After investing on a PR4/DMOZ/Yahoo! Directory listed domain and reading the comments of fellow SEO Philippines member Andre, I wanted to dig deeper into the whole expired domains/SEO topic. I specifically wanted to know if an expired domain could retain its PageRank (PR) and backlinks value once acquired by another party.

Here’s the result of my research:

Item 1: Google officially discourages the practice of acquiring expired domains for PR purposes and has indicated in the past that no PR benefit can be received from this practice.

There’s a lot of “expired domains” information on Webmasterworld. I’ve picked some of the juicier stuff:

• Thread: Good news about expired domains (WebmasterWorld March 7, 2003)

  GoogleGuy Post #1

  One resulting improvement with this index is better handling of expired domains–the authority for a domain will be reset when a domain expires, even though dangling links to the expired domain are still out on the web.

  GoogleGuy post #10

  …you can get that domain into Google; you just won’t get credit for any pre-existing links.

  GoogleGuy post #12

  When you register a domain for the first time, you won’t get the old links for free. You’ll have to get them the old-fashioned way. :)

  GoogleGuy Post #19

  There aren’t any penalties for expired domains–they just don’t get credit for pre-existing links…I tried to gently hint several times that buying expired domains just for the PageRank wasn’t a good long-term plan. Hopefully this info will help webmasters look for sites with good names or visitor traffic, because it won’t help to try to buy an expired domain to get PageRank.

• Thread: Expired Domains With PR and Links etc (WebmasterWorld June 17, 2004)

  GoogleGuy Post #1

  I’d second that (commenting on an earlier post: “buying an expired domain name on the basis of Google PR alone is a bad idea”).

Item 2: The Open Directory Project/DMOZ doesn’t pass on the listing to the next owner of the expired domain. The new owner will have to do the Suggest URL/Add URL task all over again.

Forum moderator hutcheson:

If a site goes dead, we remove it. And if a site has gone dead, we would (at best) consider it a new submittal, and review it from scratch. This is particularly true if the domain has changed hands.

You can’t inherit a domain’s former listing. On the other hand, you do inherit any bad reputation the domain formerly had. And if you put significantly different content on the domain before we spot it, then the site may be removed with extreme prejudice for what we call “bait and switch” — even if it might have otherwise been listable. All in all, a lose-lose situation and a very bad deal, I’d think. So we’d consider that people who SELL “expired domains that are listed in the ODP” to be engaged in fraud. (The ODP is another target and the victim of such frauds, as they are also tantamount to “conspiracy to commit bait-and-switch”, and we take them VERY personally.)

Item 3: The webmaster community is split on the issue. Some say PageRank is retained, some say they’re lost. The big forums are littered with anecdotes from both camps: PR4s becoming PR0s, PR4s retaining their PR4, etc. Some are saying forget PR and concentrate on the residual traffic benefit.

My Own Experience

See here’s the problem. I wish I could contribute based on first hand experience, but I just bought my baby last week, so it’s really too early to tell. So far, here are the domain variables I’m starting with (tool used was PageRank Source):

• Currently a PR4 (future predicted PageRank: PR5)
• Alexa rating: 94,881
• Active ODP/DMOZ listing
• Active Yahoo! Directory listing
• 152 backlinks in Altavista, 158 in Yahoo
• Backlinks from PR9, PR6, PR5, PR4, PR3, PR2, PR1 pages

I recently updated the homepage and true enough, within a few days, Google was able to spider and index the new page. A site:domain.com check also confirmed first hand one of the recent changes to how Google lists site descriptions. Whereas before they got snippets from the document text, now they’re getting the ODP description.

My hypothesis is that expired PH domain names retain their PR. Even if that would be disproved later on, the domain should still amount to something in Yahoo and MSN right? :) Guess we’ll just have to wait for the next PR toolbar update to test the hypothesis. While waiting for that, I should start a project asap to recoup some, if not all of my investment.

I’d ask for suggestions but unfortunately, the extra attention might “contaminate” the experiment results. Only 3 people know of the domain, so if things go boom, you’ll be on my Christmas day car bomb list :)

Recommended Readings:

The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture