Would an old expired domain with 3M backlinks still have SEO value? Bigger sites like Google have billions of backlinks. Billions of sites are linked to them. If only we could have that many.
What would your answer be to this? It depends. How old is the domain? Yeah.
If you’re looking at buying a domain and want to know if it’s worth it, there are a few questions you should ask:
- How old is the domain?
- How old are the backlinks going to it?
There’s a lot of times where you can have that many backlinks, but they’re all garbage and they don’t even exist anymore. If you go through a really low cost backlinking service, they’ll just generate a ton of just low quality ones. They’ll get put up just in time for you to see them, but they won’t stay up forever. They’ll just die. They’ll get taken down, especially if it’s like a social media or a blog site that they build them on.
Quantity isn’t everything when it comes to backlinks. We talked about that a little bit last week, but you want to make sure they’re good backlinks and you want to make sure that the domain has a good, healthy profile. If it’s an old domain and it’s got a ton of backlinks to it, but it doesn’t rank well, it’s not really going to do you any favors. But if it still has a good, healthy profile, if it still comes up in search and it hasn’t been de-indexed, then yeah, go for it.
You really just have to investigate further. One metric like that, like 3 million backlinks. Okay, cool. What else?
A better metric to use would be to just search that domain with quotes and see what comes up. If Google sees any value to it, you’re still going to find it. And if it has 3 million backlinks, there should be 100,000 results with it. But if they do a search and there’s like two pages on Google, then it’s not worth anything.
I don’t do this anymore just because there’s not that much value in it with AI results, but we used to kind of scour the interwebs for expiring sites that essentially was like some kind of organization. So we used to actually own this domain. It was called “bed bug tracker”.
And it had been around for, at that point, 15 years and had a ton of backlinks, but it also just had all these blog articles about bedbugs. And it got a few thousand hits a month. And I think what happened is whoever owned it probably just died and the kids didn’t have access to their account. So they didn’t know anything about it.
So I bought the domain, looked at the Wayback Machine, got all the content, put it back up, and I just threw ads on it. But I was making like two bucks a month off the ads. So it wasn’t really worth the effort for the return on the investment. It maybe paid for the domain name. But if you did it a thousand times it might be okay, right?
So there’s things like that you can do where you can watch auctions for domains that actually have been around a while and just whatever happened, happened and the person loses the domain. I actually made a couple friends that way because there were some big ones that expired.
There was a large domain for sale and I bought it and then I just reached out because the rights holder was NBC and I just said, hey, you let this expire. And they were like, “Oh crap. How much are you going to charge us?” I was like, “just pay me what I paid for it”. I paid a couple hundred bucks for it. They were pretty great. I forgot what they did. I think they sent me more money just as a thank you.
Sometimes you’ll find stuff like that and it’s like: “why is this expired?” Just buy it.
