A Site Abandoned, Domain Dropped & Now Renewed Again. Happy Ending???

[Rob Lowem]

Hello all,

I'm back and that means long story time eh eh heeee.

This is a tale of a domain which I registered back in 2014 to use as a review site in the music and entertainment niche. Mainly through launch-jacking/clickbank products. It used to be worked on by my virtual assistant back then and had a lot of time and money invested into it.

In late 2015 my daughter was born and my Internet marketing business started to take a back seat to selling on Amazon. Amazon sales brought in money EVERYDAY and my review sites simply did not. I just didn’t have the time to focus on it while helping out with the baby.

Time flew by and my big list of domains accumulated for money sites and private linking started to expire one after the other. It got to a time, I simply ignored the warning emails from my various registrars. The domain in question expired this year on the 25th of March 2017. I remember seeing an email for final expiry warning and thinking to myself, ok this domain didn’t really make much money in its life-time, let it go.

Fast-forward to September and my 2 year old daughter is now independent and goes to kindergarten. I find myself with enough time and start making an inventory or what’s left of my online business.

I am logging in to all my affiliate accounts and stumble on to this.

Ok thats not bad. Nothing to throw away, 80 bucks pays for all of my hosting needs etc. I get into a quick dance

Which was quickly cut short by this

OH COMON...

Well, this was money generated by this same domain which expired in March, I immediately had a "bright idea". I was going to beg for my money to be paid. It was going to be something like this:

"Dear ..., I have affiliate commissions in my account but as I have moved on from the business and no longer have access to my website, could you please..........."

Then BOOOOOM, I woke up.

I realised this was the most stupid, loser idea I had month. Why don’t I see if I could get back my domain, my rankings and SMASH DOWN THE PAYMENT THRESHOLD with sales. I once ranked top 5 for the product name FFS...

So I rushed over to my domain registrar and the domain was gone. I had a feeling that it had just expired, but NO. That was 6 months ago. The domain was long gone.

I fire up the domain availability checker and there she was. A-FREAKING-VAILABLE. Thank you google for stopping public Pagerank. This domain would have been scooped up the moment it expired.

So I order my old domain back (this was the 30th of September 2017) and uploaded a backup of my old website then indexed the site with my video sitemap trick.

Here below is a screenshot with a sample of links I have been tracking for this site. As you can see the domain came back into the google rankings at the same or higher rankings compared to when it was deindexed.

The downward ranking movement before the domain expired is due to me losing my private blogs one after the other during my 2 year break from IM. As the links disappeared, the rankings slowly went down.

Upward movement after I got my domain back is me replacing expired linking domains with new ones. I have only replaced a small percentage of those domains as I now have better quality one and don’t need as many to rank better.

In conclusion - The moral of the story....

Well the simple point of this case is that, while MANY people claim that expired domains get their power reset by google, MY CASE (which is all I can claim to have experienced) is that this expired domain is maintaining a good amount of its power and trust from google.

It entered back higher in some cases and most of the posts are slowly creeping back to old positions even without backlinks. A new domain will NEVER have these position off the bat. There are just too many SEO savvy affiliates competing for some of these keywords I currently rank in the top 20 for

So even if my domain is now just 40+ days old, it seems to be performing like that domain that was 3 years old at the time of its expiry.

There are 100000s of "formerly loved" domains that expire every month due to simple life decisions or events. These domains if registered and loaded with their old content could pick off where they left off and new content will be loved by google.

Anyone could have picked up my domain to be used for money site or pbn, ignoring that it had this potential to rank for nicely searched product kws.

Make what you want of all this but I just had to share this experience with the community.

As for the product owing me money, I have upgraded the content from a crappy 400 word review to a mega 3600 words one. The long tail traffic is slowly coming in now. I will update this thread if I ever get to meet the payment threshold and get my money.

Thanks for reading and have a great day, or night.

Rob

 

[Ryuzaki]

Awesome. I bet with fairly little effort you can turn that into $100 a month to reinvest. Maybe it pops off even more and becomes an easy $1000 a month, who knows.

This exposes a good point that people don't consider when they talk about "expired but not dropped" versus "dropped and unregistered domains." The point being that it may not matter if Google can see that you're rebuilding or restoring the exact same site with the same content. They might undo the resetting of the age of the domain and wiping of the link juice.

 

[Rob Lowem]

Yes Ryuzaki, I plan to use this site as a case study site on affiliate marketing soon. I guess I now have to try to make a different site with an expired domain.

I always have had doubts about googles statements but since I read this post by terry kyle on his expired domains test, I really have started calling bullshit to all of what google says.

I already know that having higher than normal keyword density on page is a ticket to high rankings. I have tested so many times its not funny. My last place holder post on a product to review of less than 200 words with high KW density made its debut 10 minutes after I published and indexed it, in the top 3 above the product owners website. So far I am at 12 visitors for that product name for today and I havent even had to time to register as an affiliate yet.

It is very painful to see that after writing 2000 words and spending 4 hours on a post that ranked well in the top 4, I then made another post simply saying in a few words, "company X has now moved away from their location to blah blah blah" with high KW density as the content was short. That small post is now ranking instead of the 2000 words one for the past 2 years now.

I remember Alex Becker saying that google as a father (of its algorithm) will never tell you exactly how to get in his daughters pants.

These days I dont even wait for perfect condtions and I sure as hell dont waste time trying to study what the gurus have said about something, work gets done first then clean up later.

We just never know until we test and try.

 

[Samwise89]

It is very painful to see that after writing 2000 words and spending 4 hours on a post that ranked well in the top 4, I then made another post simply saying in a few words, "company X has now moved away from their location to blah blah blah" with high KW density as the content was short. That small post is now ranking instead of the 2000 words one for the past 2 years now.

I've seen this work too, but I see those pages tank when Google does one of their offline updates. So you could definitely push another version of it right back in there. For posts that have staying power, I'm seeing keyword densities of less than even 0.50% working better. If I'm trying to rank by building links and promoting, I'd rather aim it at a page like that. But for churning and burning I'd do what you're saying all day long.

I stumbled across an over optimization technique a while back too, where someone took a two word phrase and built around a 90% ratio for the main word of the phrase as the anchor. Then they used the 2nd word like 3 or 4 times total and shot to #1 for the two word phrase. They never even used the two words together. The only reason I noticed is I remember Ryuzaki or someone talking about this. Think of a term like "shoe polish" where you'd use "polish" 90% of the time on 100's of links and then come in with a few instances of "shoe". You'll never rank for polish (over optimized) or shoe (too hard), but you take "shoe polish" immediately.

 

[Golan]

while MANY people claim that expired domains get their power reset by google, MY CASE (which is all I can claim to have experienced) is that this expired domain is maintaining a good amount of its power and trust from google

Right. Almost all of my latest recovers keep their power very well.

 

[Rob Lowem]

hey guys,

Success!!! I have finally reached the payment threshold for the affiliate program I showed in my original post.

It took about two months to start generating constant commission from that page. Mind you I'm still ranking at the top of the second page, so I getting to the first page I should be able to increase the amount of commissions that review generates. For now it's constantly making an average of $16 per month for the last two months.

I promised to update you guys and now I have. This is how life is in Internet marketing. Especially in SEO. Everything takes a lot of time and this is why you should always occupy yourself with other projects so as not to fall into the trap of waiting, checking Google rankings and traffic statistics all day instead of doing work.

Take care guys and have a nice day.

Rob

Edit: Wow I forgot how to embed an image...