Money Schemes - Learn How To Make Money Online

Welcome to the second in my series on alternative to using Shoemoney tools. This time I’m going to show you a free way of finding expired domain names that have valuable backlinks/traffic that you can buy up for cheap and use to your advantage. Shoemoney gives you the domain marketplace for this, essentially a list of domains that his scrapers find that you can then buy the name off. It’s then up to you to decide whether or not you want to purchase the domain.

In my opinion there are a couple of flaws with this. For a start you don’t know what niche the domain you are buying relates to. Relevency is everything! Secondly you can’t check how valuable the links actually are. For example the Domain Marketplace may indicate that a domain has .edu backlinks. Whilst that sounds great it might not be so great if the actual link comes from a domain blacklist on one of the university bulletin boards! You won’t find this out until you’ve paid your money to Shoe.

Now what I was going to do here was show you how to use a couple of websites to extract that same information and find valuable expired domain names. However in reality I wrote a little program for myself. I figured it wouldn’t be too much of a job just to touch it up a bit and let you guys use it so that’s what I’m going to show you how to use.

First of all you can download the Find Good Expired Domains tool using this link. You’ll also need the .net framework version 2 or better to use the software, you can download that from here.

OK. Now that’s done start the program and you’ll be greeted with a nice simple screen. Your first job is to decide what keyword you want in the domain name (see the advantage this has over the domain marketplace already?). Type in the keyword and hit the “Get Domains From Source 1″ button. At this point DO NOT CHECK FOR DOMAIN AVAILABILITY. This causes the program to go off and find domains that have expired at one point or another, they may not be currently expired but we can check for that later.

After a little wait you’ll get a popup telling you how many domains are available. Press Yes to go and get all that extra info about each domain. See if there is any lingering Page Rank, back links, .edu.gov.mil back links, any Alexa traffic etc If there are thousands of results you may want to narrow your search.

Depending on the number of domains this process can take a while. Also note that if you were to check for availability it will take a hell of a lot longer that’s why I recommend not doing it at this point. There is no point checking for a domain being available when it might not be of any value right?

Once it’s finished checking all the domains (or as in my example you get fed up waiting and hit stop) you’re left with a list of domain details. Now I recommend that you order the domains by each column (Links, DMOZ Listing etc etc) and switch tabs at the top to the Check Domains tab.

You should now be able to copy and paste the domain names that are of value into the box on the Check Domains tab. Do that for each column, so for example if there are 11 domains that have some backlinks highlight all those domain names and copy them to the box. Then order by DMOZ listing and do the same for any domains that are in DMOZ. Carry on doing this for each column (domains that have edu links, domains that have some Alexa ranking) and don’t worry about copying the same domain name twice.

Once you’ve got your complete list of domains that have some value you can then go ahead and check each to see if it’s available. On the Check Domains tab hit the “Check Domains” button. The program will go and check each domain to make sure it is 100% available to buy right now. This will take some time, roughly 5-6 seconds per domain.

Now that’s complete you can order them by availability and see if there are any domains worth buying. In my example below the best domain is probably a2zmakemoney.com but with only 4 links would I be bothered to spend $8 a year on it? That’s your call! Of course if I would have left the program to run in the first place I may have found many many much more valuable domains

It’s also worth noting that just because a domain isn’t currently available doesn’t mean it’s not worth persuing. In my example the domain 101waystomakemoney.com is not available to buy right now BUT if you check the URL you’ll find that no website exists. The owner is doing nothing with it. Who knows, doing a quick whois lookup and contacting the owner might land you with a domain with 287 backlinks and some traffic for only a few dollars!

So that’s all fine and dandy but how do you get value from these domains. The easy approach and the one that the great Shoemoney himself advocates is to simply 301 redirect them on to one of your existing content sites. Those links then get credited to your existing domain. Does this work? Yes it does. When originally writing this program I was checking for Thailand related domains, I found one for an insurance company that had 30-40 links. I 301′d this on to my Thai related site and within 2 weeks was in the top 5 in Google for certain insurance related searches. It’s a ranking that has held for months and brought some nice traffic. An absolute bargain for only $8 a year domain registration!

