The DomainFace Blog

Does a domain really “lose its age” after it deletes?

Nathan Ridley — Mon, 30 May 2011 16:12:25 +0000

I’m going to preface this post by pointing out that Kenny, the domaining mastermind I am in cahoots with, may have a slightly differing opinion to me on this subject. I will also point out that nobody can really know what goes on behind the giant steel vaulted doors where Google keeps its search monkeys, but we can arrive at conclusions based on observations and what we know about Google and their past behaviours.

We commonly receive two questions, usually in tandem, at the Domainface customer support help desk. They are:

Do deleting domains “lose their age” and if so, doesn’t that diminish their value?
How quickly does a deleted domain lose its PageRank and can that PageRank come back, even in part?

Before answering these, we should acknowledge that Google likes to reduce its measure of a site’s authority if that site has any number of things wrong with it. These can be, though are not necessarily limited to, broken internal links, broken backlinks, slow loading speed, poor content, poor navigability and a host of other potential factors. Make sure that you’re not exclusively basing any ranking problems with your aged domain on that domain’s age itself. As always, research, do your own tests and pay attention to the big boys of SEO, who are doing all of this so you don’t have to.

PageRank

PageRank has always been the foundation of Google’s algorithm and is essentially a weighted measure of how important your site is based on its backlink profile, i.e. the number and authority of other sites linking into the site. Also keep in mind that it is is called PageRank, not WebsiteRank. PageRank is based on individual web addresses, which is why sometimes you can come across a website that, for example, has a PageRank of 1 on the front page, but PageRank 4 on one of the article pages. It’s also important to remember that PageRank itself is not a ranking factor; it’s an arbitrary score, or authority generalisation, that is the result of Google’s countless ranking factors for any given website, all poured into a giant pot and baked into a single number between nothing and 10. It does not mean that your site necessarily gets much traffic, or that many people are searching for it, or that it will rank highly for any given search.

So let’s think about this in the context of an expired or deleted domain. Think back to all of those factors that contribute to the PageRank found within the pages of a given domain. How many of these are affected by the fact that the domain was deleted? Here’s a few things that tend to happen when a domain expires:

The website content is gone, so there’s nothing to index.
Because the website content is gone, the frequency with which updates were appearing on the site decreases to zero.
Because all of the pages no longer resolve, some other backlinking websites will likely start to clean up those links, as they don’t like broken links on their websites.
The website no longer works, so people will stop linking to it; that is, the rate at which backlinks are usually added for that site will drop to zero.

These along with all sorts of other side effects, mean that Google can fairly easily detect that the site is having major problems. It doesn’t like to serve up problematic results for its users, so you’ll probably see the PageRank drop to zero, or even be removed entirely. Google does however recognise that often-times a website can have problems temporarily and then make a full recovery, which means if the problems appear to be solved, there is a chance that the PageRank may recover. You can simulate this recovery by getting the website back online as quickly as possible, keeping the site in line with the content theme that Google had likely categorized the site within previously, and making sure that any backlinks point to working pages with content relevant to the backlink. Do all of these things and our tests have shown that in some (not all) cases, a website can have a partial (if not full) PageRank recovery.

Domain Age

Each domain has a digital certificate of registration called a “whois” record. The whois record shows when the domain was registered and when it will expire (or when it expired). If a domain changes hands before it deletes, the current whois record is retained with the original creation date being preserved and the expiry date updating for the new period that was just paid for. Additionally, the contact details will change to the new owner. If a domain deletes, then it loses its whois record and needs to be registered as a new domain. When that happens, the registrar generates a new whois record for the domain and, without any due diligence, the domain will appear to be brand new. This is the basis of the common belief surrounding a domain “losing” or “keeping” its age.

The problem with the fear people have with the domain’s loss of age is that it centres on two things;

the fact that Google includes the age of the website as a ranking factor (older domains having more inherent “trust”)
the assumption that the whois record is the only way that Google knows how old your domain is

I don’t personally believe that Google is so simplistic that the only way they know how old your website is, is by looking at the whois record. They have been indexing the web for a long time now and they retain more data than you can imagine, so you can bet that if a website existed at one time or another, then they know about it. They also know that websites have problems sometimes, that websites change hands and that people link to websites for a reason.

