expired domain - what to do with it?

rdlzr77 · Dec 21, 2020

Here are the stats of this domain as of today:

Niche: health services. Quite expensive, I assume. Traffic from USA.

First question would be: is this a good expired domain?

I got in in September and rebuild it with its original content (partially) from WayBack Machine. It went through the last google update without losing too much - I also monitor it with Serprobot.

No linkbuilding - just the original links. The information provided on the site is helpful.

Since I have near zero experience with expired domains turned into money sites, I want to ask you if I should keep it for link juice or I should use it as a money site. Because, here's the thing...

Let's say the domain is mostly about niche "A". For the articles related to niche "A", I get traffic as it is now.

But some articles are collateral to niche "A", let's say I get 5-6 articles for niche "A1", "A2" etc. For these, I have no traffic.

If I turn it to a money site, the niche would be "C", pretty far away from "A" but somehow in the same area.

Not sure if I should turn it into a money site or leave it and use it in six months as a link-juicer for a new domain.

Edit: the website is not monetized in any way.

Tobii1953 · Dec 21, 2020

Depends on a lot of things. I think @Nargil has a lot of knowledge about expired domains

Nargil · Dec 21, 2020

There's absolutely no way to judge whether that domain is even usable. What you see there on that pic is maybe 5% of the required info.

Backlink quality, anchors, historic anchors, Archive history, Whois Domaintools history, hosting history, etc.

DeadJoe · Dec 22, 2020

rdlzr77 said:
Here are the stats of this domain as of today:
View attachment 156089

Niche: health services. Quite expensive, I assume. Traffic from USA.

First question would be: is this a good expired domain?

I got in in September and rebuild it with its original content (partially) from WayBack Machine. It went through the last google update without losing too much - I also monitor it with Serprobot.

No linkbuilding - just the original links. The information provided on the site is helpful.

Since I have near zero experience with expired domains turned into money sites, I want to ask you if I should keep it for link juice or I should use it as a money site. Because, here's the thing...

Let's say the domain is mostly about niche "A". For the articles related to niche "A", I get traffic as it is now.

But some articles are collateral to niche "A", let's say I get 5-6 articles for niche "A1", "A2" etc. For these, I have no traffic.

If I turn it to a money site, the niche would be "C", pretty far away from "A" but somehow in the same area.

Not sure if I should turn it into a money site or leave it and use it in six months as a link-juicer for a new domain.

Edit: the website is not monetized in any way.

If the domain is good, you can definitely pivot into a related niche. I am doing this right now with excellent results, just do it sensibly. If your site is about condoms, you can sell Viagra and sex dolls on it, you just have to be smart about it. Create a different category and add content.

At the end of the day, it will come down to keyword research. You need to find keywords that have little to no competition in the SERPs.

rdlzr77 · Dec 22, 2020

Nargil said:
There's absolutely no way to judge whether that domain is even usable. What you see there on that pic is maybe 5% of the required info.

Backlink quality, anchors, historic anchors, Archive history, Whois Domaintools history, hosting history, etc.

Anchors are good and not spammy at all. There are good and legit backlinks from good medical sites, legit .edu backlinks, vice.com, slate, wikipedia and others.

I have no hosting history.

From my own research, the domain had two previous owners. Both from in the same field/niche. The domain used to have much more traffic, but I've found something which might look like a negative seo attack after which the domain was dropped (due to some google penalty, traffic also went down).

The second owner took the domain and promoted his services. It was basically a one page domain, nothing more. The chart above clearly shows why the second owner decided to let it go.

Oh, I forgot. Prior to my purchase, the site was hacked and had a security issue which was solved after I purchased it.

No new backlinks were built in 2019 and 2020. There are obviously backlinks from scraping sites and other zero value sources.

Looking at these, one might say it's not a good idea to make it a money site. On the other hand, there's nothing left to lose, right?

Nargil · Dec 22, 2020

So, bottom line:

- Spammed
- Abused as some one pager PBN
- Based on Ahrefs possibly manually penalized
- Hacked

Not sure what's there to even think about.

Keep in mind, decent, top TLD clean health domains with 100 RD go for like $500 or more.