The other way is to buy the domains to build quality content on. That’s obviously a much longer term game than just forwarding but again that’s upto you to decide!

So that’s how I go about finding valuable expired domains, use, enjoy and let me know how you get on. Now here comes comes the disclaimer:

By all means use my Find Expired Domains tool but please be aware that this is free software. It’s not to be bundled re-packaged in any way and sold. It’s also worth noting that that is a very early release and is bound to have bugs, whilst it shouldn’t cause your computer to burst into flames if it does it’s not my fault! Use it at your own risk. Just one final point, some of the API’s used may have usage limits, for example the Yahoo back links check has a limit of 5,000 checks in any 24 hours. Just keep it in mind.

I hate to break this to you, I’m not sure how to say it nicely so I’ll just come out with it….BEING A TOP COMMENTER ON A WELL KNOWN BLOG HAS NO SEO BENEFIT AT ALL!

When I first started this blog I spent a lot of time commenting on other blogs to get that “valued” followed link. I’ve since stopped. What affect did you think losing all these links would have on my Google rankings? It’s made no difference, sweet FA. My rankings have held steady, many months with no negative effect, if anything I noticed an increase in my positions when I stopped commenting.

So what this tells me is that if you’ve got a blog with the top commenter plug-in enabled that it’s very easy for Google to identify it and discount outbound links. Lets face facts here, it’s hardly the greatest algorithmic challenge in the world to identify blogs that have the plug-in installed. If you can do a Google search to find blogs that have it do you really think that Google would let this simple gaming of their system continue? The fact that it’s a followed link that the page author hasn’t approved means that it’s ripe for Google penalisation.

Of course there are some benefits, you might get a little bit of referral traffic (if your comments are interesting enough) but is it an efficient way of using your time? I don’t think so. If you’re the sort of sad bast…. that spends hours replying to every comment on every post then this is a wake up call for you. Stop commenting on other people’s blogs and spend a little time writing GOOD content for your own instead.

I’ve now had a good chance to test ping backs and see if they are a valid way of gaining links and visitors. The theory is to link to other posts from your post in the hope of getting links back and visitors.

My conclusion – It’s a crock of shit.

I’ve spent time adding “related links” section to both old and new blog posts. All in I created over 1700 outbound followed links to other blog posts in the hope of getting links back. Out of those I actually got links back from less than 5%! Of all those links I can count the number of visitors (in a month) on 2 hands. In reality all I’ve done is provided votes for a huge number of sites and in return got back a few no-followed links and a couple of visitors.

So why do so many experts push this as an awesome link building strategy? My theory is that because it’s so easy to do. It takes no time to knock up a bit of software that uses the blog search engines/directories to find blog posts by keyword that accept ping backs. Auto generate a bit of HTML to copy into your post and you’re done, WordPress/Blogger takes care of the rest. Unfortunately most ping-backs have to be approved for a start. Have enough people think that what you’re doing is junk and you’ll find yourself in the Akismet auto spam category, trust me, I know!!! In the meantime you’re damaging your link profile by linking out to all and sundry. It’s very hard to damage your link profile by gaining “bad” links (because that’s out of your control), however it’s very easy to damage it by linking to bad sites. The ping-back method encourages this.

Overall this is a rubbish method for gaining links and traffic, don’t use it if you value your site. I’ve now got the fun job of going back through removing those links, oh joy.

Back in July of 2007 when I started themakemoneyonline.net I was very new to all things WordPress. I’d only ever used it once before, adding a blog to an existing website. That site was hosted on an IIS server so I was never really fussed about the SEO factors of using WordPress, I just needed a quick and simple content system. So in terms of getting a WordPress driven website to perform in the search engines this was my very first.