So let’s think about age. If we know that Google applies greater trust when a website has been online for a longer time, then we can infer that the backlinks from older websites convey some of that trust with them. An older website with an existing backlink profile is likely to have some amount of its backlinks coming from similarly-aged websites, so my belief is that the registration date of a given domain’s whois record is not a ranking factor at all, but rather we should be looking at the age of the domain’s backlink profile. If a domain has a lot of backlinks from “old” websites, then we can assert that those domains have had a lot of time to clean up those backlinks and have chosen not to, for whatever reason. Therefore, if we can determine the real age of a domain name, i.e. the first date that it pointed at a live website and started gathering backlinks to that website, then we can infer that the existing backlink profile for the domain may carry a lot of inherent trust and authority that would not be present in a newer domain. This is, in my belief, the basis of why an aged domain often has greater value than a newer domain. Not because of when it was registered, but because of the trust conveyed by its aged backlink profile. Google’s entire search algorithm foundation is built on the link network that composes the web, so this makes a lot of sense to me.

So in conclusion;

A domain may regain its PageRank, or some part thereof, if you can quickly re-establish the factors with which it was awarded that PageRank in the first place.
A domain will probably be able to rank more quickly and effectively if it has an aged backlink profile, so use age as a starting point to find domains with aged backlink profiles, but don’t assume value based on the domain’s age itself.

Remember, do your own testing and feel free to refute everything I’ve said; these are just my own observations and conclusions from having spent time in this space.

-Nathan

A quick update on the autobidding system

Nathan Ridley — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 20:15:45 +0000

Just a quick update. The new autobidding system is coming along really well and I’m patching in each new service engine as it is completed. The whole system has undergone a complete rewrite behind the scenes and the new way it’s been approached should ensure that it produces much more positive results from now on. Please remember that each service engine (NameJet, SnapNames, etc) is a completely unique development challenge that has its own surprises and bugs that can crop up after days or weeks of going live, depending on how many people use it and accordingly, how many different variations of things like numbers of bidders, auction type and so forth are present for each auction.

A few of you (unwittingly?) tried out the new NameJet autobidding engine which I deployed a week or two ago but unfortunately a nasty bug that I didn’t trap earlier showed up and a few bids we had scheduled didn’t complete. Really sorry about that! I’ve posted a fix in the last 24 hours, so NameJet should be working correctly now. Please feel free to try it out and I’ll keep an eye on the next lot of submitted autobids to see how well they run. I am pretty confident that NameJet should be working really well now, so fingers crossed and as always please let me know if you have any issues.

Now, to add to that, I’ve just uploaded the first beta of the new SnapNames autobidding engine, which has been my main focus for the last couple of weeks. It should be working, but I have some test auctions running right now to confirm that and have already fixed a few bugs I found as a result. The good news is I’ve put it up so everyone can give it a go and of course I’ll keep a watch on how the auctions run in case of any further bugs cropping up. Please do try it out but remember that if you have your heart set on the domain you’re bidding on, to keep a personal eye on it too, just in case there are bugs that need to be worked out.

Once again, I’m sorry the autobidding system hasn’t been perfect thus far- developing a system like this that is completely dependent on an extremely volatile set of external data that we have no control over makes testing slow and difficult. It’s going to be great though, so keep placing your bids and let me know at nathan@domainface.com if you spot any errors. Meanwhile I’ll be working on the new Pool.com autobidding engine, followed by the GoDaddy engine.

-Nathan

What we’re working on right now

Nathan Ridley — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 23:45:40 +0000

I am wholly convinced that Domainface is set to become the industry standard in domain name acquisition and management, but our platform is still new, so there is much to be done yet! We spent the last 12 months getting our domain data aggregation system really solid, though it does have its limitations and a few bugs here and there, which we’re working to patch up as quickly as we can.

