Speaker 1: 0:52

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: 1:38

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 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: 2:47

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.

Speaker 1: 4:33

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: 5:22

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: 7:06

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 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: 8:25

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: 9:25

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 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: 10:41

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: 12:22

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: 13:37

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.