Introduction: Best of Series

Speaker 1 0:00

Hi , ed Dawson here , and , as I'm a bit busy at the moment and need a break , welcome to another one of my best of SEO is not that hard podcasts . These are the episodes from the back catalogue that I think have the greatest hits and ones that are still relevant and provide great value for you . So , without further ado , let's get into the episode . Hello and welcome to . Seo is not that hard . I'm your host , ed Dawson , the founder of keywordspeopleusecom , the solution to finding the questions people ask online . In today's episode , I'm going to talk about evaluating expired domains and domains at auction . As I've said in previous podcasts , as well as being the founder of keywordspeopleusecom , I've been in affiliate marketing since 2004 , and I've got a number of affiliate websites , with several in the telecoms niche .

Speaker 1 0:46

Now , the other week , a friend of mine dropped me an email with a link to a domain that was for sale on an auction website that he thought I might be interested in . Now , why would I be interested ? Well , a grey hat SEO tactic and I'm guessing , depending on your point of view , what shade of grey it is is to find expired domains or domains at auction that previously had websites on them with external backlinks pointing at them . Now if you find a decent one , if it's in the same niche as you , especially , then you can buy that domain and 301 redirect the domain to your current domain and hence start to benefit from the backlinks you've now redirected to yourself . That's the theory anyway . By the way , if you don't know what a 301

Evaluating an Auction Domain

Speaker 1 1:24

redirect is , then go and listen to episode 39 of SEO is not that hard 301 redirect tips , where I cover exactly what a 301 is and how you use them . So this domain , anyway , that my friend sent me that was an auction . It looked pretty good at first glance . It was originally a UK site in the 2,554 backlinks from 377 domains and links from sites like telegraphcouk , changeorg , wikipediaorg and many other powerful domains like that .

Speaker 1 1:55

So I thought I'd take a closer look . So the first thing I did was to go to the Wayback Machine which you can find at archiveorg , where you can put in any domain name and it will show you a sort of history , a sort of snapshot history of that website over the years and and what content was on it and whether urls were 301 redirected at any point and things like that . So I went there and I could see that this site it was a microsite created by big uk utility company in 2010 and they kept a live site on there till early 2016 , when they 301'd that site to their actual main domain , and that 301 was kept in place from 2016 to August 2020 , at which point the domain expired . And so obviously we can see that , yeah , this was the point when it was a genuine , genuine use of this domain by the original owners and that would be the point at which it picked up lots of these backlinks , especially because it was clearly branded as this utility company , even that wasn't on their main domain . And then , obviously , at some point , they decided to close down that microsite and they correctly 301 redirected that domain to a particular page on their main domain . And then , obviously , the domain expired at some point and it just became free , and at that point , obviously someone probably drop-catched it pretty quickly . They'd seen that it was coming up for expiry and that it got all these links and stuff pointing to it , and so they decided to catch it and it looks like it got caught in the 4th of December 2020

Domain History Investigation

Speaker 1 3:41

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Speaker 1 3:41

And you can tell that by doing a whois . A whois command will give you the domain name history sort of the recent domain name history . It will tell you when the domain name was created and when it was last updated . Now if it's an expired domain , then it's going to have a domain creation date that is newer than the history in archiveorg . So I can see the site had been up and running since 2010 . But because the whois record for the domain so I can see the site had been up and running since 2010, . But because the Whois record for the domain was now saying its creation date was on 4th December 2020 , I knew at some point that domain had completely expired , been released by Nominet by the DNS provider , and then someone had re-registered it as a new domain .

Speaker 1 4:30

So then going back to archiveorg and seeing what happened to the domain since , um , december 2021 sorry , december 2020 I could see that in early 2021 , um , the home page was now saying domain for sale . So there's just a page advertising the domain for sale and it sat like that . All the snapshots through pretty much the whole of 2021 had this domain for sale home page and then in january 2022 , almost a year later , it now 301s to a page on a another website . Now this website's a comparison website in the telecoms industry in the UK and they had to a page where they announced that this website had taken over and purchased another website , and then they used a similar name to the name of the domain that they'd purchased . So they were making out that they had , sort of like , purchased a business to add to their website . Um , and it stayed like this for um around a year . They kept this , this page , up on their website that made out that they would purchase this domain , um , and you know , purchase this business and rolled it into their current business and then , after a year of that holding page , they then 301 the this page they set up , that said , they purchased domain to one of their money pages that was , you know , specifically doing a comparison of a telecom type in the UK , and then after that date , december the 22nd , they literally removed the domain and removed the 301 redirect .

