Buying expired domains can get you valuable visitors and an already strong standing in search engines and website directories. However if you pick the wrong domain you can lose traffic, popularity and reputation.
Search Engine Bans
Everyone hates those sites that occupy domains and have sites with one a homepage covered in Spam and paid for search listings links. And so search engines have various methods to counter the Spam pages with spoil results and annoy searchers.
One system that many search engines use, including Google, is to permanently ban Spam addresses. The ban can be appealed but this takes time and effort, which you really don’t want to be wasting. The key is to find out before you buy.
Research the owner
Does the previous owner, own one domain or one hundred domains? If they own loads of domains, the chances are that they will all be part of an interconnected Spam network set up to fool search engine spiders and generally annoy people.
Research the site
Check out the Way Back Internet Achieves (http://webdev.achieves.com) who spiders many sites and keeps records of how the website used to look since 1996.
Conclusion
Before registering an expired domain, make sure that you have researched it first. If you do you are likely to end up with a great domain bringing your visitors and search engine listings.
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Tags: domain names, domains, expired domains
This entry was posted on Saturday, February 15th, 2003 at 5:29 pm and is filed under Programming, Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.