Expired Domain Case Study: Bullying a DR 7

SEOMadHatter

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It's been a while since I've done an aged domain case study and, this time, I have a little twist. I wanted to take an aged domain up against a site with a lot of traffic and a low DR. This is something I've been looking at for a couple of weeks now and, spoiler alert, this happens.


image.png


That - is some parabolic growth of about 15x in the space of a few weeks - and it's still growing.


I bought a couple of sites last year and this one cost me around $11,000. I'll talk about how that site was set up at some point but the results were pretty underwhelming and I'd just left it on the backburner.

I was actually considering just flipping it at a loss and letting someone else grow it when I stumbled into this little gem.


image-1.png

Note: this isn't my domain. It's a competitor with much lower authority.

For anyone who doesn't know what they're looking at - this is a site getting a fair chunk of traffic but with very few backlinks. Very little authority in the eyes of a search engine and it just so happens to be in the same niche as the $10,000 site I bought.

On top of that? It's a multi-trillion dollar market which means there are plenty of products to sell or adverts to run on the site.

If that wasn't enough? The content is so incredibly easy to reproduce (and improve on).

It's mostly numbered lists and in these topics, the Google results pages are usually a war of who can get the higher count. Users will click the top 14 over the top 13 and that higher clickthrough can really help speed things up.

So I spent a little time with a script that helps me replace their top 13 with a top 50. I produce a much bigger list in very little time and can pay a freelancer to help tidy things up. Presto, we have much better content in very little time and our aged domain has a lot more authority than the competitor.

Our end result will hopefully be that a big chunk of that traffic goes to my site instead. We'll run some ads and turn that backburnered projected into a new cash flow.


giphy.gif



On top of this - the growth on that chart is after very little content was published as a proof of concept and it hasn't had a whole lot of time to age in. Now that I know we're able to compete in this market the goal is pretty straightforward. Published a lot more content and get some ads in place.

This isn't really an exciting niche for me so a little down the line I might do a 'rank and reveal' for it or even just list the site on Flippa. My excitement for the project is just to test how easy it is to bully a low DR domain with an aged one. Depending on how workloads look it might even double as a case study on content velocity since it's relatively easy to produce.

It's an SEO case study (read: there won't be overnight results) but given the growth so far I'm motivated to keep it going and if that keeps up we'll start seeing some revenue numbers soon.
 
The above video belongs to your channel?
Interesting subject.
Thanks for the share op
 
The above video belongs to your channel?
Interesting subject.
Thanks for the share op

Yep, that's mine. A project I've been trying to take more seriously because talking about my projects keeps me accountable and actually finishing projects for once.
 
Interesting experiment... How did you find the low DR site that could be a good way of finding a niche that you could target then find a good domain to use
 
How did you determine that the 7DR site wasn't just powered by great PBN links?
 
Interesting experiment... How did you find the low DR site that could be a good way of finding a niche that you could target then find a good domain to use
I have some scripts that flag domains like this. Helps spot low competition niches or trends to try out.
How did you determine that the 7DR site wasn't just powered by great PBN links?
No links were showing anywhere for it and while maybe you manage to hide an entire PBN from a lot of aggregators it's not really something I bother with.

Plus, when I looked at their keywords there are other low competition domains ranking for it and I've now outranked some of theirs within a few weeks. I'm not worried about a hidden PBN.
 
The first couple of weeks has been been a good proof of concept. Note that the February numbers have only had a week now and it's still higher than December was.


MonthPosts publishedTotal postsUsersPageviews
Dec30123349461
Jan141371,1701,509
Feb (first week)2139423511


I was going to wait and publish an update at the end of the month but I’m headed for a break on the beach in Spain so I figured I should update now. Have you tried writing up a case study from the beach? Between the sand and the sun glare on the screen – it’s just not worth the Instagram photo.

The TL;DR of this case study is we’re taking an expired domain up against a low authority competitor in a niche where it’s easy to reproduce content and (somewhat unsurprisingly) the site is growing. Compared to most SEO projects – It’s growing quickly.

image-5.png

I put out a few dozen articles as a proof of concept to see what would happen and the growth almost right away was a clear answer. It takes about half an hour to produce content for the site which is good.

image-11-1024x29.png

The interesting part is that it takes almost as little time for that content to reach page #1.

image-4-1024x436.png

I published a bit of content over the first couple of weeks just to get a proof of concept and to see what would happen. The early results were good but the consistent growth means it’s a project worth pushing even further.

This month we’ve been averaging about 50-60 visitors a day. That’s not buying an early retirement anytime soon but only a few weeks ago we were averaging closer to 10 visitors a day. Plus, most of this content still has plenty of time to age in properly and scaling up the content production also means a bonus to topical relevance.

