Before anyone out there buys one of these domains for SEO-purposes:
I work as a technical-SEO consultant and we had the funny idea of checking all these domains about a year ago: None of them are worth buying! None of them has any SEO-potential!
- the page-rank passed from milliondollarhomepage.com to these domains is minimal (huge PR divided through tons of links is worthless)
- domains expired for a long time get some sort of "reset" from Google (we experimented with this - strong domains last used years ago do not rank faster than "fresh" domains)
Therefore, in the case of PageRank and SEO-potential: It is better to try to buy domains of local companies in your area that went out of business. These are much stronger.
And in general: Buying old domains for backlinks is a waste of time. Getting high-quality backlinks from legit sites and improving your own domain in regards to technical optimization and usability is much more effective - and scalable.
In my opinion: It's neither ethical nor necessary!
There are easier ways to get a website ranked. Publishing good and useful content, creating a valuable product, optimizing your site (for crawlers and users), and following a sane marketing strategy is much more important than backlinks and page rank. I never had any problems outranking poorly made sites that had a much "stronger" link-profile than my sites.
Needless to say: You will also build a better product/business if you do not waste your focus on cheap SEO-tricks ...
But I do not judge people using these tactics: SEO is daunting-game and - as long as Google acts as intransparent and unpredictable as it has in the past - people will focus on "esoteric" tactics.
> Publishing good and useful content, creating a valuable product
I follow a lot of indie game development forums, and one of the most striking things to me is how many people want to hit success with garbage casual mobile games by focusing heavily on app store tips and tricks.
This sounds like a diplomatic answer so you don't get downvoted. You say you are "technical-SEO consultant" then you say SEO tricks are useless and one should only create good contents and SEO will take care of itself. What are you useful for then (as a consultant)?
Because people need to be told this. Over and over again.
A highly-paid medical doctor saying "You need to eat less and exercise more to lose weight" is not unexpected. The problem is that people really want to eat crap and not exercise and still be healthy.
I (an industrial controls engineer) worked on a website for my employer's small business some years ago. I was given about 40 hours to design and implement the website to describe some 200 products that we've built over the years. Some had pictures, and some even had manuals. Most had some kind of a spreadsheet entry, but between Google (now Open) Refine and some intern hours we had a product page for each. "Magic algorithmic keyword SEO juice" was the desired strategy, such that each product page ought to zoom to the top of Google results for its search term, and I (not being a technical SEO consultant) was unable to effectively convince my boss that hiding 100 copies of the title and thesaurus-generated synonyms in white-on-white text at 0 point at the bottom of the page was not the way to do it, and that linking to it from a useful and therefore popular page would work better.
A lot of small businesses view documentation as pure overhead, to be minimized at all costs. The idea that you'd have a project manager or engineer write up the email you sent (or phone call you narrated) describing how to calibrate an XYZ blagometer, copy edit it, add some diagrams, and post it as an article or whitepaper to improve future sales is viewed as wasteful and not worth the effort.
The SEO industry is like the weight loss industry. When you hear an SEO consultant advocate creating good content, that means they're one of the good ones. If you hear them describe miracle cures, they're a hack.
Technical SEO - as I use the term - describes tasks like the following:
1) Performance optimization (One of the most important tasks)
It's basically me telling my clients that their Devs were right all along and that they have to improve their site's speed
2) UX feedback (Help in terms of usability and user experience because unusable sites will rank much worse on Google)
This is basically me telling my clients that their "fancy" 200.000 $ redesign will never rank in Google and that they have to use a "boring" design. (Their Devs were right again ...)
3) Improve internal linking (Prioritize important pages with high search volume, deprioritize less important pages)
More complicated, but this is one of the most important tasks for "big" websites (e-commerce, news, travel, ...) and one of the biggest levers to improve rankings
A lot of other related tasks are not that easy to explain for me in text (I am a non-native English speaker and this comment already took me 20 minutes up until here ...) and my guidelines vary from website to website.
But, essentially, I help clients to adhere to web standards and optimize their websites for their users. The last "spammy" backlink I build for a project other than my side-projects (experiments) was probably more than 5 years ago ...
SEO tricks are useless, but that's not the same as saying SEO is useless:
> optimizing your site (for crawlers and users), and following a sane marketing strategy
That's a lot of what (non-jerky) SEO is these days.
One can argue that it's not something worth hiring an SEO consultant for, as there's enough info floating around out there to do this yourself if you're moderately savvy. But there are folks who aren't savvy about that sort of thing, as well as folks who think it's just worth paying someone else to worry about it.
If you buy the storefront of a company that went out of business, keep the signage so their old customers will come in looking for them, and install a conveyor belt that whisks them directly to your store instead, yeah, that's unethical.
There's honestly not a great meatspace analogy to the situation, no matter how you look at it. But it's clearly not the same as just buying foreclosed real estate.
My local convience store is called Tom's.. It has been around for many years. The current chinese owners never changed the name nor the owners before. Same sign, same products.. nothing unethical.
Kind of like when a big company buys a smaller company and keeps the brand name.
Exactly. If it's basically the same business under new management, there's nothing wrong with keeping the name. If it's a new business with no relationship to the old, trading on the name to grant false credibility and bring confused customers into their own shop, that's unethical.
I can imagine circumstances where I’d find it ethical, for example when the expired domain name in itself is useful to you (say, you want to move your own site to wisconsincarpetcleaners.com instead of .info or whatever)
If you do it only to freeload off someone else’s reputation, that doesn’t seem great to me. For the comparison to real-estate, I have nothing to add beyond what PhasmaFelis wrote.
What Google has done over the years is thwart some of the scummy SEO practices by penalizing websites that do it; a big part of current-day SEO practices are to make your website conform to web and content standards. Basically, turn it into a decent site.
