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Recycling Domains

Another source of inbound-links and high search engine rankings are old domains. This is another technique that was pioneered by the on-line porn industry. It is also an area that Google has turned its attention to in an attempt to discount the value of inbound-links to expired domains.

It has been estimated that close to a million domain names are not renewed each month. Couple this with dead blogs and there is a lot of potential for recycling other peoples optimization efforts. Domains are typically registered for a 2 year period. When domain (.com, .net etc) comes up for renewal the registrar sends an renewal notice to the owner. If there is no response then on expiry the domain goes a holding phase that can last up to 45 days. During this time the registrar can send a delete command. There then follows a 30 day Redemption Grace Period (RGP) which gives the owner a last chance to renew the domain. A five day "deletion" delay follows before the name becomes available for registration.

Given that a lot of the best Web virtual-estate was registered during the dot.com boom the fact that a lot of website owners are failing to renew domain names has not gone unnoticed. Search engine optimizers will be in competition with people looking for brandable domains for a new wave of e-Commerce ventures. Domain name registrars have caught on to this business and will grab expired, high value domains that they manage with the hope of reselling for inflated prices. There is also a third market in domain names, recently the domain: mychildren.com was for sale by auction on eBay.com for $100,000. The site had a Google PageRank of zero. The name didn't attract any bids.

There are a number of services that will show domains that are due for renewal. Some of these are associated with registrars and presumably have an inside knowledge of domains that are coming up for renewal, others are more dubious and appear to be selling domains that have not been registered but have been generated by software and then checked against the whois database to see if they are available.

You can find expired domain names from directories. Link checker programs such as XenuLink Sleuth <home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html> can be used to automatically traverse directories looking for broken external links which may indicate an expired domain name. The best bet is to concentrate initially on sites sharing the same theme. Using one section of a large Web based directory I was able to come up with a number of candidate domains which were either expired or soon to expire.

From an SEO viewpoint it is only worth considering domains with existing inbound-links, and therefore good Google PageRank. Inbound links are an important ranking factor not just with Google but MSN Search, Yahoo! and other search engines. PageRank, a Google concept, is used simply as a measure of a domain's worth in SEO terms. Once you have a list of target domain names you can use a bulk PageRank checker such as <http://www.top25web.com/pagerank.php> to sort the wheat from the chaff. One of the directory sites I found had a 6 PageRank and was currently detagged by the registrar awaiting cancellation.

The question is, what do you do with any domains you pick up? Well you can repoint them directly to your website. This is what fashionmall.com did when it acquired the ill-stared boo.com domain name for £250,000. Readers may remember that boo.com was the fashion retailer that personified the folly and hubris of the dot.com era by burning $135 million in venture capital in less than 12 months. The problem with this is that it can dilute your online identity, especially with search engines who will see identical content under two different domains.

If the site contents on your recycled domain differ markedly from the original you may lose inbound-links as webmasters notice the change. In addition the site's theme and the anchor text on inbound-links may no longer match which may cause some search engines to discount the site's value. An alternative is to put up a micro-site matching the original contents and then link across to to your site(s).

Blogs

Of course registering domain names costs money, although it might still prove to be cheaper and more effective than buying links or directory listings. An alternative it to recover old weblogs (blogs) from free blog sites such as blogspot.com. Blogs range from simple online journals to full blown electronic news publications. They cover a range of topics and because they are simple to set up they have drawn in a diaspora of users with little knowledge of HTML or web publishing. The blog software means that pages are published in search engine friendly and standards complaint HTML using static URLs. Bloggers (as blog writers are called) are very free with linking to other websites and each other so many blogs have acquired good inbound-links. The blogging craze has cooled somewhat of late and there are many blogs around that have not been updated for at least a couple of years. Some bloggers want to simply move on and so delete their blogs and this last category can be optimization gold dust.

You will need to find out what error text the blog gives for a deleted blog, for example "blog not found". Search for deleted blogs that have a good PageRank. Remember that toolbar PageRank is a logarithmic scale, you might need 10 PR3 blogs to give the same benefit as a single PR4 blog. The SEOChat PageRank Search will show search results and their toolbar PageRank <http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/pagerank-search/>. Restrict your search to the blog's domain using the site: operator.

Page not found site:blogsite.com

Look down the list for any blogs that don't have any descriptive text in the search results. Not all of these will be deleted and some may already have been reclaimed. Select the highest PR blogs, you definitely don't want to be reclaiming PR0 blogs. Register with the blogsite and recreate the blog.

You will want to optimize the blog template, if possible, to remove extraneous links such as profile information then simply create a post with a link over to your main site. Your post will need a bit of content and don't forget to use keywords in your anchor text.

Creating dummy blogs in this way is most definitely a black-hat technique. It won't make you popular with the blogsite owners or search engines but with so many blogs being created and abandoned each day it is doubtful that anyone will actually notice. Remember what Google has said that linking to a site cannot do that site harm.

You could actually run your blog as a complimentary news site to your main site. Some blog software provides newsfeeds which can be useful for getting listed in Yahoo! and on news feed agregators.

Recycling Domains

Blogs

See Also