Happy Buying Expired, High PR Domains For Backlinks

I've seen a few questions about this lately so I thought I'd write up my method. First, expired domains are domains that have been abandoned. Happy Buying Expired, High PR Domains For Backlinks

They are not currently registered and cost the same as a new registration. 

They are also called dropped domains. There is a debate on whether or not these keep their age or not. 

From what I can deduce if you pick them up quickly enough and rebuild the same site that was on it before, there is no reason for any search engine to see this as a new domain. 

It looks like someone just forgot their renewal then reuploaded their site when they realized they had lost it. Google's not going to devalue a site just because the owner was a little flighty. Regardless, I'm after the backlink juice primarily so my private network has a healthy dose of these domains. 

 Step 1) Sorting Domains by Backlinks I use expireddomains.net. It is free. You can choose from .de, .com, .net, .org, .info, and .biz domains. 

I use them all but I use less .de and .biz than the others. Most people get hung up on finding domains with the highest PR listed. 

This will lead to a lot of time spent checking whether the PR is fake and very few good domains to choose from. 

Instead I filter by backlinks. I set the filter to at least 100 backlinks then sort from highest to lowest and look through them manually. 

No backlinks means no PR. More and better backlinks means higher PR. I ignore the PR column.

Also check the "only free Domains" box. There is no point in checking domains that are already registered. 

Sometimes I set an age filter as well but the age showing is not always the true age. If it was registered in 1999 that will show as the age even if it wasn't used from 2000-2008. 

The real age of that domain will be 2008. Again, age is not my biggest concern here but it is something to look out for if you want to buy a domain for its age. 

Step 2) Investigating Backlinks If you don't have an account at Majestic SEO you should. It is free for a basic account and it will tell you all you need for this. 

So, the first one on my list today is belairdoctors.com. I use fresh index which just reports the links found within the last 30 days. 

I like to see a minimum of 100 links from over 50 different domains.

Belairdoctors.com certainly meets that criteria and has a good amount of links from government and educational sites. Beware: all may not be as it seems. 

The next step is to look at the "Top Backlinks" tab. The AC rank is different than pagerank. It is a measure of how many sites are linking to the listed page. 

I don't like to see AC 0 links in the top five. Again, belairdoctors.com passes this test with flying colors. Look at the anchor texts used on those top backlinks. If it is sex or pharma, I skip it. For those of you with sex and pharma websites these will be a goldmine for you. I spend a lot of time weeding out sex and pharma sites.

This one is pharma, so I'm skipping this one, but if it weren't my next step would be to look at some of the pages that are linking to this site.

Are they quality links on domains with PR that are going to stay or are they all blog comments on overspammed blogs? In the case of belairdoctors.com, they are all blog comments so I would probably not buy this one.

This is a judgement call though. Some of the sites with just comment links might be worth your while.

I like to only buy sites in English but I am not too strict on that. I'll buy sites in a different languages as long as they used the English alphabet so I can recreate it.

Sometimes I've bought ones in different languages and just built a whole new site. You'll keep the PR if you do this but I'm pretty sure that the domain age will reset. 

 Step 3) Rebuilding the Old Site Go to the wayback machine and type in random letters at the end of the domain name, like this:

 It will then show you all of the pages that it has on file for the domain. 

If a site has a lot of pages I usually just try to recreate up to 20 but if there are not a lot I like to have at least 5 original pages if I can. To decide which urls to recreate, go to the "Top Pages" tab in majestic seo. 

The ones with the most external backlinks are the ones that are most likely to have some PR. To recreate odd urls in wordpress use the custom permalinks plug in. 

When you're done setting up the site, install link juice keeper which will redirect all links to non existing pages to the homepage.

 You can add more posts to the domain or you can just stuff your links into existing pages. I do a combination of both. 

When you've got this set up if you check the PR you will see n/a. Depending on how long the domain has been dropped this might be there for a while.

Rest assured that all the link juice going into that site will still pass through to your money sites that you link it to. 

Sometimes it will show PR n/a until the next PR update. I have one site that showed PR0 even after the first PR update then showed PR3 the next time. It has kept the PR3. 

It is possible that with this method you'll pick up a few PR0 sites with your higher PR sites but it doesn't happen to me often and even if they have a PR0, I know that they have a strong backlink profile.

Registration and Hosting - What I Do For registration I use internetbs.net. 

When you have a lot of domains you don't want to be searching for coupon codes every week as things come up for renewal. I'd rather have a site that offers me a low price all the time. They offer free privacy every year, not just the first year like godaddy. 

My hosting system is a pain in the ass. After researching a lot of SEO hosting companies I decided to distribute my sites on a few different paid hosting accounts (Hostgator) and a ton of different free hosting accounts. 

Free hosting sucks but I figure that since these are just for backlinks I don't care so much about the downtime. I hate that each one has a different system and not every free host supports wordpress which means I have to redirect old URLs to the homepage since I can't use link juice keeper. 

It really is a pain in the ass but I know I'm getting true IP diversity this way. You can find a good list here and here. I avoid any sites that make me participate in their forums but I don't mind ads. 

I know this isn't the way a lot of people are building their high PR networks but it has worked very well for me and given me some exclusive, high PR links. Let me know if there are any questions or if anything is unclear.

BY: LBrown - BH SEO