Thread: Expired domain names to help you rank

I am wondering how many of you register expired domain names to help your sites rank? You can find many at FreshDrop.net - The Domain Searching Platform
Look for the ones with .gov and .edu links
Permanent redirect them to one of your sites when you catch them and voila!

I have seen some good results from that.
You can also run a Welcome to The 404 Checker to find sites listed in high profile directories and see which ones have already been expired.

Have you had any success with this yet?


Mike

Originally Posted by firetown

Look for the ones with .gov and .edu links
Permanent redirect them to one of your sites when you catch them and voila!

These are easy catches, in fact there are some with hundreds of edus and govs, but...

Are you targeting domains related to your site only or any name?

I target
1) Brandable domain names.
2) domains which have some sort of relationship content wise to something I already run,.

Thx! ermmm.... blogmaster from DP???

Originally Posted by Shenron

Thx! ermmm.... blogmaster from DP???

Correct. I asked Will the same thin'.

I assume that the related names would perform better than the brandable names... Or have you experienced otherwise?

I will be trying this with one of the campaigns we run.

But, generally I have two concerns with this:

1. When you have more than 10 URLs 301ing to your domain/page, Google usually figures out the scheme and catches up.
2. The only way you can fix it is by using a pyramid structure of redirects, but I assume that if your hand-checked by Google reps you could be f*cked big time.

Originally Posted by Shenron

Thx! ermmm.... blogmaster from DP???

Who is blogmaster and what is DP?

I am not following exactly this strategy, but I have been doing something similar.

I seem to have lousy luck finding expired domains with PR, so I just buy domains or web sites with existing PR. Some of those domains were dropped in the past, but that was before I bought them.

I've been trying more to build web sites on those domains. This lets me link to multiple web pages with anchor-text rich links from that one domain. Plus, heck, it gives me an opportunity to get visitors to that domain.

If you're not going to build out the domains and you are just going to 301 them, here's a snippet of code for your Apache config which should keep you from having to deal with a bunch of 404 errors on your legitimate domains:

Code:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName expired-domain.com
    RewriteEngine on
    RewriteRule ^/(.*) http://www.legitimate-domain.com[R=301]
</VirtualHost>

Look for .org's with .edu and .gov backlinks. The .org's tend to be from non profit organizations and many of them have been sites that were supported by some government entities.