Expired Domain Names May Not Transfer SEO Benefit

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Monday, 10 of December , 2007 at 9:48 am

(Blue Hat) I’m curious with all their previous backlinks and such why did those exact domains take longer than the others to get reindexed. Any ideas of why that was?

I still don’t know. I don’t have the attention span long enough to buy some control domains and wait a year to expire them out and hope I manage to get them back in order to do any tests and figure it out. Anyone else experienced this by chance?

Either way I see buying expired domains for SEO reasons as having the following benefits.
1. Established inbound links
2. Aged inbound links

Other than that your still starting from scratch. So my philosophy is, unless the domain is a gem, such as either a good name or it having phenomenal unique backlinks (ie lots of links or saturation like you mentioned) than its easier and more predictable to just work with new domains.

First, a warning: Blut Hat SEO provides some questionable SEO tactics from the search engine perspective. Of course, the old argument that a webmaster has a right to do whatever he wants on his own website is hard to argue against. But then, that also applies to Google, and if you don’t mind running afoul of search engine policies then go ahead and try these things. But I didn’t want to talk about questionable SEO tactics today.

The purpose of this discussion is to shed some light on expired domain names. I don’t see any reason to invest in them for the purpose of getting the benefits they used to have. Whatever they were before you bought them, you’ll have to start building them from scratch. Aaron Wall has talked about a similar experience himself. It didn’t fare too well for him.

If you buy an expired domain name expecting to get the same benefits that the business that owned it before had then you are in for a bid disappointment. It’s a lot like buying an empty building that used to be the home of a thriving business in the brick and mortar world. You wouldn’t expect to get any of the benefits of that previous business, would you? It’s just an empty building. That’s what an expired domain is - an empty building.

Buying an existing Web business, domain name and all, is different. In that case, you are taking an existing business and growing it from the point it is at when you buy it. It could go up or it could go down in value, depending on how well you manage it. But it has built in value. There is no reason to expect that expired domain names have built in value. If you get one that does then consider it a gift, but there is no reason to expect that one will. If you invest in expired domain names expecting built in SEO benefit then you are taking a huge risk. You’re free to do that, of course, but you should know the risk before you get in.

Category: Domain Names, SEO

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