Made it to Top 100 and The Power Of Expired Domains

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Updated 4 years ago

Made it to Top 100 yesterday! Decided to share something interesting with you guys to celebrate it.

So I was doing some keywords research yesterday and stumbled upon something interesting.

I actually thought about making this into my first training but decided I know too little about the subject. I still think it's an interesting read so I encourage you to read it!

I had read that old expired domains with good backlink profiles can be extremely powerful for either building an authority site or a private blog network to direct powerful backlinks to your main site.

I had also learned that backlinks have less importance these days and Google is constantly increasing the importance of quality content over links for SEO (search engine optimization).

So the thing that caught my attention yesterday was a funny domain that seemed to be absolutely dominating many lucrative keywords.

I'm not going to mention the domain here so Google doesn't find as easily. Let's give the guy his competitive edge and learn about his success without making too much of a fuzz.

But before I continue there are a couple terms you need to understand. If you are familiar with them, skip right ahead to the end of the post.

What Are Backlinks

So before I go to more details I need to explain couple of terms to those who are new to online marketing and SEO.

In the old days search engines relied on things like keyword density to determine how relevant a website was to a search term.

This of course turned out to be a bad idea because it was very easy to just stuff your content full of the keyword, including tricks like using the same color font and background and literally cramming the keyword thousands of time into an article.

If I remember correctly Google was actually the first search engine that used links to determine the relevance of a site to the search term.

The logic was that the more links there were pointing to a site, the more trustworthy it should be because people generally don't like to link to suspicious sites.

Also, the anchor text (what the link actually said as text) was used to determine the topic of the site and relevancy to search terms.

Now the problem was that soon people figured out you could manipulate the search results by building tons of backlinks.

Google and other search engines acknowledged this and they have developed better algorithms for determining site relevance to search term. So the effect of backlinks is reduced.

But that doesn't change the fact that links still do matter, as you will see at the end.

What Is Domain Authority

Domain Authority (Moz), Page Rank (Google) and many other similar terms are used to describe and compare the rank of domains within the whole internet.

Generally speaking things that affect domain authority are the age of the site, the amount of backlinks, the quality of backlinks and the amount of traffic and ranking keywords.

A domain with high authority will rank much easier to the first page of Google. This is because the authority is essentially trust in the eyes of search engines. The site has stuck around long enough to earn a good reputation, so it gets a boost as a reward.

What Are Expired Domains

The final thing you need to understand are expired or expiring domains before I can show you the example.

Expired domains are domains that have been used for a website but they have not been renewed by the user for one reason or another.

People stop blogging, businesses go bankrupt, people pass away and sometimes people simply forget they own the site. What ever the reason, some of these old domains can be extremely powerful for SEO purposes.

If a domain has been registered continuously for 20 years and has tons of high quality links from other similarly old domains, it can be very valuable.

I haven't bought actual dropping high value domains but from what I can tell, they are usually auctioned and there are people making living simply .

If you think of domains as real estate these are nice beach houses on a good neighborhood in a big city. Or actually they are the lots. You have to build your own house on it but get all the benefits of the nice lot.

Meaning that if you build a new site on a domain like this, you will have the formed authority and link juice like you'll see next.

The Funny Domain

So I was searching for some keywords in the Make Money Online and Multi Level Marketing niche when a certain domain caught my attention.

I spotted it on the very first spot (not paid ) on Google for several keywords.

Now that's nothing special. Some authority sites simply dominate their niche. But the name caught my attention so I did a bit of digging on the site.

On the site the owner described that he chose the name because the legendary race horse really motivated him. Sounded weird, but plausible.

Also, I really hadn't seen a .org rank in this niche before.

I used Ubersuggest to get a general idea of the domain authority and the keywords it was ranking.

Ubersuggest showed the site was pretty fresh but traffic was growing at an incredible rate. Tons of traffic and an incredible domain score of 64.

For comparison, I checked other sites ranking for the same terms and I think the next best domain score 24 or something. That was on a very well-established authority site.

At this point I knew what was going on. Someone with the know-how had snagged a seriously powerful dropped domain and had converted it into one of the most profitable niches. And he was dominating the competition.

Just see what the site used to be about. I went to Wayback Machine (not sure if linking is allowed, the URL is https://web.archive.org/ please consider donating to them as they seem to be running a fundraiser. I'm not affiliated in any way, just think it's a great site.)

That's a snapshot from the year 2000. It's a freaking website for some socio-economic development organization in the middle east.

Tons of links from .org, .edu and .gov domains with very high authority.

It seems the site went down somewhere in early 2018 and by fall 2018 there was MLM content on the domain.

That's probably when the new owner acquired it and started creating content around the most lucrative MMO and MLM keywords.

The Takeaway?

So what does this all mean? Should you be investing in expired domains? Well, it depends.

If you are someone just starting out, you probably shouldn't go and try to invest in an expired domain as it's apparently bit of a hit or miss. It can also be expensive (several thousands of dollars)

The owner probably paid some serious money for that domain. I'd be surprised if there weren't other people noticing it.

If you are someone with the money to either hire someone with the know how to get you a good expired domain or simply buy and existing site, this is a great example how much of a head start you can get.

That said, the content quality on the site is top-notch and there's a lot of it, so my guess is that it would be ranking on the first page for many of the keywords even if it was bought as a brand new domain.

But I'm pretty sure the site wouldn't be ranking first for a ton of high traffic keywords.

So what do you think of my findings?

Do you have experience with expired domains?

Do you think I'm wrong with my theory? If so, why?

Are you having a nice day or is there some trouble in your mind I can help you with?

Please tell me in the comments and let's get some discussion going!