101 Articles Expired Domain Spam
EXPIRED DOMAIN SPAM
Buying expired domains for the sake of getting ranking boost, has been there since the search engines started becoming popular. Importance of search engine traffic and ranking has pushed the search engine manipulator to great extends. Due to the heavy reliability of links to rank a web site, people are finding all possible ways to get quick high PageRank.
We are addressing buying expired domains for the reason to spam the search engines. Some link spammers will monitor when the domains are expiring and will buy the domains and replace the old site with their own website. What happens here is, they will retain all the backlinks and reputation this domain already had and all the PageRank will pass on to the new website.
Some expired domains carry high PageRank and excellent link popularity. These domains are backordered and bought immediately. There are various reasons why a domain expires. The domain is not actively maintained by the individual or by the Business, the website is no longer in Business, the individual who owns expires or not in a position to run the website anymore etc. These domains are actively monitored and many domain registration companies offer back ordering of domains. Back ordering reduces your pain of monitoring expiring domains yourself and the domain companies will monitor for you and when the domain becomes available you can register it immediately.
Also recent Google and other search engine algorithms sees the age of the website and inception date as an important factor for top ranking. The older domain is better, it ranks for competitive facts. Search engines have valid reasons to do this. Before 2003 it was easy to setup a website and rank in less than 30 days. This helped the spammers and they were able to build new websites every time they use some black hat tactics and get booted from the search engines. They get booted for one spam; they start a new website rank in 4 weeks using another SEO spam. This is one main reason, why search engines have started to see the age of domains? Expired domains help in this to great extends. They already have good backlinks and might be registered long back. Not only is the age of the domain important, also the date 1st Google crawled this domain is also important. Google became an accredited registrar with ICANN in 2009. SEO experts see this as a move by Google to monitor WHOIS data and changes that might flag a purchase or transfer of domain name.
From long time SEO and search engine experts have speculated search engines, and are using domain registration data and age of website as part of the ranking. Google has denied it but Yahoo has agreed that they use it but it's a very small factor.
All the top search engines now have expired domain penalty. Google has admitted they will reset the backlink data for a domain that got expired and purchased by a new individual or company. Virtually all PageRank and backlink value is lost when Google will reset them. Also the domain will be left in a sandbox and virtually stops ranking until you file a reconsideration request with Google. We have had similar experience with Google where the domains backlink power has been reset because it expired and changed hands. Search engine spammers are smarter in buying domain names and try to keep the same contents available, search engines have systems to detect these sort of spam too.
Regardless of how well the search engines tackle expired domain spamming still SEO companies find shortcuts to get the link power of expired domains. This is an ongoing battle for the search engines.
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Images |
The image below is a clear example of domain name spamming. Here, the domain owner decides to buy the name of an expired domain which has high PageRank and backlinks so that the domain can get a boost in search engine rankings automatically.
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Screen Shots |
The below mentioned screenshot is a description of what an expired domain is and how it is used to manipulate the search engine rankings.
These are a list of expired domain names with their respective PageRank and number of backlinks.
The below mentioned image is an example of an expired domain name. This domain name is for sale now and is subject to be owned by anyone who purchases it.
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Sample emails |
Request to acquire expiring domain
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Survey |
This is an example of an image where lists of domains which are expired are mentioned along with their number of backlinks. These domain names are acquired by spammers and are used to get high search engine rankings.
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Working Examples |
This is a working example of an Australian site that uses expired domain names for manipulating the search engine and getting links back to their website.
The above image is another example of domain name spamming
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References |
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Other sites that refer to the same manipulation tactic are as follows |