July 30th, 2009 Add Your Comments Bookmark and Share

I’ve been buying expired domains with back links for quite a while, a little over a year if my memory serves me right. In that time my approach has been to buy the domain and then 301 redirect it to one of my existing domains. The results have been OK if not spectacular. Sure those links can give an improvement in search rankings but it’s not the magic bullet I was hoping it may be. There had to be a better way of profiting from these expired domains, well last week I discovered it.

I say I discovered it, the truth is that I read about it in some top secret members only area. The idea was simple, somebody was buying up expired domains with links and then instead of forwarding them he was simply using the way back machine (or internet archive) to recreate some of what was on the website originally. Failing this any relevant content to the domain would do. The thing was once Google spidered those links with the content in place the page rank came piling back. Those domains could then be flipped – easy money.

So last week I thought I’d give it a shot. Pick a niche any niche – I decided on tattoos. I managed to find an expired tattoo related domain that had 47 backlinks and bought it. Unfortunately for me the old content was rubbish so I ended up sticking up WordPress and populated it with some free tattoo articles. Within 3 days I had a Page Rank 2 blog! I’ve just sold the domain name for $50. That domain cost me $8 to buy.

$42 doesn’t sound like a lot of profit but considering the amount of effort and risk involved I’m happy with that return. I’m happier still knowing that it’s something I can do over and over whenever I’m in the mood. In fact I have another waiting for the PR to be delivered right now. The other thing to think about is the niche you go into. There are plenty of websites on the internet that really struggle with getting backlinks (gambling, porn) and if you can find a couple of good even remotely related domains for these you could be on to some serious pay dirt.

If you’re wondering how I sold my domain then I didn’t bother with Sedo. I’ve given up using brokerages for this, all I did was e-mail some Tattoo website webmasters seeing if they’d like to buy it. Was very easy.

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