We have a huge update coming soon to our back end database that Jon has been working hard on for the last couple of months. I don’t want to say too much about this just yet, but it’s going to really enhance our capabilities in terms of what you’ll be able to search for. Stay tuned on that. We also just discovered the source of an old bug in our search results which has been showing some NameJet domains as available when in fact they aren’t, so if you’ve come across this problem, you should see it resolved shortly.
I have spent the last couple of weeks focussed on our automated bidding system. I’m not going to beat around the bush; it has had its share of reliability problems, as you may have noticed if you’ve used it with any regularity in recent times. The work I’ve been doing has essentially been a complete rewrite of the system, with a completely new approach to the implementation which is going to massively improve both its reliability and the quality of the information it reports back. I’ve literally, just half an hour before writing this post, put the first phase, the rewrite of our NameJet autobidding engine, online for testing and have started performing a whole lot of autobidding tests on domains in a whole variety of statuses. You can help me test if you like, as even in this testing phase it’s more reliable than the old engine was. Note that SnapNames and Pool, whilst still listed, are temporarily offline while I apply the same level of attention to them that NameJet just got. GoDaddy and Sedo autobidding are also in my sights as part of this upgrade.
I’ve got one of my developers working on a brand new search results grid too, as well as a new help and training area which is approaching completion, so keep a watch for those. The portfolio area will be getting a big upgrade from myself once the autobidding platform overhaul is finished.

That’s all for now, I’ll be back when I have more to report.

-Nathan

Update: New registration/login system, plan changes

Nathan Ridley — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 14:13:24 +0000

I’m going to start utilising the blog for any updates we do to Domainface. It makes sense that I should do that anyway, but the updates we do are usually small and incremental in nature and often don’t feel like they justify a blog post, but this results in nobody knowing what’s going on with Domainface at all, which is a worse situation to be in. So, expect very short blog posts from now on whenever there is something new to announce.

So on to the updates for this post…

We’ve got a whole new registration process in place now. Part of the reason for this is that as more integration partners come on board over time, we need to be able to reconfigure things to help them promote Domainface to their users, plus we need to be able to easily make small changes and test different version of individual steps in the process. The way the old signup process worked was a bit too difficult to easily update under the hood as needed. On top of that, these changes help pave the way for direct credit card payments which we’re hoping to make available once our merchant account is ready (the approval process is long and drawn out in the UK for web-based companies).

As a side effect of all of this, it gave me a chance to add Facebook, Twitter, Google and other login methods as part of the login process. I also updated the Account recovery screen so you can recover your account both by username or email, rather than just by email, which was the case before.

The other major update was to the plans. Our paid plans now all come with a seven day trial as standard. We’ve updated the basic plan so you can do your searching in Domainface directly if desired, though it still integrates with the great products from the folks at Noble Samurai. We’ve raised the price of the basic plan to $19/month to make it a bit more financially viable for us, though if you signed up at $14/month and don’t cancel your subscription, you’ll be grandfathered in at that lower price permanently.

What’s next?

Right now we’re working on:

A new help and training area (this is more than 50% finished now)
A big update to the autobidding system (I’m working on this personally)
A new version of the domain search results grid

I’ll post another update when there’s something new to report, so make sure you subscribe in Google Reader or whatever your feed reader of choice is.

Domainface Pro has opened its doors (A very late blog post)

Nathan Ridley — Sat, 18 Dec 2010 16:12:16 +0000

This blog post is quite overdue, as we officially opened the doors to the latest incarnation of our service on the 15th of December (2010) and it’s now the 18th!

It wasn’t the smoothest of launches, but despite a delay getting the doors open and some issues with our mailouts, the system has been holding up very well and despite a hammering by users, there have been very few technical problems and the occasional errors experienced by users have been few and far between! It took us a while to get the doors opened, but I think, all in all, the time spent getting our systems working well was worth it. It’s important to get your product released as soon as you can, but too early and you risk losing customers due to too many errors and bugs.

On a side note, people who purchased early have qualified for a bonus webinar with Kenny and myself, as well as access to a recording of one of Kenny’s presentations at a seminar he spoke at recently. We’ll be doing a mailout in the next couple of days with the link to the recording, but the webinar may end up waiting until early January, as due to the time of year, many people may not be able to attend. Early January is very close though, so it’s not very long to wait!

