How to Derive Traffic from Back-links While Avoiding Blacklisted Domains

Purchasing expired domains with existing backlinks and high MOZ rank is a solid idea to help boost rankings of your existing website. On the other hand, you must keep in mind that it can be detrimental if these domains were blacklisted by Google.

The first sign to look out for is if there are hundreds-of-thousands of backlinks spread across the internet. This is an absurd amount of backlinks that are likely to be in relation to a spam campaign. Not only will these back-links have a high amount of off-topic content, Google will quickly recognize them as spam.

Which Sites Should be Hunted at Auctions?

If you want to look for decent expired domains, look for websites that have a past reputation in the 1990s or early 2000s. Not only will these websites likely have back-links from high authority pages, there will likely be less competition when bidding or registering.

In order to take a look at the history of a domain, simply check out what you may find in Archive.org. If a domain looks like spam, then it is not worth bidding on. If it has some spam, but with a legitimate past, then you may take it into consideration.

Is it still useful for traffic? Considering that a backlink has so many domains, you may expect to dribble a little bit of traffic out of it. In reality, it was hard to determine if a domain will serve traffic out of these spam links. You may check Alexa to see if it is indexed, but it is highly unlikely.

How should I populate the domain with content? First of all, do not rob archived content. Although you there is a great chance of getting away with it, old copyrighted content can still end up with a lawsuit with diligent authors. Instead, borrow the old permalinks and write new content that is similar to the old content. This way, you can avoid lawsuits while fully utilizing the old link juice. In addition, Google does not like it when a domain strays away from its original niche.