In the first two posts we covered a bit of background and the “why?” part of buying aged domains to renovate. Today is about the “how”, well the how I do it anyway.
The “how” is the fun part. When I’m looking for aged domains to renovate, I know that any suitable domains I find will fall into one of two categories. Anything with a PR up to 4 tends to be fair game for renovating, and anything with a PR5 or higher becomes my new ‘special friend’ and I court these domains a little differently. They get the good cheese and the corked wine instead of the screw top variety.
The higher PR sites are perfect for using in your own network and come in very handy for building links to the sites you are renovating, but more of that later.
I’m all for getting from A to B the fastest way possible and I love using tools that get me the results I’m after quickly and with the minimum of fuss. Finding aged domains does require time and effort (hey, pushing the search button is effort).
As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, there are a number of ways to do this and I’m simply sharing the way I do things. My weapon of choice is Market Samurai combined with Domain Face.
Being a child of ‘the thirty day challenge’ generation, I was weened on Market Samurai as my default market research tool and now with the domain face module, it’s my number one way to find aged domains.
When I’m looking for aged domains to renovate, as opposed to targeted keyword research for a specific market, I employ a throw a heap of mud at the wall and see what sticks approach. I keep a journal of keywords that I’m constantly adding to all day long and I set aside 45min a day to punch a heap of them into market samurai and see what comes up.
I’m constantly amazed at what comes up with this approach. You see, it really is all about just sitting in the chair, setting the timer and just doing it, nike style.
When I’m looking for aged domains to renovate I don’t really care what niche they are in. Well, to a point. I’ll stay away from markets that don’t align with my world view, such as Porn, Viagra and little fluffy white dogs. I hate little fluffy white dogs.
What I’m looking for is a balance of age, PR and back-links. Domain face is great at detecting faked PR, which makes life easier. The final filter I apply is to check that the market is not too competitive, as I do want the site to rank well. Again, I use market samurai for keyword and competition research.
PR is the first think I look for. The higher the better. PR is google’s way of telling the Internet that the cool sites in your market think your site is kida cool too. I always look for at least a PR of 2 and filter my search results around PR.
The next thing I like to see are back-links. The more the better. Back-links are the drummers of your websites. The engine room and the driving force that pushes you up the search engine rankings. Aged domains with lots of back-links make the job of ranking the site a whole lot easier.
Third but not least, is domain age. All things being equal, age makes all the difference as the one thing you can’t manipulate and make happen other than one day at a time is age.
If two sites are competing for a position and are similarly matched with back-links and PR, age will determine who comes out on top. I also find that building lots of back-links and high PR takes time, so most domains scoring well with both, will come well aged anyway. When it comes time to sell, age gives your site great street cred. You’re not the Johnny come lately, standing on then corner hustling. With an aged domain, you are the wise old grey bearded grandfather everyone comes to for sage advice.
The next think I like to do is the check out the domain’s history in the wayback machine over at www.archive.org Here you can see a history of the kind of content the domain has carried in its past life. It gives you a feel of what the site was about and what you need to do to bring it back to life, as to preserve then links that your domain comes with, you’re going to have to recreate a lot of the old content. Notice I didn’t say copy. You only own the domain and not the website or any of the content that once populated it.
When I’m happy that a potential domain ticks all the boxes I click on the link inside market samurai that takes me to the auction site for that particular domain. The domain hosting registrars are wise to the value of expiring aged domains and as a resulst nearly all now go to auction.
The auction process is pretty straight forward and most are very similar to buying on EBay and the like. The secret to picking up aged domains cheaply is to hold off any bidding till the last minute. The $10 sites I pick up, more often then not are auctions that have slipped through the cracks and I was the only bidder and at the eleventh hour, or due the fact that I live in Australia and most registrars are in the states, it’s more like 4:00 am! To get the best price, you really do need to hold of bidding for as long as possible and avoid any bidding wars.
When you first start this, it will seem like every domain goes into an auction with a ton of bids and a hefty price tag and that the guy that told you on that blog about the $10 domains is full of crap! It is getting harder and harder to find great aged domains for $10, but they do exist and I’m happy to pay up to $100 for a domain that I know I can renovate and sell for over $1,000.
When you look at in terms of return on investment, it’s nothing to be sneezed at. Try getting that sort of return in a few months with a bank theses days.
Once you win the domain at auction, you receive notification that it’s yours and you become the new proud registered owner of a healthy bouncing aged domain. It’s cigars all round!
The first step in taking the next step is to leave the domain on the registrar that you bought it from. You can host the website where ever you want, but to make sure you keep all the good stuff, like PR and back-links, it’s crucial that you leave it where it is.
In the next post, I’ll talk to you about what I do to put a website on the newly acquired domain and the steps I take to keep the site’s PR, back-links and start to turn it into a site we can sell in a few months time.
talk soon,
Danny
This post was written by Danny Batelic, who runs a popular How to Sell Websites Blog. If you want to learn how to create websites from scratch and sell them online, visit Trading Websites Blog
Juan said
I have couple of 12 years old domain with ” realty” keyword on them.
No page rank on either.
Should i flip or sell them?
Danny Batelic said
Juan, I would grow the website and build traffic and then look at selling.
Dr. SEO Haley said
Now the archive.org thing is brilliant. I feel stupid for never thinking about that. I have a particular aged domain that I have to get right to work on. But, one more thing I wonder about… If we are going to flip the domain, isn’t most likely going to be used for google adwords or something? And if that is the case, wouldn’t it be wise to search out domains with potentially bigger ticket clicks? As an example, a personal injury attorney will pay $20.00 USD per click in hopes of finding someone who just got their face shaped like a windshield when they got rear ended by a coca-cola truck. but Betty Crocker might only pay 10 cents for a click to her chocolate chip cookie recipe. So hypothetical coockie-recipes.com PR 4 is not equal to lawyers.com PR4. Or are people buying these sites for other reasons… like to be simply a place to build backlinks on for their various customers? I think understanding the potential customer for the site is necessary before shopping for aged domains. Can you tell us more about what these sites are used for when they are flipped?
Danny Batelic said
My plan is to always find domains and build sites that are in markets that I can compete in. I tend to stay away from the big competitive markets (weight loss, etc..) Smaller niche markets are easier to dominate.
End of the day I want the site to be making money in he shortest time possible.
The correct aged domain really speeds up the process when you compare it to starting from scratch.
I find the markets you’ve described just too much work to compete in.
Herman Oosthuizen said
Thank Danny
Nice Stuff. I live in Perth so there are advantages, being down-under.
Danny Batelic said
Hi Herman,
That are a ton of advantages to being down-under!
Terry Thrower said
Hi I bought bobshandymanservice.com before I knew about Domain face
where do i look for how many links, the site is over 10 year old
Terry
domainface said
Terry, I’d recommend using the Chrome browser along with the Chrome SEO plugin -
https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/oangcciaeihlfmhppegpdceadpfaoclj
This will give you back link data from Google, Yahoo, Alexa and Majestic SEO to give you a pretty comprehensive picture of links pointing to your site.
Market Samurai will allow you to get the anchor text used in the links for the Yahoo back links which is very useful.
Brett Burky said
It is funny that you just sent out this email. I am in the process of trying to define this process myself to share with my peoples and you hit it right on the head. I have to say I’m glad I’m on your list and will be going ahead and linking to this post.
You give away the goods with all your posts. I love it. Keep it coming, you are making my job easier by summing up what is hard to put down on paper.
For those that haven’t tried Domain Samurai and see this post. Get it, small price to pay for a process that I was doing prior by hand with multiple accounts. You guys save me days of work. You deserve Christmas presents, and little fluffy dogs.
domainface said
Thanks Brett.
Danny Batelic said
Thanks Brett,
It’s a fantastic product and the guys at domain face make it better and better as they grow it!
No fluffy dogs though!
Danny Batelic said
What I do is build a website on the aged domain, with traffic and usually earning income from adsense or an affiliate product.
Buyers are getting a complete working website that is generating sales.
The whole idea of building it on aged domain as opposed to a new one is that you can use the link love and authority of the aged domain to speed up the process.
Entrepreneur Solo said
Great post Danny. Looking forward to the next one as that could well be the most important part
Danny Batelic said
Thanks,
The next one does cover a fair bit
George said
We have an aged domain (10 years) that is hosted by an uncooperative webmaster so we are building another website and will just change the DNS to point to the new site when it is complete.
While this is not a “flipping” example it does I feel have valuable parallels. I am concerned that contrary to your advice we will not be hosting the site with the current host and the structure of the new site will be somewhat different. My question is how can I preserve as much of the high pagerank that the site currently enjoys. Also, what strategy should I use when adding future content to make sure I am going to get the best bang for my buck when doing that.
domainface said
George, to preserve the Page Rank you want to make sure your new site has all of the same pages and links that the current site has.
