise, authoritiveness and Trust. Eat and that's a concept of how Google wants to measure the value of a web page, as it describes in its Google quality rate of guidelines. Now, eat has been a bit controversial because lots of people who've been hit by helpful content update and other updates have said actually, our, our content is helpful. It should meet experience, expertise, authority and trust. We've got all these things and google has obviously decided they haven't. I did a episode just back in june the 12th, on google, the google api leak and what it can tell us about eeat. So if you want to learn more about eeat, then, yeah, definitely go and listen to that one, and I'm not going to go into it more now.

So next we've got EgoBait. Now, egobait is a link building technique where you try and catch the attention of individual influencers or other websites by building content on your site that specifically mentions them, and your aim here is that they'll be flattered enough by their inclusion in your content that they'll link to your page. Typically, ego bait content includes things like awards, interviews, list of calls and roundup posts. I did a whole post episode on this back early June. Yes, I've got June the 7th. If you want to learn more about how you can achieve link building using ego bait, then just go and listen to the episode from June the 7th.

Okay, next we've got email list. So you can create an email list by persuading people to provide their email list and opt-in to receiving emails from you periodically. The primary advantage of an email list is it allows you to then push content to your audience. Now, to create an email list, you'll need some an email list software. We use MailChimp, but there's plenty of others like Aweber and ConvertKit and a whole bunch of different email list software, which will be the thing that stores people's email addresses, handles all the opt-ins and things like that, and will do the sending for you. To get people to sign up for your email list, you'll quite often have to do something a bit more than just asking them for an email. You'll generally have to create some kind of lead magnet, like a book or a cheat sheet or access to some kind of tool, something like that to give them some incentive to provide their email list in return.

Next, we have engineering as marketing. Engineering as marketing is where you use engineering resources, such as developers, to create innovative and useful online tools and services that will be useful to site visitors and will attract people to talk about and backlink to your website. So engineering as marketing comes in as both a lead generation and a link building tactic, and engineering as marketing is one of the more sophisticated forms of content marketing. Keywords people use essentially is engineering as marketing. When we first created that, you know we just created the tool, which is, you know, quite a sophisticated piece of software, and the fact that what it can do is quite powerful and how it can crawl google. It's something that's good enough for people to go wow, that's quite good, and link to it. We especially found lots of people when we first went out there and promoted the tool by just talking about it on twitter. We got lots of people who, in the seo world, a would retweet it, a would talk about us and other people who write SEO blogs and stuff picked up on it and then started to mention it, to recommend it to their audiences and we picked up a whole bunch of links that way. So if you've got an idea and you've got something you can build and the resources to build it, then engineering and marketing can be one of the most powerful SEO and marketing tools that you can use. Broadbandcouk is another example for that. We got loads of links just purely because of some of the tools we built there. So the postcode checker tool that would then look up what broadband was available in your area and then find all the deals that were available in your area that garnered lots of links. Then we had a broadband speed test tool. Again, that got a huge number of links because people were quite happy to link to a tool and recommend a tool that would test your broadband speed to their users and amongst many others. So yeah, engineers marketing is a fantastic way If you've got the time and the resources you're going to be able and skills to do it. I highly recommend it.

Next, we've got entities. Google defines an entity as a thing or concept that is singular, unique, well-defined and distinguishable. So an entity can be a physical object, like a person, a tree, booking, a palace, or something less tangible, like a film, a brand or an economic theory. Now, entities can relate to each other, such as restaurants being near to a tourist attraction or films that an actor has appeared in. And by understanding entities rather than just keywords, google can put more context into responding to your search. So, for example, if you were to search for tom hanks, then google will recognize tom hanks as an entity, famous actor, and then we'll be able to pull in a whole load of other entities that tom hanks is related to. They would be films, there would be other actors that he's co-starred with and a whole bunch of context. It can bring around your search over and above just the lexical term Tom Hanks. So, yeah, entities have become much more important to how Google works and they're going to become much more important to SEO over the coming future.

Next, we've got evergreen Now. Evergreen content is content, that which does not go out of date or only goes out of date very, very slowly. Now this is my favorite kind of content because when you're going to create any kind of content, it makes sense to ensure that it's going to have the best longevity that you can. So I always look to try and produce evergreen content wherever possible. In some cases it's not possible. Fast-moving news events, those kind of things are never going to have a lot of evergreen attributes to them, but most of the things if you can then go evergreen. Looking on some of the content we produced for broadmancouk, there's content there that we produced years ago and is still relevant now. It might have been updated slightly as things move on. No-transcript it might have been updated slightly as things move on and technology has changed slightly, but the core concepts often don't change. So, yeah, evergreen content, content that doesn't expire or takes a long time to expire, is a very good thing that you should be aiming for.

