Buying Domains from an auction and 301 redirecting to your new site.

[junkcars]

Lets say I have a website in not to competitive niche. I was considering buying a few aged domains from godaddy auctions and 301 redirecting them to my new domain.

Can this alone be enough to rank pretty high for a uncompetitive niche?

Can this also be a link building technique in itself since the link juice from the domain purchased carries over?

Thanks

[SteveTheWoodsman]

Danny Sullivan really covered this well and includes a quote from Matt Cutts:

http://searchengineland.com/do-links-from-expired-domains-count-with-google-17811

So in all likelihood it will do nothing for you

[AgentsofValue]

The link form Stephen to Search Engine Land is a good resource.  I'll just add a few additional thoughts here:

1.  There are several types of domains that you might be picking up - and they are not all equal.  There are 'pre-release' domains which are auctioned off about a month after they've expired.  These are the kind you get from GoDaddy Auctions or Namejet.  If you buy those - the creation date is not actually reset - so a 10 year old domain would still be 10 years old.  During this period of time, the existing owner of the domain could actually re-register the domain as well.

After this, domains go through the 'Redemption Period' and then the 'Pending Delete' period.  These domains will be completely deleted from the registry, and have their creation dates reset.

You're much more likely to get some 'juice' from PreRelease names, than names that have completely dropped from the registry.

2.  That said, if you're still considering this technique, you'd probably want to look very carefully at the backlinks of the site you're buying.  A large portion of the expired domains with backlinks were used for spamming.  It's probably not worth your time to disavow all of the bad links from a domain you've picked up at auction.

3.  Expired domains can be 'rehabbed'.  If you take the time to rebuild the site with valuable content, it will be able to rank for search terms, and build up page rank again.  You'd probably have much less risk in the long run by rehabbing some related domains with good content and linking back to your main site, than using the 301 technique - though I've never done any side by side experiments to say for sure.