Where we’re at with Domainface and where we’re going

This is our first release of the new phase of Domainface, so you should expect it really fill out over time. What you see is most definitely only the beginning of where we’re going. Right now we have 3 main areas of functionality inside Domainface, which are:

Searching for domain names
Portfolio management
Automated bidding

Searching

The search facility is holding up nicely; we spent nearly all of 2010 getting this working really fast and reliably. Most of the technical issues we’ve had have come and gone well before now, meaning the volume and speed of retrieval of the search results has had a great chance to mature before we opened the doors to Domainface Pro.

Despite this, we have a lot more domain sources we’d like to add to fill out our results and still more metrics to add to the system, not to mention additional ways to search yet to come, not the least of which is out dictionary and keyword search features. We also have some very ambitious plans for what we’re planning on doing with our database which will make what we’re offering now look very small in comparison to what will be possible if we can successfully pull off what we’re planning. I won’t get into that much though until we have something more to show.

On the user interface side of things, the search facility works well enough, but we want to really improve the results display, which means a good amount of time is going to be invested in developing a new results grid that fits into smaller spaces and that we can reuse in other areas of the site, such as domain favourites and the portfolio section.

Portfolio Management

What you see in the portfolio section, right now, is barely a scratch on the surface of some of the ideas we have. I think of it almost as a placeholder for what’s to come, relatively speaking. We’re looking to make it possible to store a lot of your own data against each domain in your portfolio so that it’s very easy to go to one place to discover important details such as expiry dates, FTP login details for your domains and so forth. If you have ideas about this, please let us know at our community support site.

Automated Bidding

As of this post, you can only see NameJet as an option for automated bidding, but what you may not know is that our SnapNames automated bidding add-on is essentially completed and is undergoing testing right now, so you’ll see that shortly. Our add-on for Pool.com bidding is about 95% complete and will begin testing shortly, so that will come soon after. Development on our GoDaddy and Sedo bidding add-ons is about to begin, so expect those in the not too distant future as well.

Once we have NameJet, SnapNames and Pool.com autobidding all running live, we’re going to release our “triple barrel backorder” feature, which will let you, with one click, set up your bidding on pending delete domains at all three of these sites at the same time to drastically increase your chances that you’ll actually win that domain you want. Take a look at Kenny’s report on domaining for more information on the triple barrel backorder strategy.

What Now?

Get in there and find the gems in Domainface! I’ll be posting on this blog whenever we add anything to Domainface, or have any fixes and updates to report on, so make sure you’re subscribed to the RSS feed. Lastly, we know many of you have (or will have) feedback, whether praise, complaints (we hope not!), questions or suggestions, so please post them at our community support site and look through other people’s suggestions too, so you can vote on the requests you like, which will help bring those requests to our attention.

posted by Nathan Ridley.

Site Set Up Nuts And Bolts

Nathan Ridley — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 22:11:10 +0000

Before I dive into today’s post I want to share a few thoughts with you.

I remember when I first started renovating aged domains, that it was around this step of the process that I began to feel a little discouraged. Things can get a somewhat technical when it comes to setting up sites and everyone seems to have their own way of doing things and it can get a little confusing with all the conflicting advice on offer. The key for me was to stick at it, find out who was the best at what I needed to learn and take their ideas and run with them as fast as I could. I went off an studied anything I didn’t understand until it made sense.

You can waste so much time and money chasing the next guru showing you the way to online enlightenment.

My advice is to find a teacher you connect with and give their material a chance to work for you, ….or not. So many of us spend too much time chasing the non existent silver bullet to quick online success, jumping from one course to another and never actually doing anything other than making these guys rich.

If some of this process sounds a bit geeky, that’s ok. All you have to do is note the parts that you don’t quite grasp and go and find someone who has mastered it and learn.

In the last post we went through the finding and buying process. Today I want to show you what I do with my newly acquired aged domain.

As I mentioned in a previous post, it’s crucial to leave the domain on then same registrar that you bought it from. The website you’re going to build can be hosted anywhere you like. I always make sure my sites are hosted on good cpanel hosts that haven’t been modified by the hosting company. This ensures that I don’t have any issues with installing through wp direct.

