Redirecting expired domains for Link juice - bad idea nowadays?

[AhFreshMeat]

I came across a competitor website on Ahrefs that pointed a domain (that they acquired) with very powerful backlinks from the expired domain directed towards one page on their current site. This page it points to has their top posts displayed on it.

It looks like they re-directed the entire domain to this page... my question is. How can I do this without ruining my site? I'd like to do this, but I don't want to risk my site getting penalized. I was going to grab one from ODYS and point it to my site the same way they did.

Anyone have any experience with this? There's too much information online that is conflicting on this topic.

 

[LinkPlate]

If it's working for your competitor - why wouldn't it work for you? Question is, how much do you expect to make from your money page and is it worth the $$ investment in an expired domain. Some expired domains are very expensive so you should def do some calculations

 

[AhFreshMeat]

If it's working for your competitor - why wouldn't it work for you? Question is, how much do you expect to make from your money page and is it worth the $$ investment in an expired domain. Some expired domains are very expensive so you should def do some calculations

Makes sense, well, thats the problem - Its tough to calculate how much link juice works when performing an expired domain redirection.

theres so much conflicting information out there. From google’s john mueller, to independent builders like the authority hacker guys. It’s tough to understand if it can negatively impact a site, or just not work at all as I’ve yet to implement it myself. So testing on my own site ive worked so hard on feels risky… which brings me here.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Your biggest risk is that it ends up not working, not that you'll be penalized.

The magic, in my opinion, is the due diligence it takes to make sure you're buying the right domain and going through the right efforts to increase the chance that it works. Mass 301 redirecting all the pages of the expired domain to an existing page on an existing site isn't the best way of going about it, even if someone else got it to work.

It does work, though. Relevance and having the domain stay in the index the whole time and also not being dropped from the registry are important. Beyond that, I wouldn't just lazily 301 to a page. I'd match page-to-page and I'd move as much content over as I could, and I'd improve it if needed.

Basically, don't think of it as "301 Redirecting a Domain" and think of it like "Mergers and Acquisitions" and you'll be fine. "What would a real company do that just acquired another company?"

What I wanted to say, too, was that, while it does work, you don't get all the oomph out the domain like you would if you built on the domain itself (instead of simply redirecting it over). That's been my experience.

 

[Hristo]

Not an SEO guru here, but I work for a domain selling company and I can share my experience based on my work there.

First of all forget what Google says about expired domains at all - they don`t like it for obvious reasons.

Also 90% of the public information that you will find on the web is either outdated or wrong.

The truth is - 301 redirect may still work, but it is not that efficient as in the past.

I wouldn`t redirect the entire domain to a new domain - looks a bit suspicious for Google, I would redirect only the Homepage, just to be on the safe side, hence you want a domain with many and strong links to its Homepage. Usually if a client needs such domain I look for one with more than 50% of links to the Homepage.

Also there are quite a few things to keep in mind when it comes to 301 to get the most of it - strong & clean backlink profile, no archive spam and more.

Is it risky? As long as you don`t redirect everything I would say the risk is not big, the bigger risk is it may not work as good as you want.

People nowadays go for PBN`s - based on my experience that`s more effective. It requires a bit more efforts and budget, but think of it as investing in digital assets - buy a few decent domains, link them to your main site, then sell 2-3 links/guest posts from each domain, your investment pays for itself without the domains loosing to much SEO juice, repeat.

Is the PBN risky? Small risk if you know how to do it.

For the people saying "301 or PBN`s is out of the Google guideliness" - well then how buying links or guest posts is up their guideliness?

I don`t want to make the post too long, if you want to know more feel free to message me.