Make sure you use the same URL structure as there are many different ways you can do it. A few examples of variations are:
http://www.yourdomain.com/article-page-one
http://www.yourdomain.com/article-page-one.php
http://www.yourdomain.com/article-page-one.aspx
http://www.yourdomain.com/articlepageone
If there is a technical reason why you can’t do this you need to 301 redirect the old URL to the new one.
When adding content, a good way is to use a blog with well defined keyword optimized categories and keyword anchor text internal linking. Ensure the title tags, header tags and page URLs contain your target keywords.
Danny Batelic said
This is exactly what I do, well this were I picked it up in the first place
I’ll be covering what I do with content over the next few posts
Shane The BBQ Chicken Recipe Guy said
Thanks for another fine post chalked full of useful insight on quick flipping domains.
One thing you mentioned here that I would probably not have thought about is the whole leaving the domain you purchased at the registrar where you bought it and only changing the hosting…..
Dang it man, I wonder how many times people have done that? I know I have.. And like I said, I never would have thought it was something that would have such an effect on my sites PR and BL’s.
The other thing I like is the archive.org site. I’ve used it in the past but it somehow fell from the wayside and I honestly forgot about it. My bad but Thanks for the reminder Danny:)
One question I have is, since you don’t get the content from an old site, do you ever use any of these newly purchased aged domains for redirects to other related niche sites that you operate?
Seems to me that it would be beneficial to someone that already has a good pr site that needed additional authority and links for.. Or am I way off the mark?
I have been looking at a particular domain for this exact reason.. Should I go or should I NO? (The only difference in the domain name is it’s plural. but has a lil age and a few good bl’s).
Thanks Again Danny, keep that info coming.
Cheers from Wyo,
Shane aka~Luv2BBQ
PS, Thanks for the tip on Snap too.. I’m working on adding it my http://www.bbqchickenrecipe.org site..
Danny Batelic said
Hi Shane,
You’ve touched on a whole other strategy here. A killer one too if you get it right.
Any domains that I pickup with a PR of 5 and above, I always keep for the sole purpose of feeding that high authority to other sites in my stable.
I still go through all the steps of building a site on the domain, but rather than sell it, I use it’s high authority to pass on high PR backlinks to my other sites.
Shane said
Danny,
I figured I was on the right track. Thanks.
Guess I’m off to see the wizard.. I mean the Samurai:)
Cheers from Wyo
1 of your many twitter followers: twitter.com/cominback
Danny Batelic said
See you twitter
Kathy said
I have purchased domains and moved them to new registrars before. They always kept the PR and links. Could you explain this a little more please? My experience seems to contradict what you are saying.
Danny Batelic said
My experience is that when buying aged domains, they lose most everything if I change the domain registrar. The website hosting can be anywhere though.
You can change a brand new domain’s registrar, but with an aged domain it’s a different story.
Martin said
Danny what am I doing wrong?
I click on the domain I like the look of in Market Samurai. It takes me back to Domain Face sales page for the domain, but it’s always flagged as not available. When I check domain on whois it is listed as expiring 3 days ago.
How do I get to bid on it? Grrrrghh… frustrated!
Danny Batelic said
Hi Martin,
The domain face guys can answer this a little better, as it’s not something I’ve come across yet. I’d check on host registrar’s site for availability.
Danny Batelic said
Martin,
check the expiry date in MS. Sometimes sites that have expired are still in the results and when you click through to buy them they’re not available for you to buy as a result.
Alexander Umanets said
Danny,
Today You did good job and gave out some good info on how to do it.
, Domain Face and auction waiting technic, I still got some new info such as your keyword research approach.
Even I did knew all what you said regarding aged domain research using
MS (not a MicroSoft
I have to give it a short.
Thanks again and come back with more useful posts.
Danny Batelic said
Thanks Alexander
Joan Mylchreest said
Danny:
All this is very fascinating. I bought an aged domain with a bunch of backlinks
several months ago when I thought I wanted to join WPMage. I changed my mind about this program when I found out how many useless websites folks owned.
However, the Domain is registered with GoDaddy and hosted at HostGator. I haven’t built a website even though I am a tennis fan. The Domain is called
Starstringing.com. Well starstringing is not officially a keyword. However stringing is even though this is a very broad term.
This domain is sitting idle since I have no idea how to proceed with keywords to build a site. The obvious one would be tennis stringing. What do you think?
Thanks for listening.
JoanM
I paid bucks for it like a chump. Any suggestions?
Danny Batelic said
I’ve had a quick look for you and I notice that the old site had a lot of pages on it that you could recreate to keep any links you have.
I think a parked domain is a wasted domain.
I would do some research, find some good keywords in the stringing niche and put a wordpress blog on the domain.