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Google discusses using expired domains for backlinks and SEO

by — Expired Domains 5 Comments

The company doesn’t want people to game the system but doesn’t want to wrongly penalize a domain, either.

The word "SEO" in red, blue and green on blackboard next to magnifying glass with arrows pointing toward it.

When you see an expired domain auction for a crappy domain reaching stratospheric levels, you can be that people are bidding on it because it used to have an active website. They acquire the domain name to take advantage of the existing search engine rankings and backlinks pointing to the domain.

What does Google do about this? John Mueller, the public SEO face of Google’s search team, answered the question in a recent video.

Mueller said that Google does a decent job of figuring out if someone is trying to game the system, but it needs to be cautious. After all, domain names change ownership all of the time, and this doesn’t mean that the domain should start from zero in a search engine’s eyes.

He admitted that Google doesn’t always get it right.

It’s certainly a complicated issue for Google. I recall Vint Cerf bemoaning the practice of auctioning off domains before they expire at Domain Roundtable in 2006; it made it more difficult for Google to figure out if a domain expired and was picked up by someone else or was merely transferred to another owner.

This video is queued up to his answer:

Rand Fishkin on domains and SEO – DNW Podcast #302

by — Podcasts 1 Comment

The founder of Moz, and now SparkToro, discusses the history of domains and SEO.

Picture of Rand Fishkin and the words "DNW Podcast: Domains & SEO" with Rank Fishkin

My guest this week is Rand Fishkin. Rand founded SEO company Moz and his latest startup is audience analytics company SparkToro. On today’s show, we discuss the history of domain names as it relates to SEO. Rand also explains lessons he learned about naming from Moz, and how this shaped his naming decision for SparkToro. (As a bonus, get some additional color about Moz’s acquisition of the Moz.com domain name!) Finally, we discuss Rand’s book Lost and Founder, a refreshingly honest look at starting and running a business.

Also: NamesCon, CEO change at Sedo, Sleep.com, and more

Sponsor: Donuts

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 34:31 — 27.7MB) | Embed

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Subscribe via Apple Podcasts to listen to the Domain Name Wire podcast on your iPhone or iPad, or click play above or download to begin listening. (Listen to previous podcasts here.)

Verisign gets patent for showing contextually-relevant domain names in SERPs

by — Policy & Law 1 Comment

It’s a neat idea that will never be adopted by large search engines.

A diagram from a search engine patent

A diagram from Verisign’s patent for showing different domains in search results.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has granted patent #10,764,245 (pdf) to Verisign (NASDAQ: VRSN) for “Domain name determination”.

The idea behind the patent is that a website owner can maintain multiple domain names and, depending on what someone searches for at a search engine, that search engine can display a contextually-relevant domain name for the site.

For example, a dental practice called Winchester Orthodontics could use the primary domain WinOrtho.example. That practice could also maintain the domains Winchester-Dentistry.example, Metro-Dentistry.example, Metro-Teeth-Whitening.example, and Winchester-Braces.example.

The alternative domain names would be shown in search engine results pages (SERPs) for relevant searches. For example, if a user searches for “Winchester” and “braces,” the results provided by the search engine may include Winchester-Braces.example instead of WinOrth.example.

Site owners could maintain these alternative domains, and a system would report usage back to them so they could cull domain names that don’t often appear in search results.

Interestingly, the background for the patent suggests this could be a good use for new top level domains:

The Internet provides hundreds of different top level domains (“TLDs”), such as .com, .net, .org, .gov, .gift, .kitchen, etc. However, many website operators lack sufficient technical knowledge to consider using lesser-known TLDs when obtaining a domain name. For example, a small dental practice may only be aware of the most common TLDs. As such, the dental practice may not consider a potentially better domain name from another TLD (e.g., .biz, .doctor, or .expert).

Verisign’s idea is a clever one that won’t ever be put to use, at least with a major search engine. Google tries to downplay the importance of domain names. I don’t foresee it allowing site owners to improve their SERP click-through rates by showing keyword-juiced domain names.

How to clean up bad links on your website

by — Uncategorized 3 Comments

It’s not an easy process.

