So I bought an expired domain in my niche. Primary topical trust flow is directly in my niche.
So now what? Is it best to set up a page on it with a link to my money site or should I 301 redirect the whole thing to some subpage on my money site?
As an aside, how much would you have expected to pay for this domain? (Just curious to see if I paid too much)
First, congratulations on your first purchase.
Second, you shouldn't ever buy shit without having a plan for it—otherwise you're going to end up wasting a lot of money. I say this, because I've wasted a lot of money before.
Metrics aren't going to tell you shit either, IMO. They're a great general descriptor but there's a lot of context you need to check out for yourself.
Some examples:
Website Age: If the domain was truly expired, and not picked up in auction—this gets reset anyway. If you went auction style, older sites can help rank IMO.
Referring Domains: If you have 1M links, but they're only from 150 unique domains—then you don't have shit. It's typical to have a considerably larger amount of backlinks than referring domains, but the ratio isn't to be ignored.
Context: Are your backlinks in editorial context, surrounding by relevant content? A bunch of comments or shitty little resource page links aren't going to give you the same amount of prowess.
Regarding your price, it's impossible to say. I've found $300 domains before that carry as much weight as anything I've ever seen listed for $10k, and I've seen domains sell for $1K that I wouldn't pay the registration fee for. The end determinant will be whether or not you make money with it.
Regarding your other concerns, 301'ing entire domains is hardly
ever a good decision anymore. Days passed; this was a good way to boost overall authority. There are still some ways to do this, though you need to be a bit more premeditated.
1.) 301 the domain to a single article on your website. Sometimes this is plausible, sometimes it's not. All things considered, it's passable more times than not. I usually look for domains with a small number of high quality backlinks with branded anchors for such, and then do a piece related to that former website. I noindex the page, and make sure to capture all related domain requests. For example, registrars like Godaddy will allow you to redirect a domain to a url like this: expireddomain.com —> your-other-domain.com/301-article/. However, Godaddy specifically (not sure about other registrars) do this is a really shitty way and don't account for urls like expireddomain.com/popular-article-url/. It'll throw a 404 on your website, and ultimately not do much good. To account for this, you can set up some simple redirection rules as such:
Code:
^/301-article/(.+) —> /301-article/
2.) Referrer-base redirects. This requires setting up at least minimal hosting for your domain, where you can specify unique 301 redirects for particular referring domains. For example, if you picked up an expired domain that had some strong links from sites like CNN, Forbes, MSNBC, BBC, etc. you could simply redirect backlink from
those websites to your new site, or new site article, while ignoring all the other backlinks (you could send them someplace random, or just ignore them completely). If done on a server level, this process looks something like this:
Code:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*bbc.co.uk.*$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*cnn.com.*$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*msnbc.com.*$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*forbes.com.*$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*foxnews.com.*$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*nbc.com.*$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*blackhatworld.com.*$
RewriteRule ^(.*) https://www.yourwebsite.com/301-article/ [R=301,L]
That would (somebody correct me if I'm wrong here) redirect any inbound referrals from the authority sites listed, to your chosen destination, while ignoring all others. Essentially, you'd be getting only the 'good stuff'. The caveat here, is that you can't just let this domain chill at the registrar level, it'd still need a unique IP in most cases, and you'd have to maintain it indefinitely.
Personally, If I pick up websites that are worth a shit I just build them out to become mini affiliate websites that can rake in enough money to pay for hosting and expenses. After that, I get a trickle of income and a self-sustaining PBN site for my own purposes in the future. If you can get a site making $15/mo. you can pay for great hosting (unique IP, daily backups, managed hosting,
super fast) and your yearly renewal fee. If you can't get a site making $15/mo, you should probably reconsider what you're doing with your life. Personally, I enjoy using these types of sites to test out new methods I think are a bit too risky or obnoxious for sites that I really care about.
