What is going on with expired domains?

[kamgae]

Hi guys, I have been dealing with PBNs for some time already and recently noticed something weird. Just to keep simple all of the PBNs made last year and before still are very successful. I say this based on the test I perform which is described here - diggitymarketing.com/how-to-test-your-pbns/

I would like to mention here that I am working on a non-English market so google's algorithm against PBN usage may not be that developed here. Basically saying all of my PBNs look like crap. It means full posts on HP, semi-spun content (but unique), all 404 redirected to HP, 3-5 posts, generating very little traffic. But they are still indexed and perform pretty well every time I test them.

The problem is that during last 3 months I have bought about 100 expired domain. And even though I make them look even more legit (however I believe in my market as long they are indexed they are supposed to bring link juice) my success rate is around 20%. They mostly give neither positive nor negative results. Just neutral. As if all of the link juice coming from their backlinks was cut off.

What is your experience guys? I think things are getting strange.

 

[Calamari]

diggitymarketing.com/how-to-test-your-pbns/

What is going on is that Diggity talked about this tactic, it gained mass adoption, and Google found a way to combat it.

There are way too may factors that go into building a proper pbn website to figure out what is holding you back, but I'd start by building better quality ones on better quality domains.

 

[kamgae]

There is no doubt about the cleanliness of my domains. I do my due diligence and all of my expired domains have been dropped only once by its first owner (+ my country registrar publishes number of drops for every domain). All of the domains belonged to legal businesses/blog sites.

I don't pay too much attention to metrics like TF cause I check all of the backlinks manually. I only pick domains with high quality/contextual backlinks coming from well known and high DA sits in my country which I also recognise myself. Anchor texts are really good. Hosting is legit.

I know people may be suspicious about what I am saying but if someone really knows this business and wants to know what I am talking about I am willing to share my PBN example.

So basically saying I am 99% sure there is nothing wrong with the expire domains themselves.

If so, why they are not working? I may be wrong but I believe the visual aspects are only important for manual reviews. As long as you don't have a manual review and the PBN is indexed, no matter how shitty it looks like, it still should give power (especially on a non-English market). Moreover just to make sure I started building better-looking PBNs, with more content and actually it doesn't change a thing

 

[Calamari]

In the last three months you purchased about 100 dropped domains and built them all out on legit hosting?

That's a lot work and quite the investment, especially in hosting. I'd like to learn more about how you found 100 affordable hosting accounts that aren't already being heavily used by other pbn builders.

How many of your servers are located in the country you're trying to rank in?

I know you say you are doing everything right, but simply the fact that you're doing it the same way everyone else is doing it makes it wrong. It's too easy for search engines to pick up on common patterns and filter by algo.

Time is also a bigger factor than ever. If your domains aren't being somehow algorithmically identified as spam then you'll just have to wait it out or somehow make those domains more powerful.

 

[kamgae]

All of the work was split among 3 workers. It doesn't cost that much as registration cost in my country is about 2$ per domain. I also have an agreement with my hosting providers that I can get cheap additional IPs. Please keep in mind that these are really legit hosting providers, like in the top 10 used in my country.

I know I am doing almost each domain the same way (however I do change things for testing purposes - some are built crappy way, for others it took days to make them look like real sites) but it cannot matter as I am not using right now any of these domains to rank my money site. Like I said I am at the stage of testing them - it means ranking to some 3rd party website (each PBN to a different site) to check whether these PBNs have any impact on ranking.

And just like in the Matt's article I came to a conclusion - if I can't rank a decent 3rd party site, why would I point the PBNs to my MS? The crappy thing is that the PBNs, like mentioned in the first post, are really good and still don't work...