How To Use Dropped Domains To Rank Your Money Site #1 On SERPs

nanovation

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May 15, 2009
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I'm thinking about buying domain names in my niche as they drop that are PR3+ with a long history and have plenty of back links. My strategy will be to put up a 1 page website for each of these domain names with unique content on my niche on every site. By the end of the year, I should have 50 new PR3, PR4, etc. links (for the terms I want to rank for) from high-quality websites in my niche.

When I acquire one of these dropped domain names via Drop Day, I'll make the registration private so that the SERPs don't see that all these domain names are owned by me and thus don't give the links as much juice.

When I host the domain names, I'll use an SEO hosting provider like Biggest Hosting so that every domain name will have the following:
- Unique C class IP address
- Private name server (DNS)
- Own rDNS record

Each dropped domain name will cost me around $200 to $400 depending on the PR ranking. Private registration will cost me $5 a year. Hosting will cost me $5 a month. Total cost for the 50 domain names, private registration and hosting will be $18,025. Total ROI should be about 10X that.

With all that said, I'm wondering if anyone else has tried this before. Will this work or am I just going to drop a lot of money over 1 year for nothing?

Can anyone recommend a good SEO Hosting company that they use to do just this?

Did I leave anything out of my plan that you would recommend I include?
 


Jesus fucking christ $200-400 per name? Drops are usually $60 unless they go to auction. And why the hell would you spend $18,025 on a strategy you haven't even tested yet? Dude, just forget it.

Drop Day is not a dropcatcher (as I'm sure you know) so the price of private registration will depend on who catches the drop and which registrar they work with. Some such registrars prohibit transfers inside of 3-6 months, but after that you can usually get a free transfers to namecheap who will give you whoisguard subscriptions for either $2.88/yr or less (NC has tons of coupon codes and gives a free year of whoisguard with each new reg). They'll also do a free push to another NC customer if you ever decide to sell the domain.

Unless you're going to be selling links as your primary source of monetization, ignore PR. Buying domains with some sort of history is not the bulletproof solution many people think it is. You're losing all the content that got the site to rank in the first place, meaning that some pre-existing links may have been taken down by webmasters who realized these domains had died out. You're also assuming that these domains haven't been penalized. And that the PR is real. And even if you use privacy protection, anyone who can navigate to DomainTools can see that the domain has changed hands after a drop... including Google. So don't bet the farm on your ability to capitalize on old links. And you also don't seem to have figured in the cost for getting these sites back online (design, development, content, link building for re-indexing, etc).

I used to buy PR8 text links on Forbes.com that did 10x more for my site than these 50 domains will, and it cost me less than half of what you're talking about spending. And fuck $18,025... if you've got your little heart set on this, buy ONE domain, not 50. Not trying to shit on your strategy, but it's unrealistic, unsustainable, and you're going to end up eating that money. One or two killer domains, or just an investment in a single site plus a *REAL* seo firm (not someone from WF) would be a much smarter way to spend that kind of cash. Fuck, pay someone to develop an awesome CMS you can sell, or an iphone app, just don't dump $18k into a low-hanging-fruit shortcut.
 
Excellent feedback dogfighter. That's exactly the type of push back I was looking for.

Yes, $200 to $400 is expensive, but these are domains with real PR and LOTS of high quality back links. If you get a 1 page website up that displays similar content to what they last had, then you shouldn't lose many links.

As an example, if you buy a dropping domain in the flower niche and get a page up about flowers with a link to your money site promoting FTD or some other flower delivery service, it should retain the links a lot longer than the usual dropped domain ad page.

I've already tried this with one PR5 domain name that I dropped $550 on and it has retained all its links and is passing sensational ranking power. My site went from #65 to #8 for the keyword I used.

Design wise, I just use a $10 template that is perfect for my niche.

The benefit of doing it this way though is that it's cheaper than renting links. Of that $18,025, $15K is up front domain name purchase costs (50 domain names x an average price of $300 at auction). The remaining $3025 is yearly maintenance cost.

Instead of spending $9K every year on one Forbes link, you can get 50 PR3 to PR5 links that never go away.

If we look at that over a 10 year period, 10 years of 1 forbes link = $90,000. Instead of $15,000 for the 50 PR3-5 domains + $3025 x10 years = $45,025. Thus, this strategy would produce a 50% savings over 1 forbes link.

Now imagine you are promoting 5 different sites in that niche. You can now rank your flower delivery review site, your flower seed site, your flower growing site, etc. Now instead of having to get 5 links on Forbes.com for $9K each, you've got your bases covered with these 50 that will never go away.

Now does it start to sound better?
 
Yes but I can kill off my liabilities to Forbes at any point if algorithm changes render the strategy useless. You get footprinted and those IBLs won't be worth much anymore.

At any rate, you should check out selfmademinds.com. He rarely updates anymore, but he's made a good chunk of change by not only buying old domains, but contacting the previous site owners and buying the files/content off them as well. Might be of interest. You should post a case study though. I thought this strategy died years ago but if you can still make it work then rock n' roll McDonalds.
 