A picture of chain links with the words "broken links"

Domain Name Wire is 15 years old and has over 12,000 posts.

With so many posts, and so many of them years old, it makes sense that a lot of links included in posts are no longer valid. Services I’ve written about have gone defunct, news sources I’ve linked to have closed their doors, and third-party files have been removed.

I was reading an SEO guide the other day that said it makes sense to clean up non-working links. This idea certainly makes sense, if nothing else, from a user perspective. And no site owner wants a link on their site that used to resolve to a useful website to resolve to one that’s now filled with “adult” photos.

But where do you start when you have tens of thousands of outbound links?

I came across a service designed to look for bad outbound links. Dr. Link Check scans your site for links that fit into three main categories:

  1. Broken links, e.g., 404 errors
  2. Links to malware/blacklisted sites
  3. Links to parked pages

The monthly service charges varying fees depending on the number of links on your site, the types of “bad” links it identifies, and how often it crawls for link changes.

It’s difficult to know how many links your site has before you get started. I optimistically paid for 20,000 links for $21.00 per month and began the scan.

20,000 links weren’t enough. Unfortunately, there’s no way to know how many links you have until they are all crawled. Dr. Link Checker also doesn’t let you add links to your plan and continue where you left off; you have to scan everything again. (The company provided some helpful link scanning rules I can apply to keep the service from checking internal links.)

Of those 20,000 links, Dr. Link Checker identified 481 problematic links. 379 of these were labeled a “broken,” although a subset of these were links that the service couldn’t scan because the linked pages block bots. Of the remaining, most were 404 pages.

105 of the links led to parked domains. For most websites, this means the site linked to no longer exists. In the unique case of a blog about domain names, I’d say about 1/3 of the parked page links originally linked to active sites. The others were examples of parked pages that I purposefully linked to.

I learned a lot by looking at the errors. Many of them were for defunct services. A lot were for sites that I linked to liberally, such as Domain Name News, that no longer exist. Links to online auctions almost always break over time. Many of the broken links are in the comments.

Some of the observations will help me when linking in the future. For example, it seems that quarterly earnings releases on Yahoo Finance break after some time, so I’ll no longer link to earnings releases there.

With this context in mind, the next challenge was figuring out what to do with the broken links.

Given the number, I decided not to worry about links in the comments. WordPress sets these to ‘no follow’ by default. Google isn’t following them, and I assume most users who click on them understand that it’s user-generated content. Dr. Link Check allows you to filter out no follow links.

Other links are easy to clean: there’s no need to keep a broken link to an online auction from 2007. These can be safely removed.

But what about when links added context? Often, I’d quote another site’s article, and that article no longer exists. Or a forum post. How can you explain that this content existed and no longer does? Does it make sense to remove these links, or should you keep them in the text so that people understand that you linked to another site for more context?

For now, I added a note in some posts that states that I removed a link because it’s no longer active. From now on, I think I’ll change this so that invalid links point to a page on Domain Name Wire that explains that a link was removed because it no longer works.

The other issue I ran into is the sheer volume of bad links and the time it takes to correct them. Ideally, if you can get on top of the issue, it should be easier to manage going forward. A service like Dr. Link Check surfaces newly-broken links, which should be manageable on a monthly basis.

Getting on top of invalid links will take time, but I think it’s a worthwhile practice for a 15-year-old blog.

SEO from Expired Domains – DNW Podcast #258

by — Podcasts 6 Comments

How to leverage the search engine value of expired domains.

The word "SEO" in red, blue and green on blackboard next to magnifying glass with arrows pointing toward it.

Building links and authority for a new website is hard but there’s a way to skip a lot of the work. Today’s guest, Sean Markey, explains how to find expired domains and turn them into websites to leverage their search value.

Also: Scratch.org finally resolve, interesting cybersquatting disputes, Sedo’s latest seller-friendly change and more.

Discussed in this podcast: expired domains newsletter

Sponsor: Name.market

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:23 — 22.8MB) | Embed

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Email | RSS

Subscribe via Apple Podcasts to listen to the Domain Name Wire podcast on your iPhone or iPad, view on Google Play Music, or click play above or download to begin listening. (Listen to previous podcasts here.)

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