How Do I Rebuild An Expired Domain?

Posted in Web Master by DB

About 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 my GoDaddy account. Whew!! That was one long week. The original buyer could have still renewed the domain even though the auction was completed.

So what now? Well, I bought the domain for several reasons  and one of them was to learn and better understand how Google reacts to expired domains and the best process to manage and rebuild an expired domain.

Now IF I was trying to pull wool over Google’s eyes, this is what I would do starting today. (If anybody from Google is reading this, please note I said “if”)

  1. Turn on Domain Privacy protection. Not much point but will keep my personal details from all the other folks that bid on the domain and from the previous owner, whenever he finally realizes the fact that he does not own the domain anymore. As far as Google is concerned, the best case scenario is Google is not 100% confident that the original owner did not renew the domain. That said, the minute the domain enters the redemption period filters would have already been applied on the domain.
  2. Change my name servers to my hosting account nameservers. I would have ideally liked to avoid this but I’m loathe to use GoDaddy for anything but for domain registration and that too only when I absolutely have to. I prefer to do all my website hosting either on my dedicated servers or on one my reseller accounts.
  3. Do a search on Google and recreate each and every indexed page of the previous website by looking at the cache. This is a time consuming and a painful activity especially if the domain has a lot of pages in Google’s index.

    To elaborate how one would go about doing this.

    • Open Google.com on your browser and type your search as “site:www.DomainName.com”. Replace DomainName with the name of the domain name you want to check.
    • Google will list all the pages that it has currently in its index. Click on the “cache” link on every result and you will get to see the cached page. Copy the main text content and recreate the page with the exact same url.
  4. Start building content on the domain. Start slow in the beginning and slowly pick up the pace.
  5. Do not even think of using Google Analytics or registering the website on Google Webmaster. I have no idea if Google keeps track of account information but I’m paranoid as hell and so I’m gonna avoid it as long as I can.
  6. Start building links. The current static toolbar PR3 is sure to get wiped off in the next update. But will go down with a fight. Try my best to get good authority incoming links to the website as I can.

It sure is going to be interesting going in the next few months and IF I indeed do any or all of the above, rest assured I will keep notes and share my findings when the time comes. Till then keep reading more website hosting and optimization tips and keep linking and lastly don’t forget to subscribe to my feed.

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One Response

  1. MR AUSTRALIA Says:
    May 26th, 2008 at 8:38 am

    “Google will list all the pages that it has currently in its index. Click on the “cache” link on every result and you will get to see the cached page. Copy the main text content and recreate the page with the exact same url. ”

    Dinesh, shouldn’t you ask the previous domain name owner for permission to do this? Although the domain may no longer belong to him/her, the copyright on the content still does…and without their permission any one that does this is breaching copyright law. In fact they could still have rights under common law on the domain if they have built a brand, and doing what you suggested without permission is technically termed as “passing off”

    Sure, if they’ve let their domain expire they probably won’t know or care, but I think it would be best to ask for permission first. After all, how would you feel if someone copied all the great content from this website?

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