I do like WordPress. So much so that I’ve gone on to create probably another dozen websites using it as well as moving several old websites over. Yesterday though I discovered a problem that has been holding me back and it is something so simple that I’m positive there are plenty of people who have done the same.

Duplicate Content
Duplicate content is a simple 2 word phrase that can strike the fear of god into SEOs. WordPress’s biggest weakness (out of the box) is the high possibility of picking up a duplicate content penalty. Or at the very least having the wrong content indexed. This is where the robots.txt file helps. At the moment mine looks like this:-

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /go/
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /author/
Disallow: */page/*
Disallow: /wp-images/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /backup/
Disallow: /banners/
Disallow: /archives/
Disallow: */trackback/
Disallow: */feed/
Disallow: /*?*

User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Allow: /wp-content/uploads/

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Allow: /

User-agent: duggmirror
Disallow: /

There is one vital thing missing…I don’t exclude tag pages! It’s because when I first started using WP there were no tags. Since then they’ve been added and I’ve started tagging posts across the majority of my WordPress websites. Depending on your template but for the vast majority, a tag page is given much more authority than the actual post itself (it’s all to do with the tag cloud in your template). This results in lots of non keyword targeted tag pages that although indexed don’t rank anywhere whilst your targeted posts end up ignored. It’s a lose-lose situation.

I recently started a new blog where this became apparent. Within the first week I had 20 pages indexed in Google. The home page, 2 posts and 17 tag pages. The home page brings a tiny amount of organic traffic (it’s still very new). The 2 posts that are keyword targeted and indexed are already in the top 3 results of Google for their keywords and bringing targeted traffic. However the tag pages that have been indexed are nowhere in the first 3 pages of search results, even when you search for their title. The posts that contain the content similar to what is on the tag pages aren’t indexed at all.

The really simple solution here is a 5 second fix. All I need to do is add “Disallow: /tag/” to my robots.txt file.

When I was told this by one expert I dismissed it. When I was told it by a second expert I assumed he’d found out from the first and still ignored it. However by the time I was being preached to by the third expert about this I thought maybe there was something in it.

I’m talking about gaining extra backlinks for your posts. At the end of the day the SEO battle will come down to links, whoever has the most valued, relevant links will win. Unfortunately link building also happens to be the most tedious part of building a website. It is usually a toss up of getting low value links quickly or spending lots of time getting a few valued links. The method that I’ve heard is about getting relevant links quickly and easily.

Just 2 of the places I’ve seen this featured include Shoemoney’s Marketing Tools and Market Samurai. With those endorsements surely it will work? Every bone in my body is telling me it’s too spammy to be anything good but these guys are endorsing it. Shoemoney does it for Christ’s sake! There are paid tools to make it easier. People pay to be able to use this method So I’m going to give it a go and see what happens. If it does work I’ll be letting you know a free way of making it work for you too. If it doesn’t work then just pretend this post never existed.

I spent all of yesterday creating a new content website, I think I’ve found another one of those little niches that whilst it won’t make you rich it will easily make an instant profit for relatively little work. I was going to go trough my usual routine of hooking up whatever related content I have to it and giving it that launch pad, it’s a great way of getting an almost instant return (on that massive $8 domain expense!)

Instead though I’m going to do something a little different with this one. What happens if you’re totally new to this game? If you don’t have a set of established websites to help Google find your new website? I’m treating this website as if it is my very first, I’m new and I want my site appearing “somewhere” in the search results. If you didn’t know any better and you believed all those adverts out there for services to “get your site indexed quick” you’d think that indexing was a slow process, does it really take days, weeks or months? I’m going to try and find out.

My strategy to test this is simple, I’m only going to use the resources that are 100% under my control to get my site indexed. I just want indexed at the moment, I’m not bothered about where in the SERPs I appear. So first things first, I’ve gone and created a sitemap. I prefer to use this rather funky and fully featured sitemap generator. I then sign up at Google’s Webmaster Tools website and create an entry for my new domain. The webmaster tools allow me to verify me website (confirming that I own it) and then I can submit the sitemap that I generated. Google are now aware of not only my website, but also the individual URLs for the pages that make up that website. I consider that an essential step with any website I create.

