A WebmasterWold thread has discussion on the strategy of buying domains, expired or soon to expire domains, to build links quickly.
A member of the forum asked if people still use this as a strategy. The SEO said:
A few years ago I developed the strategy of buying dropped domains with good backlinks and pagerank, and either 301-ed them to one of my main sites, or host them with a bit of content, and link them to my sites. Now, years later, some of those still bring in nice traffic and PR.My question: Is anyone still using this strategy (for the traffic)? I assume PR indeed does not pass through anymore, as was announced? Any thoughts on retribution from Google?
There are many articles discussing how Google handles expired domains. Danny has a nice one with Google's Matt Cutts over here, plus we have at least two pieces on this topic.
Wheel in the forum suggested, "that there are places where you can grab a domain as it drops (i.e. before it actually drops). That's probably the way to do this." Moderator, martinibuster, agreed but added:
Whatever backlinks dropped domains had won't count toward ranking. Backlinks get reset. This has been the case for several years now. Previous to the change the backlinks would acquire whatever PageRank they formerly had prior to the drop. After the change, which happened quite a few years ago, the backlinks got reset.This change also affected typos with pre-existing backlinks. The pre-existing backlinks get reset.
I'm not saying you can't rank a dropped domain. Just that the backlinks get reset and this has been going on for years now. I remember when it happened, it was literally like overnight the expired domain market changed. I was fairly active buying dropped domains until this change happened. If I buy an expired domain nowadays it's for whatever traffic the links may bring, not for the equity.
This is an excellent thread on the topic of expired domains and link building.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWold.
