Pasted below is a post that @eli wrote about old and expired domains many years ago
This question just in from Till
Hi Eli,
is an old domain just worth if it has quite a lot backlinks or is an
old domain also worth if it’s just in the index of search engines, but
has almost no backlinks (0-20).
Regards
TillGreat question. It captured my attention because theres always a lot
of talk in the SQUIRT forum about expired domains. Several members of
the community are talking about how they’re building their SEO Empires
with snagged expired domains. I kind of cringe when I hear that not
because expired domains are bad, but because I personally have no idea
about the history of the domain. Frankly it could sway either way. The
practice of using expired domains could be good or bad. The problem I
have with it is the unpredictability, which I’ll get to in a moment. For
now I assume the people know what they’re doing when they buy the
domain and are making wise decisions. Much like buying a used car always
do your research and find out the background of what you’re buying. The
inherent problem is, the odds are stacked against you. If it was a good
domain with value someone would of kept it. Yet, mistakes are made and
there are some definite gems out there and if you aren’t on the field
you can’t score. So while I think buying up expired domains for SEO
reasons is a good thing if you know what you’re doing I am hypocritical
in the fact that I don’t do it myself. The main reason is due to a
question I have myself.This question just in from Eli
Hi handsome!About 8 months ago I had several domains
expire on me and never managed to pull them out. They were good domains
with links, never banned or penalized and were part of several different
projects. I reregistered them quickly and managed to get them back. I
had no real purpose for them so I added them to a common platform site
network I was working on with several other new domains. All the sites
had the same structure and went through the same promotion, but for some
reason the expired domains took nearly 3 weeks longer to get indexed
than the brand new domains. 8 months later they still seem to perform
about the same as the other sites, but I’m curious with all their
previous backlinks and such why did those exact domains take longer than
the others to get reindexed. Any ideas of why that was?I still don’t know. I don’t have the attention span long enough to
buy some control domains and wait a year to expire them out and hope I
manage to get them back in order to do any tests and figure it out.
Anyone else experienced this by chance?Either way I see buying expired domains for SEO reasons as having the
following benefits.1. Established inbound links2. Aged inbound linksOther than that your still starting from scratch. So my philosophy is, unless
the domain is a gem, such as either a good name or it having phenomenal
unique backlinks (ie lots of links or saturation like you mentioned)
than its easier and more predictable to just work with new domains.
Not to mention it saves a bit of headaches and time, and even sometimes
money. Which brings me back to the predictability thing. I sometimes get
questions from people about a particular basement or foundation site
that was an expired domain like it suddenly dropped in ranking, or it
got banned, or it lost a bunch of pages in the index. Anything out of
the ordinary.
BTW I’d like to take this moment to remind everyone that in case you
never noticed, every year right before Christmas sites tend to drop in
saturation levels in Google. Its probably due to the upcoming updates
that usually happen in January, I don’t know. Either way it seems to
happen every year near the beginning of December.So in cases like this you can look at stuff and maybe find a problem,
or you can just write it off as the search engines being weird, but
when your dealing with a new site on an previous registered domain you
get that extra variable. Is the problem caused by a problem with the
site, search engines being weird, or the history of the domain causing
problems? It makes the job of diagnosing problems and learning from
mistakes that much harder. For me personally, I’m still going to be
doing this in 5 years so theres no point in forcing unneeded shortcuts
on myself. All my domains will eventually become old, all my domains
will eventually get link age. I just let time do its thing and in the
mean time work on new exciting projects. <- its a good life
Which nearly answers the question about old domains. Old domains
aren’t something I think people should stress about. Every single site I
build, while I’m building it, I’m wishing the domain was old. Hell when
I’m buying the domains I wish they were old. Yet in a year none of it
matters and nothing has changed. I’ll still be wishing the domains I am
buying now were older like the domains I bought last year and the year
before that. It’s like playing Sim City, it doesn’t matter if you have
it on fast mode or slow the strategy is still the same. Because the
beautiful thing about age factors are, they are done for you
