A common SEO trick for link building is to buy an expired domain that still has some “juice” (i.e links still pointing to it) and do one of two things with it. First, you could bring the site back to life. Once back to life you can point links to other sites to pass link strength and authority. This is building a PBN. Second, you could redirect the expired domain.
Many people like the second option as it’s significantly easier than maintaining an entire site. There is some thought, however, that redirect expired domains don’t actually pass any juice. Once they have expired, the juice dies with it. But, does it? We check that out.
Test Downloads
Transcription Below
One of the techniques for getting a PBN is to buy an expired domain. As everybody probably knows, hundreds of thousands of domains expire, they die everyday. A lot of these domains still have backlinks pointing to them.
As a result, they have potential juice. You can purchase that domain and now, you have that domain that now has all those backlinks going to it. There are two things that you could do with that. The most commonly done is that you bring the site back to life then you could point links from that to wherever you want to go and the idea is that you are now getting the benefit of those links coming to it to wherever you would want to send it. This is a PBN you built. If you have two of this, then you have a network.
The other thing that you could do is to not bother recreating the site but just redirecting it, 301 it to anywhere you want to go – you could 301 it to your money page, to the domain, or to the individual pages that you want. You could do that at the registrar level – where you buy the domain, you could just set it up to redirect. While a lot of people like these things, I have actually been reading a lot of questions if that really still works anymore.
Does it pass juice? There are two reasons that it might not.
Reason one is that it is expired and there is this concept that once the domain expires, Google knows this and then cuts off any of the juice of the links that are coming to it. It is a dead domain, it is expired, somebody else has purchased it, it has been reregistered under a new name, Google somehow cuts of the juice, is how it goes. People believe that.
The other reason is that, if you 301 an entire domain, it won’t pass any juice because you could not just 301 the whole thing over. Google knows this and that is why this technique is not effective, I have done it, I didn’t get any movement from it. Google has shut this whole thing down. You can see the problems with this.
What people are talking about is their own experiences. They have 301d their domain and they didn’t get the bump that they were expecting, the technique is dead, but they have not really put it into a test environment to see what is what. So, we did.
My VA went out and found three domains for twelve dollars or less, is what I was shooting for. They just need to have some juice. I didn’t really care what it was so I wasn’t looking at niches, I wasn’t really backlink profile that much other than that it didn’t look completely horrible and to be honest with you, I just took my VAs word on that. I just wanted the domains and wanted to see if this would work just at all. I got three domains – funwithjustin.com, anikamari.com, foreverdreamin.com. These are all bought at auction in GoDaddy.
The results were, with funwithjustin, it moved the page to number two. The anikamari, no movement yet. The foreverdreamin moved to number 1. What was pretty sweet was that it happened within a matter of days.
The domains that were being forwarded provided immediate benefit which was pretty impressive because that was even faster than building links and the links that we build in test environments often don’t move that quick. This was immediate.
This works, this is a thing, you can do this. You can buy an expired domain that has juice, you could 301 it and you could get some effect out of it. You can see that the effect isn’t all three times. We could just be talking about time. It hasn’t really been that long. The other one hasn’t moved, I haven’t checked it this morning. I checked it yesterday and it still hasn’t. Or, it could be some other factor in play.
This might go to what people are talking about on how expired domains doesn’t work or you can’t 301 it. There might actually be some factors where they don’t pass juice. The thing that jumps out of my mind first is the spam score from Majestic and the trust flow and citation flow are out of wack.
Dori: I was going to say that. That was a really poor site. It could be the reason why.
The other thing too is that Majestic and Moz are not perfect. They are not seeing how Google is seeing it so you could have one that looks great to both of those sites but Google hates it for some reason. Maybe they are not picking up some problems.
Dori: Even before redirecting this to your money site or client site, doing a test like this is a good way to filter out those ones that Google doesn’t like.
For sure, cause all you do is you fire and see if you get movement, I did, you just refire it somewhere else.
Dori: This is a brilliant strategy. The next thing I would like to see is how many we could point at one page. I know about 5 or 10 years ago, I don’t know what it was, but I think it was Matt Cutts that said – yes this works but do not do more than 5 or so to your money site/main site. That could mean that we don’t want to do this because it really works.
It would be a really good thing to test out to see how many we point until it has diminishing returns and start going downward. You do not really have to build PBNs anymore. You could just buy expired domains and redirect and not even build the site.
When you think about real world scenarios, let’s say you have a company and you sell something. In a real world setting, it makes a lot of sense that if your competitor dies, you buy their inventory and the competitor becomes bankrupt, you buy all their stuff, or you buy their brand and you bring it under in and consolidate them under your own business.
When you think about your domain, it makes a lot of sense that a competitor our there or a domain that has related traffic and it dies, it only makes sense to grab it and put it under your brand. Grab it and 301 the juice. Let’s say you are a monster and you have acquired a hundred other niche domains of people that are trying to do something similar or people that are related to what you are doing and you are just grabbing all those and 301ing them.
Why couldn’t you do a thousand, why would you be penalized for that, is my thought. I think Google probably acknowledges that. It would only make sense that you are succeeding in the internet game or your business is succeeding, you are going to be acquiring more and more of this and pointing them to yourself, it is going to be a good strong signal, it means you are healthy and growing. I have a feeling that large conglomerate website are doing that and they are not going to get penalized.
I think it is a good strategy. When you are concerned with how many is many, I do not think there is a number because it doesn’t make sense to me. There could be just to many because you could just be growing and acquiring.