The first thing I do after I take over a domain is point the DNS to the new hosting account and setup a cpanel account for the domain. I always use word press for my blogs and I’ll install the blog through word-press direct, but you can also use fantastico which is free and comes with most hosting accounts offering cpanel. Just check with any potential hosting company to make sure they offer it.

If you’re new to all this, there are some great YouTube videos on the subject and of course you can learn all this over at the challenge.

When renovating an aged domain you want to keep as many of the links that were pointing to the domain as possible and the best way to do this is to put similar or even better content on your new site.

Remember, you only own the domain and have no rights to the content that was on the site, so you can’t just copy the old content.

I do this by either looking through the site on Way-back Machine at archive.org or entering “site:whatever the domain is.com” into google and going through the cached pages and populating the site with content. Lately, I’ve starting using the SEO plug-in for google chrome and it works really well too.

Also, If you’re using Market Samurai you can find all the site’s anchor text links for yahoo there and use that to recreate pages.

It’s important to make sure your keyword is in the Page URL, title tags and header tags to get the most SEO value.

It can take time, particularly if it was a large site with lots of pages, but if you spend the time it can really pay off.

One of the main reasons I like using wordpress direct is that the initial installation sets the site up with some great SEO plug-ins to help manage and build the site. However there are a few that I like to add myself.

When building sites on aged domains, there will always be links coming into pages that you haven’t accounted for and these will result in 404 error messages and lost links if you don’t fix things fast.

I use the Redirection plug-in, which is a complete 404error and 301redirection solution. Basically a 301 redirect works by passing a URL through to any another URL you want, thus avoiding any dead ends and lost links.

This is only a short term solution for any pages I have missed in the setup and if I don’t recreate the original page on the new site, I will eventually lose the links to that page.

I know, it’s a confusing explanation , so let’s look at our “blowupdolls.com” example.
If the old site had a page titled ” puncture repair kits for blow up dolls” (apparently it’s a common hazard) and I don’t have that page on the new site, I’ll set up a redirect and tell the search engines that the page is now at the homepage ” blowup dolls.com” or any other page I think appropraiate. Now instead of an error message and a dead end, the homepage will appear and I’ll keep the link, giving me time to recreate the original page.

Once I’ve taken care of the house keeping, the fun can start.

These days there are two plug-ins that I just can’t live without. They’re not free, but worth every cent.

The first is RSS Bomber which comes with a free copy of the second, Link Daemon.
I won’t go into too much detail about the plug-ins, other than to say I have had smashing results with them both and they come with great ” how to guides”.

RSS Bomber turns every post on your site into it’s own RSS feed. Normally a site will have one RSS feed for the entire site, one for comments and bigger, more complex sites might have a couple of extra feeds set up.

What happens now is that your site has as many individual RSS feeds as it has posts and it’s a matter of submitting these new feeds to as many RSS directories and aggregators as you like.
You can now grab multiple top ten positions in google and dominate the first page.

With Link Daemon you set up a system of internal links via pre-selected anchor text, linking to any page on the site you want.

Internal keyword linking to pages you’re trying to rank can produce amazing results!

In the blow up doll website example, let’s say we have a keyword phrase “doll puncture repair kit” and a page we want to rank in the search engines. We set up link Daemon so that every time the phrase “doll puncture repair kit” is mentioned anywhere on the site, a link to that page will appear.

Repeat this for all your keywords and over time you have a huge internal keyword link network.

Internal links are very relevant. Don’t ignore them!

I also like the Yet Another Related Posts Plug-in, which gives the reader a list of related posts that they can then read on the site.

That’s pretty much all I do to get things up and running. In the next post I’ll talk about content, back linking and setting up the site to sell.

cheers,

Danny

This post is the fourth in the series by Danny Batelic, who runs a popular How to Sell Websites Blog. If you want to learn how to renovate aged domains and sell them online, visit Trading Websites Blog

Choosing Domains For Your 90 Day Flip

Nathan Ridley — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 20:07:37 +0000

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

Putting A Plan In Place For Your 90 Day Flip

Nathan Ridley — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 16:14:11 +0000

Today I want to talk to you about the end game.