And if you're using the site for an inbound link, then you really don't care what it ranks for. Just as long as it retains its links / PR value.

I've looked far and wide and haven't found anyone discussing this method, but it seems like a great way to get laser focused category specific links that never go away.

I'll keep you posted on how it goes.
 
holy shit that is way too involved... and don't stick with 1 page sites... it is a crapshoot with drops - but look today (as anyone with a shit load of pr domains and a network of their own with have noticed) google rolled out the pr udpate wagon...

to the best of my knowledge first since nov. so now is a GOOD time to pick up names as you are seeing pr that just made it past a fresh update (at least all of mine are showing updates today - some i lost but not more than one pr level.... which overall looks like it worked out well, as i had others that i either fucked up getting set up transfered perfectly and quickly and lost pr down to zero and now jumped back to at least 1 or many to 3...

one domain that i stupidly realized was totally a fake pr5 (redirecting from some vimeo page which had the real 5)... well i threw it onto authoritylinknetwork so i wouldn't need to do any work to it and some links and content would happen, i paid just like godaddy closeout so maybe 9$ + fees...

now today it is a REAL pr 3

so some will go up some down - but my advice on the expired front to buy only through godaddy closeouts, hunt with a tool like the free expireddomains.net (i think is it something like that) i also use domainface and domainpeeker

i mostly either just do private purchases, stumble on ones about to expire on name.com and nab them, or buy cheap godaddy closeouts and throw some auto content (articlebuilder.net rocks for this) updating daily, throw a few good links maybe a 1-2 month blogroll pr link at it etc... see where they land next update (number game)... but better than spending anything like 100-200$ on a dropped name

i only pay real $ for private transfered or auctions sometimes - esp. where i can pull over the site exactly and immediately as it is... has some sellers very cool with that...

BUT for your idea of using a site as a go-between . ie. safety wall to rank other safe site - you can set up 301 redirect in cpanel (host it - obviously - on differen c class and host ideally) then spam the fuck out of the aged down that points to your URL you want to rank.... i'm in the middle of trying some of this but lots of people do this.

I am more interested currently in building out my network and its various segments which each are for different roles....

let me know if you have more questions on the topic, i've been pretty heavy into this for the last little while.
 
Jesus fucking christ $200-400 per name? Drops are usually $60 unless they go to auction. And why the hell would you spend $18,025 on a strategy you haven't even tested yet? Dude, just forget it.

Drop Day is not a dropcatcher (as I'm sure you know) so the price of private registration will depend on who catches the drop and which registrar they work with. Some such registrars prohibit transfers inside of 3-6 months, but after that you can usually get a free transfers to namecheap who will give you whoisguard subscriptions for either $2.88/yr or less (NC has tons of coupon codes and gives a free year of whoisguard with each new reg). They'll also do a free push to another NC customer if you ever decide to sell the domain.

Unless you're going to be selling links as your primary source of monetization, ignore PR. Buying domains with some sort of history is not the bulletproof solution many people think it is. You're losing all the content that got the site to rank in the first place, meaning that some pre-existing links may have been taken down by webmasters who realized these domains had died out. You're also assuming that these domains haven't been penalized. And that the PR is real. And even if you use privacy protection, anyone who can navigate to DomainTools can see that the domain has changed hands after a drop... including Google. So don't bet the farm on your ability to capitalize on old links. And you also don't seem to have figured in the cost for getting these sites back online (design, development, content, link building for re-indexing, etc).

I used to buy PR8 text links on Forbes.com that did 10x more for my site than these 50 domains will, and it cost me less than half of what you're talking about spending. And fuck $18,025... if you've got your little heart set on this, buy ONE domain, not 50. Not trying to shit on your strategy, but it's unrealistic, unsustainable, and you're going to end up eating that money. One or two killer domains, or just an investment in a single site plus a *REAL* seo firm (not someone from WF) would be a much smarter way to spend that kind of cash. Fuck, pay someone to develop an awesome CMS you can sell, or an iphone app, just don't dump $18k into a low-hanging-fruit shortcut.

true dont buy only for pr make sure incoming backlinks are ok and do all the proper due diligence for looking at (and even scraping archive.org content) keep on topic and all, but i can assure you it can and is VERY still worth it if you set it up correctly... i dont sell links at the moment but use my 200+ domains with pr to rank my money sites my clients sites, sometimes they fluke and have good traffic that i can monetize etc... but there is a lot you can do with a nice little network once you've got it all setup and running properly with say 100-500 sites.

yeah my hosting costs are a lot etc. but its a worthwhile investment, esp as i can (and am) for instance ranking one money termin my niche for 5 different page one spots and those are 5 different sites of mine in my network so when i got fucked and google slapped on one recently i had others to boost and fill in from behind ;)

lots and lots of reasons to spend the effort if you can - it does take work but IMHO is very worth it
 
subbed -- I am thinking about this too. I have access to about 20 domains that are not dropped, the owner says 'do anything' with them and some have PR.