Speaker 1 6:14

So why does this quite convoluted sort of history that this domain's been through actually matter as to whether this domain might actually still have some value in it , especially in terms of its backlinks ? Well , that's because there's information given by Google as to certain scenarios in which they do

Link Equity Loss Analysis

Speaker 1 6:32

and don't pass the link equity and other history equity over with a domain when it's 301 . And this domain's history has had a few of those where it might qualify for it to have worked or not worked . So in the first case , yeah , when it first set up that's genuine , got genuine links , it was a genuine site . And when the original owner , 301 redirected it to their main domain , to a page on their main domain , yet that would have worked and that would have passed over those links , the equity to that original domain . Now Google have said that after a year , a 301 redirect is considered permanent . So if that's true , then between 2016 and 2020 that 301 almost in place , it would be have become permanent . And then when the original domain expired , you know the links and all the three ones have carried on pointing to the new URL on their main site .

Speaker 1 7:33

Now the second point at which Google says sometimes link equity can be lost is when a domain does expire . Now , it's not always in cases that it expires , because obviously a site could genuinely just forget to renew their domain and it could expire and then they could quickly panic and then rebuy their domain and carry on as they were . In that case , google would want to try and honour the link equity and everything else that goes with that domain even though it's been re-registered . But in this case , obviously it went from being a 301 redirected domain to then being a domain for sale for a year . So that's definitely doesn't sort of cover the case where they might want to pass it on from someone sort of mistakenly forgetting to renew their , their url and then obviously again it was sold to this comparison site , which then sort of did their superficial .

Speaker 1 8:33

We've bought a business and this is , um , you know web page to say that what the business ? Now , the reason they've done that we've bought a business thing is it's one of the scenarios where Google says , yeah , it's fine , to merge a domain into a new domain is where , for example , a , an existing website , might buy another website as a business , a going concern business , and then roll it into its own brand , in which case , yeah , that is a genuine case where the history , the link equity and all those things of the purchase domain could be legitimately rolled into

Auction Results and Warnings

Speaker 1 9:08

an existing domain . So they're obviously trying to with this page . They had up for a year trying to make this point to google that that's what happened , and then obviously after a year , they are now considering that that 301 redirect is now permanent and they remove the 301 redirect and have now , then , after a period of time , decided to sell that domain to obviously try and recoup some of the money they put into purchasing it . But if they believe that , then obviously they would have believed that back in 2016 , when it was 301 redirected for four years from the original owner to the original owner's main domain , all those link equities gone . It's been permanently redirected off .

Speaker 1 9:49

So now I'm not saying any of these scenarios are definitely 100% gospel truth as to what has happened , but this one case has got so many different points in where the link equity could have been lost completely . Google could could be disregarding all those old links that it makes the domain , although it looks great at first glance , you know , you know da45 , thousands of links , hundreds of linking back sites , you know in the right niche and everything but that first glance looks a lot murkier and muddier when you look at the history going back . If it had been a domain for sale by the original owner and you know all the links were there and it never been 301 redirected before , it could have been a really good domain to do something with , but this one it just looks like there's so many points where the link actually could have been lost , that it's not anywhere near as valuable as it appears to be . And you know I've decided you know I'm not going , I'm not gonna take any interest in this domain in terms of purchasing it . But I have watched the auction go through and it sold for less than 100 pounds . So you know , less than $100 . And that's because I think obviously other people who were looking at this have probably done the same kind of homework and thought actually , no , there's probably not much value left in this domain anymore . So the seller hasn't recouped very much at all from their original investment than they appear to have paid from the history of the domain , nearer to $1,000 for it just in two by the looks of it . So , yeah , not a great return on selling it . I personally probably would have just kept it and kept that 301 in .

Speaker 1 11:30

Now a word of warning on buying expired and auction domains . As well as the situation where , like in this one where I think there's probably was no value in this domain , you also have situations where a domain could have actually had a money in action or a penalty applied to it by Google . If you then purchase that domain with a penalty and then 301 the domain to one of your own domains , one of your other domains , then you are potentially going to be passing that penalty on . So you can actually cause yourself more harm than good in some cases if you're not careful . And this is one of the reasons why I very rarely would consider buying a domain and I haven't bought a domain to 301 into any of my main websites in many , many years . That's not to say if I didn't see a good domain with some really good links that I wouldn't be interested in buying it . But I wouldn't necessarily be looking to three or one into one of my existing domains because I think there's just potentially too much risk there . But you know , with all these things , buy beware . If what the risks are and you've weighed it up and decided it's you , then go for it . It's up to you . But would I ? Would I do it ? I don't think I would .

Speaker 1 12:45

Thanks for listening . I really appreciate it . Please subscribe and share . It really helps . Seo is not that hard . It's brought to you by keywordspeopleusecom , the solution to finding the questions people ask online . See why thousands of people use us every day . Try it today for free at keywordspeopleusecom If you want to get in touch , have any questions ? I'd love to hear from you . I'm at Channel 5 on Twitter or you can email me at podcast at keywordspeopleusecom . Bye for now and see you in the next episode of SEO . Is Not that Hard .