Is Buying Expired Domains For Backlinks Still A Worthwhile Tactic?

PBNs seem to be all the rage at the moment and while they do work well, it can be expensive. I have been slowly working through this whenever I can afford it, but its slow...because my money site isn't earning a huge amount of money.

I have been looking over some expired domains in my niche and theres backlinks from sites that I would like to have backlinks from. The downside is the anchor text and the reference page are unrelated to keywords that I am trying to rank for. If I am paying like $10 per domain, is there any advantage in me buying a few dozen of these expired domains, disvowing the bad links and redirecting the good ones to my home page? $10 for just one of these backlinks seems like money well spent, but since the backlink is unrelated to any keywords i am pushing, is it a waste?

Is there any value in unrelated backlinks these days or is google smart enough to catch that I have just bought an expired domain and have used a 301 to pass all the juice to the homepage of my main site?

Why would you be disavowing a few spammy links? Ideally, try to get as clean domains as possible and even if there is a spam link here and there (you will never get 100% clean domain ever), then just keep them as they are. Keep in mind though, that you should properly check the domain. Not "I checked Ahrefs and Wayback" kind of "properly".

Domains can be unrelated. It's called repurposing, more about that here - https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/c...osts-metrics-spam-and-niche-relevancy.916518/

Ideally though, you want niche relevant domains, but those simply can't happen in some of the niches. Also, keep in mind that finding a decent and clean domain is nowadays quite a task.

Wow, that was a fantastic read. I'm a little deflated after reading it though. I have spent most of my day sifting through domains, checking backlinks. Seems like the immediate 301 method is pointless. I'd rather put the time and effort into targeting more keywords with my primary site than working on some garbage site. While I am very let down, I should thank you as you have saved me from wasting me entire weekend on this.

In regard to your comments about disvowing spammy links, why would anyone leave them? I have been using the backlink audit with SEMrush and it's pretty pushy when it finds spammy links. It makes sense to disassociate your site from them doesn't it?

Disavow tool should be the last resort. Plus, adding separate Webmaster tools to every single PBN domain you have (just do not tell me that you have them all in the same account please) is tedious, annoying and unnecessary. Just as disavowing spammy links overall. If the domain isn't penalized or toxic and works well, what's the point of disavowing them? Unless there is some massive issue, do not ever touch that tool.

how do you guys find domains that are related to your niche?

ThirstyForKnowledge said:

how do you guys find domains that are related to your niche?

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I was just searching for domains with a keyword in the domain name.

ThirstyForKnowledge said:

how do you guys find domains that are related to your niche?

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There are quite a few number of tools out there or contact @Nargil

danoseo said:

I was just searching for domains with a keyword in the domain name.

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You can also check archived.org to see the content for correctly assessing the niche