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Buying expired domains and redirecting – does it work?
I’ve seen quite a few posts here about buying old domains with lots of backlinks – if they’re relevant to your niche, does this strategy actually do anything?
If so, what’s the best way to go? I’ve seen people either 301 redirect to their main domain, or they rebuild the expired site and backlink to the main site, which is preferable?
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1 Reply
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It does work, I’ve done this on some of my own sites and client sites. You do however have to buy domains that hosted similar websites, especially in your geographic locale if your client is location specific.
You also have to make sure the domain has inbound links from quality sites, and not from spamming, blog commenting, or link directories. If you see a domain with inbound links from .gov or .edu, buy that domain up! You could also hold on to it for a future client.
The best way to redirect is to recreate the old site using pages from Way back Machine. But, you can also do it by just hosting that domain on a server with an .htaccess file containing a site wide redirect.
Do not do a redirect on the domain’s registrar, as this only redirects links pointing the root domain and does not redirect deep-linked URLs.
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Where can you find these expired old domains?
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Personally, I’ve tried it and didn’t see the benefit. I had much better luck purchasing an expired domain and using that website.
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Usually no benefit
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It works, but in my experience it only works if it’s the a domain in the same, tightly aligned niche (and obviously it can’t have a bunch of shit links pointing at it). For example, I tried 301ing a domain I bought about astronomy (with a ton of great links) to a domain about hobbies, because I thought there’s some level of relevance there since astronomy is considered a hobby by many. But it totally failed. So I reworked the hobby site to be exclusively about astronomy as a hobby, and what do you know….the site took off.
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This is called “404 hijacking” or “domain hijacking” and it considered black seo.
I wouldn’t do it. -
The devil is in the details. I’ve seen it work, I’ve seen it not work and I’ve seen it temporarily work. Assume that Google is actively trying to ensure it doesn’t work.
Best case scenario, quality [very recently] expired domain redirected to quality target site in the same niche.
But the above case seems rare from my experience, usually the owner of the target site hasn’t created a truly quality product and is just looking for a shortcut.
Or the expired domain wasn’t as high quality as the buyer perceived.
So for it to be effective long term, you can’t (from my experience) neglect the quality signals of the target which is really the hardest part.
Most people don’t get it right on all accounts because it is more effort than they are willing to put in. Hence so many failures (that don’t get bragged about).
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Works fantastic. Anyone who claims it doesn’t either
1) doesn’t want more people competing among us to capture fresh expired domains. There are literal software that cost thousands madebto find these domains, bc it’s highly successful.
2) doesn’t know how to do this even though it’s simple.
3) has tried and failed themselves. Either due to lack of knowledge or ability to follow instruction. Or bc they bought a shitty expired domain. Or they had no niche overlap.If you are getting expired domains in a niche relevant to the money site you’re redirecting to, you will have no issue. The more relevancy the better.
In my personal experience, I get expired domains and turn them into PAA sites. Pretty much have an entire PBN of them from expired domains. Be sure you restore the pages/URLs that it use to have which were ranking.
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It works. There is completely legit reasons for it to work as well. Like a company buying another brand and acquiring its assets. Like others have said you need to do it correctly though and ultimately it works best if it’s the same niche.
IE if you have a gardening blog and buy a domain about plants for example. And also don’t just redirect the entire domain. Do it on a page-by-page basis. So redirect from the old page to a relevant page on your new site.
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