If this is a scraped top TLD domain, then you won't find anything clean with RD above 50 and rarely anything with RD above 20 if you do it manually without analyzing tens of thousands of domains.

Especially not in health niche.

rdlzr77 · Dec 22, 2020

My theory is/was that first owner just got lucky with the traffic. The site had good content and natural backlinks, therefore the traffic you see prior to 2018.

I've found in Bing web console (but not in GSC) a lot of russian xxx domains pointing to it. It looked like an "attack" but it should not be a reason for that massive traffic drop. Should be something else, but I couldn't find anything.

Second owner hijacked the first owner, promoting his/her own services, but did not regain traffic so the domain was dropped a second time. Second owner did not set up redirects or anything, just registered the domain and from "therapist x" turned into "therapist y". It wasn't used as a PBN.

There was no manual penalty when I verified the domain on GSC. Only a security issue which was solved in 24h.

Nargil said:
Keep in mind, decent, top TLD clean health domains with 100 RD go for like $500 or more.

Got it via snapnames for $75. But I know what you're saying, I saw very good domains at dropcatch going much higher than $500.

In the end, what should I do with it?

Keep it for testing? I have a bunch of pretty good content ready to be used...

themvf · Dec 22, 2020

Entirely depends on what links are posted to it. I own a few health niche PBN sites, mostly ex National Health Service websites.

The main things I watch out for these days are:

Are the links still in place.
Has the domain been used for PBN or fake designer goods/Chinese crap lately.
Has it been blasted with Tiered backlinks.

Anyway, sounds like you got a good deal for $75. Build a neat replacement site on there and re-use some of the old content from Wayback Machine and you should be good.

rdlzr77 · Dec 22, 2020

themvf said:
Are the links still in place.

Has the domain been used for PBN or fake designer goods/Chinese crap lately.

Has it been blasted with Tiered backlinks.

1. All important links are in place. Old urls are 301 (via .htaccess, no redirection plugins) to new urls, made from original content. These restored posts do have traffic.
2. No/No.
3. No blasting as far as I can see. 90% of links were gained before 2018. The rest is noise, but absolutely no blasting.

At least I could try something, with 99% chances of failure in mind.

moneyguru2013 · Dec 22, 2020

The domain doesn't have much authority but it is ranking for a couple of keywords , so you need to check to see if those are money keywords (keywords that will lead to a purchase). It is also important to check the spam score or backlinks history to see if those backlinks are good.

Nargil · Dec 22, 2020

rdlzr77 said:
My theory is/was that first owner just got lucky with the traffic. The site had good content and natural backlinks, therefore the traffic you see prior to 2018.

I've found in Bing web console (but not in GSC) a lot of russian xxx domains pointing to it. It looked like an "attack" but it should not be a reason for that massive traffic drop. Should be something else, but I couldn't find anything.

Second owner hijacked the first owner, promoting his/her own services, but did not regain traffic so the domain was dropped a second time. Second owner did not set up redirects or anything, just registered the domain and from "therapist x" turned into "therapist y". It wasn't used as a PBN.

There was no manual penalty when I verified the domain on GSC. Only a security issue which was solved in 24h.

Got it via snapnames for $75. But I know what you're saying, I saw very good domains at dropcatch going much higher than $500.

In the end, what should I do with it?

Keep it for testing? I have a bunch of pretty good content ready to be used...

In my career, out of thousands of domains, I've seen probably 10 clean ones on Snapnames ever.

All in all, that domain has been abused to hell and back and is unusable. You can set up some content on it, maybe it will do something, but I wouldn't have my hopes up.

And even if it gets indexed, it might simply never rank effectively ever.

Also, if that domain were decent, there would be two dozen bidders on it and as I said, price would be much higher. There's reason why that domain has been dropped and why nobody has bid on it.

rdlzr77 · Dec 22, 2020

Nargil said:
Also, if that domain were decent, there would be two dozen bidders on it and as I said, price would be much higher. There's reason why that domain has been dropped and why nobody has bid on it.

Exactly my thoughts after Snapnames got it and entered the auction. I was the one who requested it and also the only bidder. I began to think about it after I saw some traffic building around it in the last months.

Will try something there, but no high hopes or anything. Thanks you, guys, for the support!

expired domain - what to do with it?

rdlzr77

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