Does link equity still count after an expired domain is purchased?
-
Hi guys,
We've recently noticed a (very) minor competitor competing with us, as well as some of our industry's biggest names, in the Google SERPs - and the reason why has us absolutely stumped.
Aside from an awful website from an aesthetic/UX point of view, their on-site content is horribly over-optimised, with keywords on the homepage even STRONG TAGGED for crying out loud! A backlink check using OSE and Ahrefs found 19 linking domains - most of which were just trash - but there were 5 that boasted some decent DA, the highest being 43.
The thing is, these 5 sites are all very generic industry-relevant "blogs" that provide exceptionally poor quality content. The thing is, they have some very high quality backlinks (the BBC, the Guardian and CNN to name just three) acquired when the websites were something different entirely. The competitor has basically bought expired domains, turned them into basic websites related to our industry and linked them to their main domain.
My question then is: is this competitor benefiting from the very high quality links that are pointing at sites that are then linked to their main domain? I found an article from 2009 that suggested old links stop counting after being purchased by someone else, but we are stumped as to why they could be otherwise.
Thanks in advance everyone!
John
-
Thanks Massimiliano. That particular domain still has a DA of 43 so perhaps they haven't quite got around to it yet..
Appreciate the response.
-
In theory they should discount it.
Usually it takes time. I have a domain I bought to test this technique two years ago, it had DA56, now it's DA20, that's giving you an idea of how slowly they do.
But I have also seen domain being bought, content changed, and still retain their value.
No one knows what is in the mind of google algo.
-
Hi Massimiliano,
No, the competitor has replaced all of the old content with new content that is targeted towards their keywords. The website in question is this one:
http://www.the-hutton-inquiry.org.uk/
It used to be a website dedicated to The Hutton Inquiry (funnily enough...) but is now just a generic blog called 'Personal Injury UK'. In total they've done this with 5 different expired domains, in the exact same way.
Is this just one of those things that Google claim - and may even usually - they'd discount but that might actually just slip through the net? The rest of their backlink profile is very poor and their rise through the rankings seems completely inexplicable.
John
-
That is a very common and old gray hat/black hat technique.
You buy an expired domain with a good backlink profile from godaddy auctions, or some other similar website. There's few online services screening expired domains and offering you directories of them filtered by topics/DA/PR etc...
Once you bought the domain, let's say with a DA of 50 you can just 301 redirect the domain to your website or build some content and link to your website to pass juice.
The problem is google doesn't consider that legit. In both cases google algo have been instructed to discount the value of the juice passed, because it does detect the change of ownership and more important the change of content.
But it may still work.
The cleanest way of doing it is to replicate the content after you bought the domain. You buy foo.com, you download the old content from web.archive.org and keep serving it, then start to add content targetin the keywork you are after and linking to your domain. Doing that way google usually doesn't notice the change and doesn't discount the juice value.
Is that what your competitor is doing?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Via this intermediate link?
I'm doing some work on an ecommerce site for an electronics distributor and I've been seeing these "Via this intermediate link" notations from GWT under our "Links To Your Site" section. I understand how and why these notations would normally be displayed, however, these links are mainly coming from our direct competitors. Fearing that we might be a victim of a negative SEO attack, I looked into the situation and noticed that all of the links are from PDF's (technical data sheets) provided by the manufacturer that both we and our competitors use on our product detail pages. This still seems odd to me because, we download these pdf's and host them on our own site on our own servers under a completely different name (as I'm assuming our competitors do as well), yet, there still seems to be a connection between our sites through these PDF's. I've included a screenshot of some examples. Since we have thousands of SKU's on our site - with technical PDF's for nearly all of them - we're seeing a lot of links from competitors sites. I'm not sure if this is good or bad, I'm just trying to understand the situation more clearly. Has anyone had any similar experiences or some information from Google that might explain what I'm seeing here? fpWvB5T
Competitive Research | | GalcoIndustrial0 -
Tool for discovering outbound links?
I want to find a tool where I can put in a url: www.site.com and it will tell me all the people that site links to. If this is in the Moz tool set, then I apologize. I couldn't find it. I can only find tools that tell me who links to a site, but not the other way around. Thanks, Ruben
Competitive Research | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Abnormally high number of root domains linking to root domains
My client runs a very small business hiring out space in a single warehouse and rarely adds content to his incredibly badly optimised wordpress site. Can anyone make any wild guesses as to why my client has 2.9 million root domains linking to root domains? He also has a domain authority of 100. Strange when the number one competitor in warehouse space in this part of the world is Gumtree (equivalent of Craig's List) and that only has 9.25k root domains linking to root domains and site authority of 80. Is there any way of finding out where these links are coming from via Moz? Thanks
Competitive Research | | SocialStreets.Co0 -
Expiring Domains by Content
I use sites such as expireddomains.com and Snap Name sin searching for expired domains. All these sites let you do a keyword search based on the domain name, but does anyone know a site that lets you search by the CONTENT of the site rather than just the name? Thanks, Kevin
Competitive Research | | Ebtec0 -
Decent domain authority score with no links other than their own linking back to them. How is that possible?
Hello everyone I just spotted the following 'abnormality' while doing a little link analysis with Open Search Explorer. I checked out a site that has a domain authority score of 35, when the only domain linking back to them is ''the site itself'. They happen to have a domain authority of 35 themselves, but no other links pointing back to them apart from their own and yet they have the same authority as other sites with twice the amount of content and an actual backlink profile. How is that possible? 🙂 Links and authority scores, stills baffles me...
Competitive Research | | Hermski0 -
How to combat competitor buying who is buying links and winning.
I have a competitor who is buying links in the Featured Advertiser Links section of Washington Post online. His backlink profile is a very low # of referring domains. (38ish) with a good bit being repeats of Wahington Post. My question, is their strategy within Google guidelines, and what can I do to combat it? Thanks.
Competitive Research | | bozzie3110 -
Discrepancy in Competitive Link Analysis?
I currently have a campaign set-up that monitors a few competitors compared to our site. When I look at the Root Domain Metrics I see that Company A has 2,053 total external links, and Company B has 1,632 total external links. I wanted to view these links in more detail so I ran Advanced Inbound Links reports. The reports returned 432 results for Company A and 693 results for Company B. Shouldn't these numbers match up with each other, or am I missing something? Also, I noticed that in the Inbound Links analysis for my competitors there are a number of results listed that are not actually inbound links, but are internal links from there own site. Is there a reason these are appearing? I am having problems because I am trying to use this campaign to show the improvements in our site vs our competitors. However, OSE shows dramatically fewer total external links for our site (about 260 vs 3200 in Webmaster Tools) and I cannot tell if the competitor data is accurate? Thanks
Competitive Research | | zazo0 -
Is there a tool that could list all high PR pages of a domain?
Is there a tool that could list all high PR pages of a domain? Ideally, non subscripton based but if the tool is awesome then I wouldn't hesitate forking out for it.
Competitive Research | | rmteamseo0