Wanted: Domain Mortgage/Finance domain or website needed. Advice Please!

[birdie87]

Hi there

I think this could go in one of three sections and I didn't really know which one to put it in so I'm putting it in here. Admin may want to move the thread somewhere else.

An unscrupulous guy spam linked our mortgage website two years ago and we got hit by the penguin update. It's completely screwed our site and damaged livelihoods. We were just about to upload a massive wordpress content site on top of this (from 30 odd pages to about 100). Now, with penguin revival being so difficult and unpredictable, we're thinking of playing it safe and just putting the new content onto a new website and starting from scratch.

I've looked at the mortgage domains on here and they're all quite micro targetted (bestremortgageuk.co.uk type stuff). We want a good domain (one that gets exact match searches ideally) but that also keeps it quite open for the vast amount of content that will be placed on the website. Narrowing it down to a specific mortgage micro niche won't be good, especially if we want to brand the site a bit.

Besides the depressing fact that we're pretty much starting from scratch, I'm also a little depressed about the prospect of being put in the google sandbox for the first few months as mortgages is quite a competitive niche. So, ideally, we would like a domain with a page that is currently indexed in google. Or, alternatively, one that has only just expired and that has a number of decent links and page rank passing to it.

We want to be able to get up and running and start ranking things right away rather than waiting for months for the domain to be trusted by the big G. Ideally, it will have some links pointing to it.

Does anybody have any domains/websites for sale that fit this criteria? If so, I would be interested in finding out more. If they have domain age and a bit of website authority they don't also have to have be an exact keyword match website either as long as it's something that could sound like a legitimate company.

Also, how does a person go about finding and buying specifically UK domains that are about to expire? Is there a tool or website worth visiting? Does anybody know how long a domain has to expire for before google stops counting any links that are pointing at it?

Would really appreciate any feedback you can offer here guys. I know this is a long post so thanks for taking the time to read it.

Really appreciate any advice you can offer.

There is one other thing. I came across an exact match domain for a general mortgage search term that gets 2.5k exact searches per month with somebody willing to sell it to me.

It's probably not suitable for our needs at the moment as there has been no website associated with it now for at least 4 years. How much would that be worth, how much would you guys pay for it? Will consider buying it if I can't find something else more suitable, or buying it and selling it on if I do.

Again, thanks for reading this and appreciate any help you guys can offer.

Regards,

Dave

 

[dashu1]

Have you tried disavowing all of the spam links etc?

What's to say if you put it all on a new site and get it ranking again they won't just do the same thing again?

 

[addz123]

I have my 1.5 yr old site MoneyAdvisor.co.uk for sale for £650. Let me know if you're interested. I also have some other finance domains such as ETFs.co.uk although not sure if that is too niche for you. PM me for more information.

 

[birdie87]

Hi

It won't ever happen again. The penalisation was due to link spam (blog networks mostly). We were naive enough to trust this guy.

Since we used him two years ago the only kind of link building that has been performed has been high quality guest posting and the occasional directory submission (again, only relevant decent directories).

I own over ten websites and the two that used him two years ago have been hit in exactly the same way. None of my others have. The content was high quality.

 

[Murray]

Have you considered buying a domain that already ranks on google page 1/2/3, that has strong natural links and a history of stable rankings that you could work on building up?

If you wanted help trying to recover your old domain I would suggest Marie Haynes

 

[julian]

Good advice seo-god - how much you getting paid to post that backlink?

You must be kidding right? A report that's cleverly written to catch desperate people, a mere snip at $900

Ohh.. look it gets better, I can even pay $200 per hour on top if I want more help after reading that - great!

If you wanted help trying to recover your old domain I would suggest Marie Haynes

 

[Murray]

Good advice seo-god - how much you getting paid to post that backlink?

You must be kidding right? A report that's cleverly written to catch desperate people, a mere snip at $900

Oh god you've caught me

I've known Marie for a couple of years now from another forum (an SEO one).

Shes written a book on the unnatural links penalty & shes authored posts on popular SEO sites like seomoz and searchenginewatch about the subject.

It was an honest & unbiased suggestion, you trying to point fingers is embarrassing.

 

[birdie87]

Murrary that would be an absolutely ideal situation. The average domain seems to go for 1k around here. Even if a domain like that exists on here, buying a domain that's already ranking really well with lots of strong links and a history of stable rankings would probably be far out of my price range, unfortunately . Otherwise, yeah, that would be absolutely completely perfect.

Thanks for the suggestion on Marie. I'm almost 99% sure I know what caused the penalty though. I think there is of course a good chance I could eventually fix it. I just don't want to risk it and wait about for 6 months. The fact that we always have to wait an undisclosed amount of time between each refresh (usually about 6 months) is a massive risk factor and I would rather get started on my big new site right away.

