Leveraging expired domains is one of the most effective ways to ramp up your SEO, but it’s still an underexplored SEO strategy by those who are fanatically white-hat. It’s great for improving your backlink profile, and it can be an impactful way to attain HQ backlinks that increase your site’s authority, resulting in higher traffic.
There are quite a few ways to use expired domains to improve traffic and clicks. In this post, we’ll explore how to use expired domains to level up your SEO strategy.
What Are Expired Domains?
Domains aren’t a one-time purchase–they’re usually run on annual subscriptions. When the owner doesn’t renew the annual subscription, the domain name expires and goes defunct. Most successful sites attract a significant number of links in their lifespan. When a domain is closed due to nonpayment or if the business closes, the domain is then available for buying along with all the links.
Many people purchase expired domains to redirect traffic to their website, hoping to increase their website’s Google search results using those extra backlinks. These backlinks increase the target site’s authority, and as a result, it performs better on Google’s search results. When choosing an expired domain, try to find one relevant to your site.
Building Private Blog Networks
PBNs are one of the most popular methods of using expired domains, but using them is also the riskiest method. A private blog network is a network of sites set up to build links for a website to improve its Google search position, and it’s usually set up with similar content from the expired domain.
To set up a PBN, you need to register an expired domain and set it up as an online blog. Keep in mind while setting up your site, it needs to look like an authentic blog rather than a privately owned site created for linking to other sites.
Building a PBN is more costly than broken link building because you have to develop and host websites. However, you can then sell links on your PBN, even by using PBN domain services. PBNs are against Google’s guidelines, though, so you might get your PBN taken off or even receive a penalty.
Broken Link Building
Broken link building is the best way to use expired domains to improve your SEO. This way of gathering backlinks takes a lot of time, but it takes the least upfront capital.
First, you have to pick out an expired domain in your niche with lots of HQ backlinks. Then, you’ll reach out to those sites that link to that expired domain and tell them about those broken links. After that, provide them with an alternative to link to on your website to replace those broken links.
To get the highest response rate, contact the site owner. In most cases, they’ll offer a link to the website to replace the broken ones, but you should expect some site owners not to respond to your offer.
Using the Merger Technique
The merger technique is one of the best methods for improving SEO as it takes the least effort while giving the most ROI. The most time-consuming component of this tactic is finding high-quality, relevant domains.
The merger technique is essentially the attempt to find relevant expired domains with solid backlinks and then redirect them to your site. This is incredibly effective in increasing your site’s authority and traffic.
Build a Microsite
Another great way of increasing your site’s authority is by building a microsite within your main site. This method creates a set of relevant web pages which work independently within your main site.
You can then use those pages to redirect traffic to your site by setting up redirects for individual pages corresponding to your website’s relevance. If the expired domain had steady traffic when it was active, chances are it’ll get some of it back after setting it up again. This way, you’ll instantly get a boost in traffic.
Final Thoughts
These are some of the best strategies you can adopt to skyrocket your SEO results using expired domains. Expired domains are an inexpensive yet effective way of increasing traffic to your site.