Refurbishing old domains for search
Apr 22, 2009 SEO
We occasionally receive low-ball purchase offers from domain hunters whose emails smell suspiciously like link building emails. That is, these low-ball offers seem to be undervaluing domains because the people behind them are hoping to make a quick, easy profit.
By now many people have a growing catalog of domain names they don’t quite know what to do with, or just don’t have the time to develop into something useful. I have some 4-letter domain names, for example, that were not bought up in the rush to own 4-letter domains back when that was the “hot” thing.
Domain prospectors now seem to be looking at brand value more than length. If a domain can be associated with a company, a product, a service, or a person there is probably someone out there who would want to buy it.
A handful of people have built huge fortunes by investing in domain names. They place ads on the domains and wait for the brand-value to attract buyers who want to develop real Web properties. A 2-letter domain name might command a price of $250,000.
The SEO community has only driven up the price of old, unused domains by investing in the “aged domain” mythology, which teaches us that all we have to do is buy an old domain and 301-redirect it to get all its “link juice”. Many an SEO has learned much to his dismay that it’s not quite that simple.
For example, if you’re trying to build your search results on the basis of PageRank rather than anchor text you’re exchanging low efficiency for really low efficiency. PageRank should be the least of a link builder’s concerns.
Some SEOs buy domains that have been penalized or banned and they end up with real lemons. There is a sordid, underhanded side to domain trading that is rarely discussed in public. Think about it. Someone out there has a domain that has accrued a lot of links, it earns tons of traffic, and the name is easy to type in.
Why should you be able to buy that domain for only a few thousand dollars? There’s something wrong. Either you’re buying from someone who doesn’t appreciate the value of his domain or he burned it and is dropping a dying property before all the site and link queries dump his pages.
If you’re going to buy a domain that has been used before, you should be ready to write a reinclusion request. You should be ready to put some real content on it. And you should be ready to build links for it.
In other words, don’t assume your “aged domain” comes with any value. The odds of that value you perceive vanishing overnight are pretty high.
You can age the domain yourself (I do this), starting the clock over as soon as you put content on the domain and point some links at it. Just get a few links every month. Add some new content every month or two.
Create a pipeline of domains you’re cultivating for relevance, value, and linking resources. A lot of SEOs who “trade” three-way links sort of do this, only they don’t really invest in their linking resources. They just create crappy sites that look like they are not parked and then start dumping links on them.
If you do this right you’ll end up with a couple hundred domains that have content, receive traffic, and all have some link power that you can leverage for your own benefit. Now, if you’re just promoting one Web site this is an extremely inefficient way of doing things. But if you promote a LOT of Web sites, having a large network of aged domains whose backlink profiles you built gives you a tremendous advantage.
You can use old, well-established but abandoned domains if you want to but if you don’t treat them with the respect they deserve you’ll realize less return on your investment than if you had simply bought previously unused domains.
So the bottom line here is: buy old domains that you can develop reasonable plans for, that you can actually use. Buy old domains that you can give new life to. The day may come when someone offers you a few thousand dollars for an old domain and, who knows? Maybe they’ll get what they are paying for.
—Written by Michael Martinez—
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Tags: Domains, Old domains, Refurbish, Search, Search Engine Optimization, SEO
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