Link building - anyone use this technique?

[seoman10]

I have had a client come and ask me to do some link building, they are wanting to use a strategy of buying expired domains and creating a single page website with some keyword links back to the main website.

Seems like an old idea at best, has anyone used it or is it risky

[Nigel_Carr]

Hi seoman10

This is an old school black hat technique that may do more harm than good. What you are talking about is setting up your very own backlink network. I would think very carefully about doing this. I.E. I wouldn't do it. You would likely pick up a Google penalty in this post-Penguin world. Before you ask I have experience of doing this. I had 29 domains pointing to my main domain with great anchor text. Everything came crashing down around me in September 2012 when Penguin slammed me in the balls. The traffic collapsed and my site received an algorithmic penalty. Now that was a proper link network!

What you could do and get away with would be to just buy a couple in a related niche and 301 them to your domain but you would have to thoroughly check their history.

1. Go to www.achive.org and check out what the sites looked like. Are they quality sites? do they look OK? Are they in a related niche?

2. Check out the backlink profile, check to see if there are any dodgy or spammy backlinks that will get you in trouble if you 301 from the site,

3. Check in Google search console if there are any manual penalties on the domain.

As long as you don't buy 20 or 30 domains and do this then I can't see much downside if the domains are clean. There may be a small loss of link juice going through a 301 but not so much that you would notice. (The jury is out on this one - Rand maintains there still is - other SEOs point to the fact the Google said there wasn't - I tend to believe Rand)

Note also that you can't guarantee that these domains will keep the backlinks now they are pointing to you!

I hope that helps

Regards

Nigel

[seoman10]

Thanks yes that confirms my suspicions.

When you say by a couple of domains I take it you mean ones that are currently active as opposed to expired?

As I understand it Google resets the domain when it expires and changes owner?

[Nigel_Carr]

Hi seaoman10

Expiration isn't the problem. Of course, when a site is dormant after expiration there is no content so it will drop from Google pretty quickly - it isn't reset as such. The problem will be whether a dormant domain can retain its backlinks which if the site is reused would still be valid.

A change of owner has little effect on a domain.

I have seen some horrific sites being offered for sale so do check the spam score in MOZ open site explorer as well. Tread carefully!

Best Regards

Nigel

[Paddy_Moogan]

Hi there,

Thanks for the question!

As Nigel said, it is a risky tactic if you're doing this kind of thing at scale, so I'd definitely echo what he said about being careful. There are legitimate ways of linking multiple sites that you own together - publishers will often link all of their magazine sites together - but the way you've described it doesn't fit with this.

It may well work for a short period, but if it's clearly been done for SEO purposes then it will most likely catch up with you at some point!

Hope that helps!

Paddy