Excavating SEO Shortcuts from Expired Domains

Li Huang
by Li Huang 22 Oct, 2015

One man's garbage is another man's treasure; this is especially true in terms of SEO and expired domains.

There have been numerous instances where businesses have had great success in capitalizing on expired domains and not only making them presentable, but also reputable and profitable. When purchasing expired domains and building on them, you are not exactly working with rubble and debris. Like renovating a newly purchased house, putting together a slew of available images into a collage, or carefully shuffling a pile of cards from a leftover hand for an advantage in the next round, the strategy of building from an expired domain gives its owner an established Web presence, content and quality backlinks.

 

Like the spinning wheels of a train in motion, Web browsing is constantly being refreshed to better sustain user satisfaction. One prime example is the search engine. Search engines such as Google are always updating their algorithms, laying new tracks that derail SEO tricks to get favorable rankings. Much like mobile or AppleWatch apps constantly refreshing themselves, search engines do the same, but instead of tacking on new additions, they filter out all the junk.

 

SEO marketing is always changing and many reliable "loopholes" in the past have since been knotted. In the recent past, your site could get a favorable ranking from the sheer amount of backlinks directed to you. Nowadays, search engines target and eliminate backlinks that they process as spam. Quality is now prized more than quantity. With that in mind, it's important to be careful and not to direct poor quality backlinks to your site.

 

Simply put, expired domains can give you an SEO shortcut in the following ways:

· They help bring in traffic through the sub-niches

· They can assist you in getting instant page rank

· They cut your workload by creating backlinks

· Have directory listing done for you

· Help you avoid actions that may lead to penalization by websites

 

You can make use of the exact-match domain names to target the sub-niches that are relevant to the market that you are serving. Most of these domain names are not very competitive and thus cheap to buy. You can also take over these sub-niches in a few weeks. If the domains are good, you could get a sizeable amount of traffic and grow the profit of your business.

 

It may take some time for you to establish a domain name and build up its page rank. It helps to purchase an expired domain that is highly ranked in search results. This streamlines your domain-building process, allowing you to build authority for your site and gain traffic that would be considered rapid by conventional SEO techniques.

 

When you buy expired domains that have built authority, you are assured of getting quality backlinks. It's like building on a Lego project where someone else had compiled some decent amount of blocks already. The old domains will serve as your template and where you begin your architect is really up to you.  Building authority and quality, relevant backlinks for a new domain is tiresome and time consuming. Thus, by buying expired domains, you'll get faster ranking in search engines than you would if you started from scratch.

 

There are powerful online directories that have great influence on your website's ranking with search engines. These directories include DMOZ and Yahoo. You may have to burn extra time before your website is listed in the directories, or you can always purchase websites already listed there. The latter saves a lot of money and time. For example, if you wish to get into the Yahoo directory, Yahoo has to approve your website first before following up with a $299 joining fee. For the DMOZ directory, it also takes weeks to months of review before acceptance.

 

If you're starting a new website, building on an existing domain is way to avoid search engine penalization. Startup websites don't have the feathers of beginners' luck; rather, they are cursed by scrutinizing penalization. Newbie websites are the subject of focus so attempts to promote the site or make use of backlink software automatically raises red flags, resulting in lower rankings.

 

The SEO shortcut of buying expired domains is not exactly a hit-or-miss shot. By purchasing an existing domain, you've ascended a critical step in your web enterprise and thus a major leap in your SEO efforts. From there on, however, how well search engines rank the website depends on the amount of effort spent on crafting authority in its niche and the quality of its backlinks.