Do Expired Domains Keep Age, Power, Trust and Rankings Once Recreated? A Case Study

Welcome to my blog and first case study.

This is a tale of a domain which I registered back in 2014 to use as a review site in the music and entertainment niche. Mainly through launch-jacking/clickbank products. It used to be worked on by my virtual assistant back then and had a lot of time and money invested into it.

In late 2015 my daughter was born and my Internet marketing business started to take a back seat to selling on Amazon. Amazon sales brought in money EVERYDAY and my review sites simply did not. I just didn’t have the time to focus on it while helping out with the baby.

Time flew by and my big list of domains accumulated for money sites and private linking started to expire one after the other. It got to a time, I simply ignored the warning emails from my various registrars.

The domain in question expired this year on the 25th of March 2017. I remember seeing an email for final expiry warning and thinking to myself, ok this domain didn’t really make much money in its life-time, let it go.

Fast-forward to September and my 2 year old daughter is now independent and goes to kindergarten. I find myself with enough time and start making an inventory or what’s left of my online business. I became a full-time Internet Marketer once again.

I am logging in to all my affiliate accounts and stumble on to this.

Ok thats not bad. Nothing to throw away, 80 bucks pays for all of my hosting needs etc. I get into a quick dance

Which was quickly cut short by this

OH COMON…

Well, this was money generated by this same domain which expired in March, I immediately had a “bright idea”. I was going to beg for my money to be paid. It was going to be something like this:

“Dear …, I have affiliate commissions in my account but as I have moved on from the business and no longer have access to my website, could you please………..”

Then BOOOOOM, I woke up.

I realised this was the most stupid, loser idea I had month. Why don’t I see if I could get back my domain, my rankings and SMASH DOWN THE PAYMENT THRESHOLD with sales. I once ranked top 5 for the product name FFS…

So I rushed over to my domain registrar and the domain was gone. I had a feeling that it had just expired, but NO. That was 6 months ago. The domain was long gone.

I fire up the domain availability checker and there she was. A-FREAKING-VAILABLE. Thank you google for stopping public Pagerank. This domain would have been scooped up the moment it expired.

So I order my old domain back (this was the 30th of September 2017) and uploaded a backup of my old website then indexed the site with my video sitemap trick.

Here below is a screenshot with a sample of links I have been tracking for this site. As you can see the domain came back into the google rankings at the same or higher rankings compared to when it was deindexed.

You can click here to open the image in full in another window.

The downward ranking movement before the domain expired is due to me losing my private blogs one after the other during my 2 year break from IM. As the links disappeared, the rankings slowly went down.

Upward movement after I got my domain back is me replacing expired linking domains with new ones. I have only replaced a small percentage of those domains as I now have better quality one and don’t need as many to rank better.

In conclusion – The moral of the story….

Well the simple point of this case is that, while MANY people claim that expired domains get their power reset by google, MY CASE (which is all I can claim to have experienced) is that this expired domain is maintaining a good amount of its power and trust from google.

It entered back higher in some cases and most of the posts are slowly creeping back to old positions even without backlinks. A new domain will NEVER have these position off the bat. There are just too many SEO savvy affiliates competing for some of these keywords I currently rank in the top 20 for.

So even if my domain is now just 40+ days old, it seems to be performing like that domain that was 3 years old at the time of its expiry.

There are 100000s of “formerly loved” domains that expire every month due to simple life decisions or events. These domains if registered and loaded with their old content could pick off where they left off and new content will be loved by google.

Anyone could have picked up my domain to be used for money site or pbn, ignoring that it had this potential to rank for nicely searched product kws.

Make what you want of all this but I just had to share this experience with you.

As for the product owing me money, I have upgraded the content from a crappy 400 word review to a mega 3600 words one. The long tail traffic is slowly coming in now. I will update this post if I ever get to meet the payment threshold and get my money.

Thanks for reading and please make sure to check back as I will be adding to the blog more cool test and case studies as well as simply sharing what I experience in my day to day SEO journey.

You can leave a comment if you want to share your experience or ask a question. For now I have made a review of the monster truck seo. Feel free to check it out. You can also check out my My Pay Per Lead SEO Journal.

I wish you all the best in your endeavours.

Rob

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