Purchasing expired domains can be a great way to boost your online presence and help you take advantage of that domain’s PageRank. But using old domains can also be somewhat risky. If you don’t properly manage your domains in use, you can severely lower your SEO scores and find yourself struggling to show up in online searches. Before you decide to revive any expired domain for your website, make sure you do your research to check that the domain is set up for success.
Matching Content
One of the worst things you can do is purchase an expired domain that has drastically different content from the website you have or are building. While there’s no easy way to tell how search engines determine content similarity, making sure the websites are as close as possible is the best way to improve your chances of making a successful recovery. When considering expired domains to purchase, look at both the domain name and the old content of the website. If, for example, you are a dental office in New York, you won’t want to buy a domain from a clothing store in Colorado. Matching up the content of each domain is necessary to keep your site at the top of search results.
Backlink Quality
Broken links on a webpage are detrimental to your online presence. Not only do you lose faith with users who try to click on them, but search engines can pick up on broken links and use it as a reason to filter you out of results pages. You can use a number of tools or applications to check a domain for broken links, or just go through them yourself if you have the time. Buying an expired domain with weak or broken backlinks can have a reverse effect on any success from using an old domain.
Broken links aren’t the only things that you have to worry about, either. When other pages link to your domain, you’re creating a connection between them. Checking who links to an expired domain is a great way to determine whether that domain is right for you. For example, a domain that has links from authoritative websites will have a higher standing in online searches than those that don’t.
Redirect
Once you’ve found an expired domain to help boost your business, you could just use it as your main website. However, many businesses employ redirects to siphon the PageRank of old domains while still using their main website address. Using permanent redirects (also known as 301 redirects), you essentially connect the two domain names. Now, whenever someone tries to go to the old domain, they will end up on your website instead. You can have as many redirects to one website as you’d like; just make sure each expired domain is of good quality.
By doing your research and examining the content and links of an expired domain, you can boost your website’s online presence and help build up your business.