Next, we've got exact match domain, or EMD for short. Now, an exact match domain is a domain name that matches exactly the primary keyword that you wish the website to target for, such as, say, cheaplaptopscom or bestdishwasherscouk. Now, while google claims there's no ranking advantage, the fact is that other sites are likely to link to you with the domain name as the anchor text in many cases and this could provide some advantage. Downside is that it does completely pigeonhole your site and they're not very brandable in most cases. Now we got round that with broadband, okay. Okay, we managed to make a brand around that it did help us when people linked to us. We just often would just link to us with broadman at Cody UK because we made the domain name the brand. I think that helped and I've certainly done.

On longererTail stuff. I found historically that exact match domains can help. Google have claimed that they've dialed down how good it is. There is some stuff in the Google API leak about exact match domains, but you know I still see them working. Just be careful with them because I say it's the pigeonholing that is the issue that you're going to have there, that if you go to exact match then you can. That whole site can really never be anything else or it's hard to expand into other surrounding sort of topic areas.

Next, we've got external link, so an external link is a link from your website to an external website, and also known as outbound links. So they are links that you put on your website pointing to other third-party websites. Now, is there any ranking benefit from linking to other websites? I don't know. I've. It's hard to see. I don't. I don't know that it's ever really been tested, but I think that people don't link out to other sites often enough.

I think it's good for your users to link to other sites, especially when you consider how we know that google listens to the clickstream data, so that if someone is on your site and then the next logical thing for them to do is to find that, go to another resource that you don't have, and if they are going to go, jump back to google from your page and ask google, are going to jump back to Google from your page and ask Google where to go next. That possibly doesn't look as good as if they jump onto your site. You then link to the next place that they should be going to, even if it is a third-party site, and they click your link and go Rather than going back to Google. It may send a stronger signal to Google that you know a real authority in the original query and that the the user didn't need to go back to google to get further information. So that might be a good reason to do it. But I also think it's just good for the web to actually link out where it makes sense to do so.

Don't hoard. Don't hoard all your link equity. It's actually worth sharing about, and I think if you're the kind of site that does link to other places, then you probably probably might just send a little signal out to other people that maybe they you know you're, you're a nice site to link to. But who knows? Right?

And finally, we've got to expired domains. Now, an expired domain is one which belongs to a formerly legitimate website that has been abandoned and then, once a bit abandoned, the domain owner does not renew their domain then expires. That becomes then an expired domain. So a domain registrar may let expired domains go completely. The domain then becomes available for anyone to register and a domain that truly expires and is registered again may be considered a clean new domain by Google and all the old ranking signals may not be preserved. However, I have seen it said in the past I think maybe a long time ago, maybe by someone like Matt Cutts at Google that they may decide to preserve signals if it believes the site was allowed to lapse accidentally and then has been repurchased by the original owner. So I think if a site because people do this, they forget to sort of register their domains when they're coming up for expiry. People have let their domains drop by accident, panic, and then they buy the domain back, they re-register it and then the exact same site pops up again on it. Google's screen is going to look at it and say you know, that was an accident. Let's, you know, keep everything as it was. We'll keep all those ranking signals there. But if it expires and then a complete brand new website comes upon it with completely different content, then Google is probably going to say, hmm, you know, we don't think this is the same owner, going to say you know, we don't think this is the same owner, it's not the same website. We won't preserve any of the old ranking signals. Many domain registrars, however, such as GoDaddy, what they do is when their non-renewed domains come for expiry, they don't actually let them expire. What they do is they put them up for auction, so the domain technically never expires. In these cases, many people, they purchase these domains at auctions in the hope that some of the ranking signals from the old website will be preserved and will provide benefit to the new website that's built on the domain.

Now. This definitely did used to work. We used to buy expired domains back in the sort of late 2000s, early 2010s and we used to um, we had a yeah uh, we created pbns essentially, and nothing that we do anymore. After penguin, we stopped doing this because it killed the business model. But you know, we have expired domains, put articles on, sell links in them. There are still people that do that now, but we packed up when penguin hit. Now that used to work and it used to work really well.

Does it work anymore? I don't know because I've not tested it for a long time, but it's one of those things where google it's easier to spot a from a link spam side of it and also from the fact that the domains are completely. The content on the domain has changed, but technically the domains haven't expired. It's worth considering. Google announced in march 2024 that expired domains and using them to manipulate search rankings is considered spam and may lead to penalties now. So you've got to be really careful.

I think with expired domains, there's going to be cases where I think it's legitimate to use them and it's fine, and there's going to be ones where if you're trying to do you know anything to manipulate search rankings, then you may be at risk. So just be careful. So that's it. We've done. Um, where did we start? We've gone from e-commerce to expired domain. So I hope you found that useful. And yeah, if there's anything you think we've missed any ease you think we've missed that should be in an seo a to z then do let me know and we'll get them added. And yeah, that's it for today and we'll see you next time.

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