The plan is to use something for now and if we recover the old domain just 301 everything back to it. We love the brand and domain so will switch it back as soon as it's possible to do so.

There have been mixes results for a lot of people with googles disevow tool and even webmaster tools doesn't give you every link that goes to your site.

If you have any suggestions for find a domain like the one you suggested I'm all ears.

Thanks for your suggestions anyway .

Dave

Have you considered buying a domain that already ranks on google page 1/2/3, that has strong natural links and a history of stable rankings that you could work on building up?

If you wanted help trying to recover your old domain I would suggest Marie Haynes

 

[Murray]

Thanks for the suggestion on Marie. I'm almost 99% sure I know what caused the penalty though. I think there is of course a good chance I could eventually fix it. I just don't want to risk it and wait about for 6 months. The fact that we always have to wait an undisclosed amount of time between each refresh (usually about 6 months) is a massive risk factor and I would rather get started on my big new site right away.

Are you sure it was penguin though?

My concern would be if you're not 100% on what the problem is you may be working on fixing the wrong thing.

Here are a couple of interesting posts about penguin

seo.fathomslaw.com/?p=204

seo.fathomslaw.com/?p=275

He has apparently had some real success recovering penguin hit domains.

 

[birdie87]

Hi Murray

Really like those links. Especially the second one. After analysis, I pretty muched agree'd with everything that he says.

As soon as I found out the penguin update hit me it didn't take ong for me to decide to 404 the pages that had actually been link spammed. There are only four pages on the website that have been link spammed by that guy (unless you count press releases as link spam, which would make it five).

My plan was to just 404 the link spammed pages and try to just get a few of the non-spammy links altered. The only problem with that is the fourth most spammed page is the homepage. The guy used to put a homepage link on as a secondary link for some of the blog network links.

My plan is to 404 he other three pages and just try to clean up the homepage as much as I can (about 30% spam roughly). I cannot 404 the homepage so I am forced to try to clean this up. Because the guy did it without my knowing, 'm not even sure of all the spammy websites. Therefore, I can only rely on things like webmaster tools and open site explorer.

I'm not saying it cannot be fixed, I just think it would be stupid to rely on it being fixed. I will just keep the site as it is without changing it and do my best to fix things on my own whilst in the mean-time growing and developing the new version of the website on what, hopefully, is a decent domain that won't take long to get ranking.

Thanks for the links, I like that dudes analysis.

 

[Murray]

I'm not saying it cannot be fixed, I just think it would be stupid to rely on it being fixed.

Yes it's important to be realistic when thinking about recovery

Has your site got any quality natural links? or was it just ranking from spam.

If it was just ranking from spam then there really is nothing to recover, once you remove all the spam you will just be starting fresh, you wont regain any rankings, and if you're going to be starting fresh then it would of been easier to do that on a new site without all the time spent removing spam.

I don't envy your task trying to rank for competitive mortgage/finance keywords

 

[birdie87]

I appreciate your sympathy and lack of envy! My mum STILL thinks i play computer games in my boxers all day refusing to get a real job. Actually, thinking about it, so does my Mrs.

There is definitely some quality natural links in there. Definitely. It's hard to say what percentage are natural quality one's though. When the guy did blog network stuff and PR's it tends to be lots of low quality links. I would say that there are definitely more spammy links, however, more pagerank/page authority is passed overall via the better quality one's.

You also make a good point again. I have to bare in mind that, even though I will be removing my penalisation by 404ing the domain, I will also be wasting a good deal of stuff from my good links as well as actually loosing pagerank from my spammy one's. Even if I could remove every single bad link at the push of a button I would still end up worse than before as the spammy one's were passing pagerank.

I'm not too concerned with ranking. I know I can do it. It just takes a lot of time. That's why I'm looking at some smaller niche stuff for now.

People always look fo micro-niches to compete in. I find micro-niches within niches within massive niches. There's a lot to choose from. With this, content is really king. It's just a shame we didn't get chance to apply all this content we wrote to the website .

Yes it's important to be realistic when thinking about recovery

Has your site got any quality natural links? or was it just ranking from spam.

If it was just ranking from spam then there really is nothing to recover, once you remove all the spam you will just be starting fresh, you wont regain any rankings, and if you're going to be starting fresh then it would of been easier to do that on a new site without all the time spent removing spam.

I don't envy your task trying to rank for competitive mortgage/finance keywords

 

[vizzo]

Just remember that it's not all about Google. Make sure that, if you have yahoo/Bing traffic, your solution doesn't lose that traffic.