The future plan is as straightforward as the results have been so far. Scale the content production and add some display ads and affiliate offers into the mix. Projects start to get interesting once they can pay for their own growth so that’s the first milestone we’re aiming for.

Given the potential RPM of the niche and the ease of content production, if this growth continues anywhere near this rate it could have a positive cash flow within a couple of months. For an SEO project that isn’t half bad.

I wish all my case studies were this easy. ‘I published a few dozen articles and my traffic went up almost 5x‘.
 
i subscribe your channel, hoping you will release more videos in the future
 
Do you outsource the contenr or you write it yourself?
 
Quick update today. I touched on this site in a roundup video for the last couple of weeks and I've not been focusing on it as much as I should - but this needs to change.

The site is doing well. I haven't been publishing much to it (for reasons I'll get to in a moment) but everything we publish gets indexed quickly and ranks fast. On top of that, I'm pretty sure the EPMV for the niche is going to be higher than I expected and I think I found some underserved affiliate opportunities.

The content structure I put together was a little rough around the edges since it was a bit of a punt but now that it's seeing some good traction I want to take some time to improve the quality and then really put the foot on the gas. It should be easy to find a hobbyist that knows the niche for a decent price.

The thing that has been holding me back? I think I've just exposed this site to more people than I normally would. At this point, I'm pretty sure I'm going to reveal the domain and/or flip it fairly early and I normally don't do either of these things so I've always been in two minds about devoting resources to it.

Looking at it today, I think it's time to really focus on it though.

i subscribe your channel, hoping you will release more videos in the future
Cheers. :) I've been slacking a little lately as I've had some stuff going on but I'm trying to get more consistent with it.
What's your article length like?
It varies. I think most of the content is 1-1.5k but I've got plans for both longer and shorter form. I think people put too much focus on this though, there are some big sites out there with 200-word pages. Just answer the users query and get them to take action on something or visit more pages/ads.
Do you outsource the contenr or you write it yourself?
A mix of both. This site has had a ton of outsourced content and I've done a bit of the more recent stuff to test a new content hub. I think I'm going to find someone who really knows the topic to handle it for me going forward.
 
It's been a while since I've done an aged domain case study and, this time, I have a little twist. I wanted to take an aged domain up against a site with a lot of traffic and a low DR. This is something I've been looking at for a couple of weeks now and, spoiler alert, this happens.


image.png


That - is some parabolic growth of about 15x in the space of a few weeks - and it's still growing.


I bought a couple of sites last year and this one cost me around $11,000. I'll talk about how that site was set up at some point but the results were pretty underwhelming and I'd just left it on the backburner.

I was actually considering just flipping it at a loss and letting someone else grow it when I stumbled into this little gem.


image-1.png

Note: this isn't my domain. It's a competitor with much lower authority.

For anyone who doesn't know what they're looking at - this is a site getting a fair chunk of traffic but with very few backlinks. Very little authority in the eyes of a search engine and it just so happens to be in the same niche as the $10,000 site I bought.

On top of that? It's a multi-trillion dollar market which means there are plenty of products to sell or adverts to run on the site.

If that wasn't enough? The content is so incredibly easy to reproduce (and improve on).

It's mostly numbered lists and in these topics, the Google results pages are usually a war of who can get the higher count. Users will click the top 14 over the top 13 and that higher clickthrough can really help speed things up.

So I spent a little time with a script that helps me replace their top 13 with a top 50. I produce a much bigger list in very little time and can pay a freelancer to help tidy things up. Presto, we have much better content in very little time and our aged domain has a lot more authority than the competitor.

Our end result will hopefully be that a big chunk of that traffic goes to my site instead. We'll run some ads and turn that backburnered projected into a new cash flow.


giphy.gif



On top of this - the growth on that chart is after very little content was published as a proof of concept and it hasn't had a whole lot of time to age in. Now that I know we're able to compete in this market the goal is pretty straightforward. Published a lot more content and get some ads in place.

This isn't really an exciting niche for me so a little down the line I might do a 'rank and reveal' for it or even just list the site on Flippa. My excitement for the project is just to test how easy it is to bully a low DR domain with an aged one. Depending on how workloads look it might even double as a case study on content velocity since it's relatively easy to produce.

It's an SEO case study (read: there won't be overnight results) but given the growth so far I'm motivated to keep it going and if that keeps up we'll start seeing some revenue numbers soon.
Is it you in the video?
 
Smart move buying aged domains + outsourcers for quick content scale.
 
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