Most are about 3 yrs old and no bad history.

SO I am thinking about building 5 of them as a mini net and buying 5 dropped domains as another mini net to test out.

If you change registrars you lose the domain age right?

WJ
 
DO IT.

This will be the best ever investment you would have made.
Also now that you will have 50 different IPs, you can create 15-20 mini sites for each niche you are targeting, and you can rank almost all medium comp sites.

You can still be more conservative on the cost of domains.. Also only buy if those domains have good backlinks that they are not going to lose.

You would prolly make more money by renting those pages to other subscribers though lol.
"In the Gold Rush you didn't get rich by staking a claim – the real moneymaker was selling picks and shovels to miners."
lol
 
ugh was in a domaining mood tonight so i compiled a txt file of about 20 domains pr 3-4 i was going to bid on...ran it through the fake PR checker and 18 were fake. tough game.
 
ugh was in a domaining mood tonight so i compiled a txt file of about 20 domains pr 3-4 i was going to bid on...ran it through the fake PR checker and 18 were fake. tough game.

What Fake PR checker do you use, few i found suck and give me false negative
 
Also now that you will have 50 different IPs, you can create 15-20 mini sites for each niche you are targeting, and you can rank almost all medium comp sites.

I thought SEO Hosts only allowed one site/domain on each IP. Since the OP needs all 50 sites to target his main niche how would he be able to create additional 15-20 mini sites for different niches?
 
I thought SEO Hosts only allowed one site/domain on each IP. Since the OP needs all 50 sites to target his main niche how would he be able to create additional 15-20 mini sites for different niches?

Oh. Didn't know that. I don't use SEO Hosting.. I use a better alternatives which I thought was more expensive than SEO hosting (Average 100 per year per hosting), but now I realize that they were damn cheaper.... Every IP I own has at least 20 sites on it... Good I never used SEOHost.
main deal breaker for me for uptime, and everybody using their IP range for one and one purpose only.. SEO Hosting.. ..

Imagine... every 100 or so blocks of IP from that webhost linking to the same bloody sets of url.. Whereas popular shared hosts have thousands of regular non-spammy blogs on their IP

Also, I never knew about SEO hosts when I started setting up sites on 10 shared accounts I got for 10 bucks each in 2007 on some introductory offer... It was against their TOS, but well... I managed. And later on I started paying full price....
 
Unagi, thanks for all the tips. Much appreciated. I hadn't heard of ArticleBuilder before, but can see it being an essential part of the business strategy. And thanks for the offer of sharing your experience. I'll be sure to reach out to you when the appropriate time comes.
 
If you change registrars you lose the domain age right?

My experience has been that changing registers does not affect the domain age or its PR ranking. People consolidate / move domains all the time and I've never seen Google or any other SERP slap them for doing so.
 
From my research, the advantage of SEO hosting is that each and every one of your domains gets a dedicated IP address in a different C-class. So instead of Google seeing that your 50 inbound links are all coming from the same IP address (or IP addresses in the same c-class) they see it coming from 50 different IP addresses. If all your links were coming from the same IP address, Google would instantly realizing that they must be owned by the same person and devalue their value. How much? Only Matt Cutts knows.

I can get a dedicated IP address form my usual host (Host Gator) for $2 a month, but if I put an order in for 50 IP addresses, they're all going to be in the same c-class. XXX.XXX.333.123, XXX.XXX.333.124, XXX.XXX.333.125, etc. Once again, the Google bot will realize something is up and devalue their value some.

And if I do a reverse DNS lookup on those IP addresses I get from HostGator, I'll see that they show my site being hosted on theplanet.com (owned by HostGator). This is not a private DNS.

An SEO hosting company would not only give you the dedicated IP addresses on different c-classes, but also provide private name servers so that when the Google bot does a rDNS, it shows the name of the URL instead of the name of the hosting provider.

Here's where you determine any sites IP address: Find IP address of a website - server ip lookup

And here's where you can do a rDNS on that IP address to see what the Google bot will see: Find host by IP address - IP to server lookup
 
I thought SEO Hosts only allowed one site/domain on each IP. Since the OP needs all 50 sites to target his main niche how would he be able to create additional 15-20 mini sites for different niches?

Oh. Didn't know that. I don't use SEO Hosting...

Actually I am going to take back what I said originally.

Having looked into a bit more and asked some of the providers, it seems to vary between them. So SEOHosting.com let you have unlimited addon domains on each IP, but Aseohosting.com don't - they only allow one domain per IP.

I like the way you do it Blogspotter but can imagine that gets pretty expensive pretty quickly if you need 50+ shared accounts, not to mention the headache of finding them in the first place & then managing them all.

One advantage SEO Hosting companies seem to have is that you only need to access one cpanel to manage all the IPs