There's still the black market SEO where people hire spambots to send links, but that's been thwarted / voided by just adding a nofollow to links in user generated content like comments.
It depends on the type of SEO. SEO includes, for instance, making sure that your page loads quickly when otherwise you wouldn’t have prioritized that. A lot of it is unethical though.
> Therefore, in the case of PageRank and SEO-potential: It is better to try to buy domains of local companies in your area that went out of business. These are much stronger.
I never understood how this works.
What do you do with these domains? Do you just redirect them to the main business site or do you create a supporting site on them that heavily links to the business site?
Anyway the old domains won't get any new attention if you don't work on that and then you can just can work on your main domain.
> Anyway the old domains won't get any new attention if you don't work on that and then you can just can work on your main domain.
It doesn't have to get any attention. Links (or a redirect, or other things) from it will still (massively, depending on the quality of the domain) improve your ranking.
You could also throw some unrelated content on it, and will likely rank for quite a while until somebody complains loud enough that Google manually sets up a -100 on your domain.
Is this domain-name-is-everything.nonsense still a thing? Not in SEO myself, but even a few years back, the ranking was heavily shifted towards actual content, never mind the domain name.
>And in general: Buying old domains for backlinks is a waste of time. Getting high-quality backlinks from legit sites and improving your own domain in regards to technical optimization and usability is much more effective - and scalable.
Yeah no kidding. Like saying that a 5 star hostel is nicer than 1 star one. Obviously, it's much more epxnsive. If buying a $11 expired domain is good enough to help get the page indexed, then it may be worth it even if does not help your rankings.
>Therefore, in the case of PageRank and SEO-potential: It is better to try to buy domains of local companies in your area that went out of business. These are much stronger.
yea this is old method that is saturated. there are many of ppl with programs scanning for expired domains
Most of the author's arguments are compelling, but I am very skeptical if any app in the west will ever reach super app status.
Regulators are already considering actions against FANG, although, if compared to Tencent, neither Google's or Facebook's positions in the market seem that threatening at all ...
Building a "real" super app might actually be dangerous for any company int the west.
Disclaimer: Non native english speaker - I am doing my best so please ignore my errors...
I read a bunch of the books on the list the most interesting to me that I have not read for now are:
- The Content Trap: A Strategist's Guide to Digital Change
- Stealing Fire
- Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought
- The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future
Has anybody here on HN read those? Are these any good? I am usually quite sceptical regarding Amazon recommendations (or some random CEOs thoughts), but most of the time love books recommended on HN...
In turn my thoughts about some of the books on the list:
- Shoe Dog: Probably the best and most inspiring biography/memoir of any entrepreneur I have ever read. If you are thinking about starting a company or are a founder you will love it!
- Sapiens: Fantastic book that completely shattered parts of my worldview. In my opinion a must read for everyone! (Gave it away as a present for many of my friends - almost everybody liked it)
- Extreme Ownership: The best book regarding leadership I have ever read. At first I was skeptical about the "military-parts" of the book, but they have been useful in illustrating the underlying principles the book covers. If you are in any leadership position (top management, middle management or leader of a very small team) it is definitely worth your money.
>The Content Trap: A Strategist's Guide to Digital Change -
I read that book and it's not bad. The main idea is that having a mindset of being protective of your content is flawed. The bigger opportunity is "network effects" like community, crowdsourcing, etc. It's the platform, not the content.
Hi - I know some tools report a slow site in this case, but these reports are not accurate - don't believe them! Google is not that stupid ! :D
I am currently working as a dev in an SEO-Agency (in Austria), and we never believed this hypothesis - so we tested this once with a bunch of our sites:
When moving sites with a German speaking audience to a VPS in America, your rankings at google.de/google.at will decrease (slightly - the effect is not that big) - the other way around your rankings will improve (slightly).
However - even if your rankings would improve when moving to America I would recommend keeping your sites hosted in Europe: The increase in rankings will not offset the decrease in user satisfaction and therefore the decline in your conversion rates.
We regularly test different things, but few are as extensive as this "server location test".
This one was quite easy to do - and to revert - even when doing it for a lot of sites: just duplicate your sites on another continent and change your dns-settings.
Sadly we do not blog about this stuff. As our customers are not particularly fond of sharing their data - and blog posts without precise data are not useful at all...
Additionally, most of our assumptions and hypotheses were wrong. So most of our blogsposts would sound like:
"We thought google would work like this, but sadly we were wrong"
SEOs might like these posts - but potential customers probably not so much :D
- values ranging vom 320 - 410 for a bunch of German speaking sites hosted in Europe
- and values of 221 and 240 for my two English speaking sites hosted in America (via firebase - on googles own infrastructure)
So if you are concerned with your crawl budget, I think you better focus on things like:
- On-site duplicate content
- Soft error pages
- and Low quality and spam content
Plus you could also get some high quality backlinks.
And please be aware that the crawl frequency does not directly influence your rankings. So, as long as your do not really have a big problem regarding your crawl budget, you may spend your time wiser if you focus on other metrics.
PS: You may already know the tools, but others could be interested:
If you want to optimize you sites performance in respect to SEO use the following tools:
Choose a server near you and aim for a Speed-Index of maximum 3000 - I personally target 1000, but depending on your influence regarding the website's frontend you will not be able to achieve this.
> Choose a server near you and aim for a Speed-Index of maximum 3000 - I personally target 1000, but depending on your influence regarding the website's frontend you will not be able to achieve this.
For some comparison results: Uncached, with my own CMS indexing and analyzing a 6GB database of crashdumps and providing an overview with graphs over that, I get a score of 623. (This running on a 9€/mo dedicated server).
