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- Sep 3, 2012
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I see people buying, selling & talking about dropped domains with SEO value and it makes me cringe.
I've seen some people say expired domains have no SEO value and they're a waste of time.. google treats an expired domain like it never dropped, it has exactly as much value as it did prior to dropping so as with any normal domain it's value and ability to rank is in the quality of its links
The problem is people buy/catch rubbish thinking it's gold that's turned into rubbish, but in reality it's always been rubbish.
One thing I can't stress enough ignore the visible pagerank
A domain might show as PR4/5 and you might be tempted just from that, don't be, often pagerank can be very misleading.
I've seen domains show as PR5 purely because they were being redirected to a PR5 domain prior to expiring (I'm not sure why that is, but it seems to be a thing)
A much better metric to look at is open site explorer page & domain authority (remember to put in both www. and non www. into OSE because it will show different results)
Generally I wont even look at a domain unless it has at least above 40 page authority.
Then the important part.. it's links. Look at the linking domains and "pages on this root domain" and click filter.
When I look at a domains links I want to see links from authoritative sites I will recognise, I want ac.uk, bbc, .gov, national news papers and magazines etc
I do not want to see freedirectory.com, placeyourseolinkhere.com, freesubmit.com, trash. Even if OSE says it's page authority is 50, it's still trash.
After you identify it has some quality links, manually look at a few of the best ones, make sure they're natural given links and not just something like comments. You can use SEO spyglass free version to check all it's links are still in place and not nofollow.
I think that's basically it, but you must check the quality of the links and that they're still in place, please do no buy domains just because they have a high pagerank or OSE, Majestic or any other metric.
Any questions feel free.
I've seen some people say expired domains have no SEO value and they're a waste of time.. google treats an expired domain like it never dropped, it has exactly as much value as it did prior to dropping so as with any normal domain it's value and ability to rank is in the quality of its links
The problem is people buy/catch rubbish thinking it's gold that's turned into rubbish, but in reality it's always been rubbish.
One thing I can't stress enough ignore the visible pagerank
A domain might show as PR4/5 and you might be tempted just from that, don't be, often pagerank can be very misleading.
I've seen domains show as PR5 purely because they were being redirected to a PR5 domain prior to expiring (I'm not sure why that is, but it seems to be a thing)
A much better metric to look at is open site explorer page & domain authority (remember to put in both www. and non www. into OSE because it will show different results)
Generally I wont even look at a domain unless it has at least above 40 page authority.
Then the important part.. it's links. Look at the linking domains and "pages on this root domain" and click filter.
When I look at a domains links I want to see links from authoritative sites I will recognise, I want ac.uk, bbc, .gov, national news papers and magazines etc
I do not want to see freedirectory.com, placeyourseolinkhere.com, freesubmit.com, trash. Even if OSE says it's page authority is 50, it's still trash.
After you identify it has some quality links, manually look at a few of the best ones, make sure they're natural given links and not just something like comments. You can use SEO spyglass free version to check all it's links are still in place and not nofollow.
I think that's basically it, but you must check the quality of the links and that they're still in place, please do no buy domains just because they have a high pagerank or OSE, Majestic or any other metric.
Any questions feel free.
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