The best way to get the most out of renovating aged domains is to actually have a plan in place.

The reason for having a plan is that there are aged domains that are perfect for renovating and others that make it a little harder. Sure, any aged domain can be renovated and sold for profit, but with a little planning you can make it all happen with a lot less effort. In fact there a couple of tools that I’ll show you that make it very easy.

The key to fetching the highest price possible when it comes time to sell your sites is income. If you have a look at the just sold section on Flippa.com, you will see that the sites that sell for over $1,000 all tend to be making money. It doesn’t have to be much either, but income makes a huge difference.

We’ll go through the process of buying and renovating aged domains in the next few posts, but today I want to work backwards to show you how to move forwards. No, I’m not going to teach you Michael Jackson’s moon walk, but show you why certain aged domains work best for what we’re trying to do.

The key to maximising profits when it comes time to sell and one of the easiest things to get wrong with aged domains is keeping PR. It doesn’t take much to lose the PR that comes with your aged domain, so it’s crucial that you do all it takes to keep it and hopefully increase it.

Playing the PR game with google is in an interesting one. They make the rules, but don’t fully explain how they work.

The stats that google release about your site are anywhere up to 3 months old and not a true indication of where a site sits in real time, so there is never an accurate way to tell where your aged domain’s current PR really sits when you buy it, or what will happen to it when the next update cycle kicks in.

That part of the game is a roll of the dice, but it works both ways. Your newly acquired aged domain’s PR could move in either direction or even stay the same in the next google update. I’ve had PR3 domains drop to PR1 and I’ve had PR2 domains move up to PR4. You just don’t know where in the cycle the domain is at the time you acquire it. Google keep their cards close to their chests with stats. More often than not it’s not a huge shift either way, if there is an movement at all.

The good news is that you can preserve and even increase the PR of your aged domains.

How do you do all this?

The same way you do with any other site. Great regular content and quality backlinks. I wish there was a quicker and easier way, but the rules that apply to regular sites, also apply to sites you build on aged domains. Sure, you can venture down the grey/black hat road and get some great results fast, but what then? How do you sell a site with all the sneaky cloak and dagger techniques attached to it?

When creating sites to sell built on aged domains, you need to make them as organic as apples with worms and spots on them.

If you have a number of sites on the go at once, adding content regularly to all your sites becomes a challenge and some help is needed. There are two resources that I use for adding content and once set up correctly they pretty much run on their own.

You know how I mentioned earlier that some aged domains lend themselves better to renovating than others? This is how it works. If you’re looking for keyword relevant content to feed your site the easiest way to find it is to start with keywords that lots of people create lots of content for.

As an example, recently I bought an aged domain, with a PR of 3 and a few hundred backlinks in the pregnancy niche. Finding content for the site was easy as it’s a popular niche.

The two main sources of content I use to feed my sites are WordPress Direct and Article Marketing Automation. I use WordPress Direct, which is basically a word press manager on steroids. It’s the fastest way I known to setup and manage a word press blog. It also comes with great content posting software included and setting it all up is a breeze.

Article Marketing Automation does a few things, but what we are interested in is the article submission feature where you basically select niche categories that relate to your website and the system regularly feeds your site with unique spun articles and this part of their service is free. If you’re not familiar with article spinning, it’s a way of writing and formatting articles in such a way that every time it is published, a unique version of the article is created. I’ve had sites increase PR purely on the back of feeding keyword rich articles from AMA. This is why it works best with aged domains that use popular keywords. It’s hard to find spun content on more obscure topics.

Now, that you have an idea of why targeting certain markets works best for renovating aged domains, we’ll have a look at how to find and buy aged domains in the next post and I’ll show you how I avoid getting into bidding wars when winning domains at auctions.

cheers

Danny

Is It Time To Get A .co ?

Nathan Ridley — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 12:23:33 +0000

Although it’s only been available on public release since July 20th the .co release has already silenced any Doubting Thomases having already hit 310,595 registrations (after 9 years .biz registrations are only at the 2 million mark).