The second thing I want to do is get some free back links, I need quick back links from pages that the search engines crawl and follow frequently. Sounds like a bit of a challenge doesn’t it? Not really though. There are a number of services out there that have detailed reports on domains (age traffic etc), one of the easiest ways of getting a few quick back links is to check for your new domain with these services. This automatically creates a page for your site at their end, these sites tend to be getting crawled all the time. So I’ve checked my domain out at the following places (just replace yourdomainhere.com):-

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/main/yourdomainhere.com

http://www.urltrends.com/viewtrend.php?url=www.yourdomainhere.com

http://www.iwebtool.com/pagerank_checker?domain=www.yourdomainhere.com

http://www.toolurl.com/search-domains.php?url=www.yourdomainhere.com

And that’s all I’ve done. I didn’t want to create forum users and post enough to get a signature, I didn’t want to rely on having blog comments not only approved but followed. Basically I’ve done this as simple as possible just to see how long it takes before some of my pages start to appear. I’ll be checking it every morning and will let you know as soon as I’ve got any pages indexed, my guess is 3-4 days.

I’m not a religious person but I do believe in Karma (it’s got nothing to do with “My Name Is Earl”). Seeing as how I’ve been feeling a little unlucky lately I’ve decided to try and swing Karma back in my favour….by giving. From now on this blog is a DoFollow Blog. All comments are followed for SEO purposes. I’d really like to keep it that way so I’m going to have to have quite a strict anti-spam policy, I already use a couple of plug-ins but I’ll also be rejecting anything that isn’t relative to the post (No one worders, sorry) In short, as long as you keep it on topic you’ll not have anything to worry about and should gain some link juice.

Peace out brothers and sisters.

Some of you might have noticed that I’ve added another page to the top, it’s a listing of over 1200 free link directories. It also contains all that other info that’s important, Page Rank, Alexa rank, back links etc

But why would I do this? I hate link directories, buy a domain, buy a directory script and upload. Bingo, you are done. They are 10 a penny. With few exceptions I’ve never really valued their links so wouldn’t want them, never mind pay for them. Whilst that may have been true in the past, in the last couple of months I’ve had my eyes opened up to something that would just be stupid to ignore! I’ve spent years (6+) working on some of my websites, building original content, accumulating links the old fashioned (and slow) way. People who do this, who work the long way are relying on the algos from the search engines to do the right thing, to do what they say do and remove the spam, giving us a chance.

I’ve been fairly royally pissed off then to discover some of my sites being pushed down the SERPs by websites that are nothing more than scraped/re-published content. All of the search engines are aware of duplicate content, but it seems that one in particular can be fairly easily gamed because of its reliance on linking. If somebody can’t be bothered writing content what chance that they are going to the trouble of sourcing proper links, it’s a much more time consuming and difficult job? We all know Google’s bias on back-links in it’s algorithm, it’s also fairly widely known that that isn’t really any such thing as a bad in-bound link (if this was true we could all just scupper our competition). But what I wouldn’t expect is for people to rank well by doing nothing more than getting a couple of hundred back links from free link directories, but yet I’ve seen it happen. It’s not even like it’s part of a linking strategy, I’ve seen well ranked domains that only have back links from directories. I’m not talking about the most popular keywords here, it is after all niche marketing, but it seems that this is a viable and free way of ranking well. Sometimes for very profitable words.

So what are you supposed to do? Me, personally, I started collecting the URLS of link directories from anywhere I could find them. A lot was based on what was causing my competition to rank. I’ve now got a decent list that will accept free submissions. It’s just a case of slowly working my way through , spending 20 minutes a day doing manual submissions. My approved list is slowly starting to build so with any luck I should be started to see the affects of this soon. I can only hope that original content + quality back links + directory back links is better than scraped content + directory back links in Google’s eyes. I’ll keep my fingers crossed.