Buying Expired Domains for Traffic

[Mercantile]

Following CCarter's inspirational post in the Digital Strategy Crash course on using expired domains for traffic I thought I'd give it a go. Just one question, how do I know whether the traffic reported is bots or real visitors? I know in my Google Analytics accounts I often get "referrer traffic" from these bots (before I block them anyway). Or is it just a matter of putting down your money and taking a chance?

Cheers

 

[CCarter]

#1. GoDaddy's numbers are off a regular hit counter, not Google Analytics.

#2. Google referral spam that you filter in your Google Analytics never hits your actual website, it just pings' Google servers and uses your account #. That's why you can't block that traffic in .htaccess since it never hits your site.

#3. Sometimes you just have to roll the dice, and if you followed the instructions correctly and got only Expired Auction domains, you will see that once you win a couple here and there the numbers are not only accurate but they actually increase. First domain I bought I spent about $700 on and it claimed to have 32K visitors monthly. I bought it and did a case study on Wickedfire and 3 months later it was doing 100K visitors from the SAME referral traffic, less than 3% of that traffic was from Google.

#4. You need to be able to distinguish between bullshit backlinks that send no traffic and backlinks that send traffic. The easiest way is to first look at the domain in Archive.org and see IF it was even imaginable that site could've been doing the amount of traffic being reported. Afterwards look at all the backlinks and see the Alexa of the sites backlinking to the site. Does the story still make sense? At that point you can take each backlink and run them through SEMRush or Ahrefs and any other competitor look up tools which can give an estimate of traffic that might be coming to that backlink itself.

Lets say you see a domain being touted at 1,000 visitors a month. And you look at the backlinks and their Alexa are in the 100K to 200K range. Is it possible that those backlinks are sending 33+ ppl a day? Yes. But if you look up the backlinks and see the sites are in the 1+ million Alexa range - then something is off. It could be the traffic was part of an affiliate's tracker and they forgot to renew it, and will be disconnected soon.

"The more you investigate the less risk you have to take on." - Dan Peña

If you take the time and look up each backlink you should be able to quickly determine where the traffic is coming from. If you can't figure it out then something is definitely fishy. The project I did was generating 90% of it's traffic from Pinterest and I was able to determine that within 5 mins. However if you don't follow the Expired Auction instructions and don't do the research, then yeah, you'll be throwing money out the window and it will be your own fault.

I've got this one little network where I budgeted 1K a month to spend on new domains, and no matter what I spend that money. I used to be able to get 5-10 domains generating 1-10K visitors a month, now a days cause so many people are now aware of buying traffic I'll be lucky if i can get 2+ domains for 2-5K a month. But the traffic is still there and if you find niche sites that pass the smell test then yeah go for it. I'm able to almost guarantee traffic increases just off this strategy.

What I would do is watch several auctions and monitor the domains after they've been won. You can setup email alerts for all this, I've got an email folder with all these past domains that were expired auctions. I visit the sites every now and then and look at the Alexa. It's always on par with the traffic estimate - and IF, again this is worth repeating for the 12th time, it was an Expired Auction.

 

[Mercantile]

Thanks for the great reply CCarter. I was checking them in Archive.org similar to what you suggest and was starting to see those patterns, but the backlink analysis will take it to the extra level.

Thanks also for the tip on referrer spam and htaccess.