Further confirmation that .co domains are a force to be reckoned with came when Google announced on Thursday that they would be recognizing .co as a Global TLD just like .com, .net and .org. as long as the majority of content is global (i.e. not just Spanish).

So what does this mean for you?

Well you should be be looking at niche specific keyword rich .co domains as a great opportunity, because suddenly a lot more desirable domains are available to choose from. And while it’s looking like .co will continue to sell strong with big name brands like Overstock (O.co) and Twitter (T.co is to be the new Twitter branded URL shortener) getting on board, there are still rich pickings to be had, so have at ‘em!

Turn $10 To $1500 In Just 90 Days

Nathan Ridley — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 15:47:02 +0000

A guest post series by Danny Batelic from Trading Websites Blog.

Over the next few posts, I want to show you how I find, renovate and then sell $10 aged domains for $1,500 on flippa.com, all in around 90 days.

Less than a year ago, I was a drummer in rock band struggling to make ends meet when I chanced upon Ed Dale’s Challenge, looking for ways to market my band via the internet. Forward to today and now I’m a little ahead of struggling to make ends meet and I’ve managed to sell over 100 websites online in a little over six months.

That’s not the lucky part. It took a ton of work and very little sleep to make all that happen. The lucky part comes a little later.

I’ll throw in a disclaimer here, just so I don’t start getting hate mail. Not every site I build sells for $1,500 (who would have guessed that the latex rubber doll market would fall through) nor does every domain I buy cost $10, but a lot do.

If you’re not familiar with the Challenge, in a very small nutshell it’s a free course that shows you how to make your first dollar online. In a slightly larger nutshell, it’s the most successful internet market teaching resource ever made available.

Why am I telling you all this? Well, buying an aged domain is the easy part. It’s what you do with it that makes you money. If you want to use the successful strategy of building a website on the domain, you will have to get good at building and managing websites.

I knew nothing when it came to internet marketing, other than most of the teachers were frustrated, and some even frustrating, guitarists. Well that was it for me. If a guitarist could do this stuff, then a drummer was a sure thing. You see, unlike guitarists, drummers actually listen to what’s going on around them. So I listened and I learned. The course teaches how to research, build and run a niche website from scratch and make your first online dollar. And I did. In fact, I made $3.27, which is about the going rate for most unsigned bands playing at your local bar on that much coveted Tuesday night spot.

On the final day of the challenge, and almost as an after-thought, Ed mentioned about selling any of our no longer loved sites on this new auction site ‘Flippa.com’. I had been working at dominating the micro niche “How to Play a Ludwig Snare Drum”, and seeing as the rent was due two days ago, I thought “why not?” I listed my site the next day and within the hour it sold… for a few hundred bucks.

Now, here comes the lucky part:

I was there selling websites on Flippa right at the beginning of an arbitrage opportunity and I milked it. Back then you could by a new domain, throw a wordpress blog on it and sell it for $300 and repeat this as often as you could supply. Like any arbitrage moment, it was going to end and it was a race to supply before demand dried up.

Here’s the next lucky bit:

I attended a seminar earlier this year and heard Kenny Goodman speak for the first time about buying and selling aged and dynamite domains.

That night at the bar at around 2am , where all great ideas start, chatting to Kenny the idea came up that I could merge what I had been doing with aged domains.

You know what, it works like a charm!

I started buying aged domains, with good PR then built a wordpress blog onto them, using wordpress direct, that fastest and most accurate way to setup a wordpress blog. There were a few things I had to learn along the way, such as preserving link networks, understanding 301 redirects, and recreating without copying content. When you buy an aged domain you don’t have any rights to the content that was once on the site, but as long as you can make the pages similar to the previous site, you have every chance of keeping the old links to that page.

Then with a little SEO love, some new content and little time, my $10 aged domain is now a website that will sell for $1,500

The first lesson for me was to learn how to build and manage webistes, so that when a great aged domain came along, I knew what to do with it. The Challange is still the best resource out there, it covers everything and it’s FREE. I recommend you start with the Challenge and I’ll be in touch in the next few days and show you how I find and buy aged domains.

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