Bought An Expired Domain. I Wonder How Google Will React.
Posted in SEO, Web Master by DB
It’s been an eventful day today. I had planned to spend some time tweaking the home page of Website Hosting but instead spent the entire afternoon in auction bidding for a domain that had recently expired. Finally did manage to get it, paid a tad more than I thought I would but what the hell. Technically i still need to wait for a week to get it. In the meantime I’m hoping the previous owner does not wake up or have a change of heart.
I stumbled across this website a few days back when I was doing my research (don’t ask for what) and when I clicked on the domain it took me to an auction landing page. What was appealing was the fact that this domain was already listed in Yahoo directory. Yes, the same one where most of us have to pay $300 for a review with no guarantee of acceptance and if accepted it becomes a recurring amount every year. A small percentage do get listed for free but don’t hold your breath.
I’ve been trying to find out with no success on how to determine if a listing in the Yahoo directory is a paid or a free listing. If the domain I just bought is a paid listing then by the end of the year term a mail will probably go out asking to renew and when that happens my domain will get delisted because I’m not going to get that mail now am I? Until then I’m gonna keep my fingers crossed hoping that this was a free listing. I know, fat chance!!
The second plus point was that the domain name had a keyword that I’m interested in. All said and done, branding and marketing expert advice aside, having your keyword in your domain name adds weight to your SERP’s listing and the keyword in this case is in a very competitive industry.
Finally the domain was a PR3. Note that I list this as the last of my plus points because the PageRank you see in your toolbar is in reality only a snapshot of the real PageRank of the website in time. Google in all probability would have already reset the PageRank back to 0.
One of the trickle on and probably the biggest reasons was to understand exactly how Google reacts to an expired domain. Knowing in theory in one thing but actually experiencing it, if it is indeed true is valuable knowledge. I’m getting ahead of myself now, let me backtrack a bit.
Google ever since it became a registrar of domains has had better and direct access to all publicly available domain name related information such as the date of registration, registration term, the domain owner information, nameserver information to name a few. Yes, you can use a privacy protection service to hide the ownership details but the rest of the data is still available. Side note, I believe using a privacy protection service will reduce your website trust factor (still a theory of mine). This information is then used and has an influence on your website ranking in the SERP’s. How big an influence is anybody’s guess but it definetely forms a part of the 200 odd factors that make up the Google search algorithm.
Back to the domain I bought, I ran a quick Google cache query and it showed me the domain auction page which means Google has been active on the site and knows for sure that the domain is up for auction. The next few months will be interesting. I expect the site current PR3 ranking to go to 0 and not rank very highly for competitive terms. But you never know, sometimes we give Google a lot of credit, too much infact, let’s see how this one plays out.
Do remind me to post an update on Website Hosting tips on how things turned out in a few months from now.
3 Responses
Leave a Comment
April 10th, 2008 at 10:25 pm
[...] a week ago I mentioned here that I picked up an expired domain from an auction. It took a week but finally I got an email from GoDaddy telling me that the domain was finally in [...]
November 11th, 2009 at 10:05 am
Bought any expired domains recently?
I’m having a hard time getting google to cash them, they’re being much more aggressive now with resetting the pagerank and previous link equity to zero when a domain has entered the redemption / deletion period.
Any updates?
November 11th, 2009 at 10:05 am
Bought any expired domains recently?
I’m having a hard time getting google to cache them, they’re being much more aggressive now with resetting the pagerank and previous link equity to zero when a domain has entered the redemption / deletion period.
Any updates?