Buying Expired Domains with Decent DA/PA for SEO Purposes

[RickyShockley]

Hey guys, i've seen some stuff about this before but I recently found an opportunity to put it into action and wanted to make sure I knew what I was getting into!

I am looking at buying a domain (expired and now only 10 dollars) that has a decent domain authority and has some keywords in it related to my clients practice. I plan on using a 301 redirect to pass "link juice" because this client is looking for a quick bump in rankings.

Thoughts? Benefits? Problems with this?

[TheSymmetran]

So interestingly enough, and without trying to identify the people involved, I have found a local SEO company that has somehow acquired a fully unrelated domain which supposedly used to have something to do with students and kids lives and was a resource of sorts back in the day.

This site has FOLLOWED backlinks (with the student resource context) from the United Nations, from cbs.com, and from a wide range of websites mostly referencing it as a student and kids life resource.

Given the looks and feels of their site, they seem like a shabby SEO company with rather grey or dark themed SEO tactics.

This company ranks on page 1 for City+ SEO combination of keywords for three to four MAJOR cities in the US.

I want to find out what you all think of this...

Is this ok?

How is this ok?

Is this going to cause them to be flagged eventually automatically for a penalty or purge?

Does Google have anything against this sort of thing at all?

Danke

[farisz]

what is a good resource to find expired domains? for instance a list or like wise instead of purchasing scraping tools.

[giliardmast]

I tried this procedure but was not very successful and the blog was penalized by Google.
What I did, I bought a fairly good command with AD and a good amount of back-links it was indexed.
I created new content for the blog and redirected all the old pages to the home.
I was punished because the content that the user should see is not the same as the search engines, not entendie well.

[ErrickG]

In my opinion I have seen both tactics work, it really comes down to how much Google trust the domain and your web site. If you are going to do a 301 redirect, I would do a very in depth link analysis and make sure that nothing is spammy. Make sure you really dive into the quality of back links that the URL has as well as how diverse the link profile is from a link standpoint and anchor text standpoint. A buddy of mine thought a URL was good but got penalized because to many links were coming in from the same type of sources even though it wasn't the same source.

You also need to check your link profile and make sure it is well diverse as well. This will help the url blend in more natural. I agree with Moosa, I would only use this tactic one or two times. If you are thinking about doing a PBN I wouldn't recommend it. However there are plenty of legit ones that really build out great content and information and are legit, but in my opinion if your going to spend all the time and money doing that you could spend it on your website. Good luck

[salmanbaig0312]

OoOPs! I forgot this is only white-hat forum/QA board. but buying domains in bulk and redirecting to main site is also blackhat. 301 was supposed to be a transfer, If your website is shifted from domainA to domainB then you can redirect 301 from domainA to DomainB. Anyways, Do make a try with your strategy. I've shared what worked for me

[RickyShockley]

Thanks guys! I've got a solid checklist now to complete to qualify a site!

Though for anyone else reading this thread--@salman...sounds like a very old-school, black hat SEO tactic! Not only do I doubt that would work short term, I KNOW it is something that Google will be looking to penalize. A link network/ link farm like that is not really a legitimate SEO practice and violates Google's guidelines.

[salmanbaig0312]

Its a good thing, but I'd prefer to use expired domain as a backlink source.
Its called Site-network or Blog-network. Register 10-20 domains with different PR's and DA's. Put high quality content (related to your topic) and then link to your client's website with different anchor tags. then see Boom in rankings! I ranked a 52% Keyword difficulty keyword using this method in 1 month.. Exact!

[MoosaHemani]

I never say No to it, unless you have like 20 domains 301ing to the main domain but one or two are fine in my opinion.

When buying an expired domain, having a decent DA is not enough, also check their links that are pointing the website and if they are fine, go for it otherwise, 301ing the domain to the main domain might hurt!!

[TheeDigital]

I agree that this is a great idea, when handled properly.

Oleg pretty much covered everything but this 2013 post from SEORoundTable.com covers this tactic as well: http://www.seroundtable.com/competitor-domain-name-17032.html

[OlegKorneitchouk]

• Check if domain is indexed
• Check the anchor profile of the domain - too spammy means it would affect your current site's anchor profile and possibly penalize it
• View the site via archive.org and make sure it was good site. Spam/porn/hacked sites will probably do more harm than good.

Also, the best 301 strategy would be to link individual pages to specific new pages on your site. I would focus on the pages that have external backlinks and do a catch-all redirect to the homepage for the remainder.

[Asjad]

Hey,

This is good idea if implemented properly! You need to check few things before redirecting this domain

• Verify that there is not Manual Penalty to this domain (Verify it through Google Webmaster Tool )
• Check the back-links of domain if any. It might be victim of Penguin 2 & 2.1 (You can use ahref.com or Moz Explorer)

Redirecting this domain without above verifications could lead to further trouble!

Regards