This is not really an SEO site — I’ve had one of those, spent a lot of time one it and got bored with repeating myself over and over to the masses.  However, once in a while I still like to ramble on about some SEO tricks. So this one is thick on the seo.

Now there are a million and one tricks to getting backlinks, but most people never bother with the complicated stuff and just go with the basic automated stuff. This is a mistake. It’s not so much the quantity of the links that help you rank guys (though quantity can rank you), it’s the quality of the links. And this is even more true these days in a post panda/farmer world.

There are, what I consider, two main ways to build a new website.

Method 1: Ranking a New Website

One way is to buy a brand new spanking domain, preferably with your keyword somewhere in the title, even better if it’s the exact keyword. You then throw up 5-20 pages of content. Start building some backlinks SLOWLY over six months. Between 6 months to a year, provide you have enough content, some high value backlinks or just a lot of low value backlinks, you’ll start to see a good amount of traffic. Likely between 75 to seven hundred people a day. You then start fleshing out the site with more content and building even more backlinks and you’ve got yourself a decent site in another six months to a year.

The problem with the above method is that it takes a long time to get your new site getting traffic and even longer to make some decent money from it. This is why I tell noobs who want to make money online with new websites to given themselves a full year to year and a half before they expect to see a real profit from their sites. You can make money a lot faster, but to build up some real authority for a single niche site (as opposed to spamming out a ton of shitty little sites), you’re looking at a year to two years before you can start seeing four figure traffic.

Are there faster ways to do this? Yes.

Let’s look at the next method.

Method 2: Aged Domains

Now there is a way to fast track the whole ranking process quite substantially. And that’s to buy aged domains. There are a couple ways to get an aged domain. The first, best, and most expensive, is to just outright buy someone’s existing website. You are basically guaranteed the rankings that the website has and with some elbow grease on your part, you can substantially increases the traffic with some good SEO.

However, these days people like to hang onto websites (even if the website makes no money), so unless you are prepared to part with thousands of dollars to buy someone’s website, this is not a strategy that most of you will follow. But if you have a lot of spare coin in the bank, this is the BEST way to save time. Rather than build, just BUY an existing website in a niche and you’ve already climbed half the mountain.

For people who can’t afford to buy existing websites, there’s a much cheaper option that can still yield some surprising results: buy expiring domains.

These are basically domains that webmasters have let go or forgotten to renew. You see when your domain name expires, it doesn’t directly get reset to “new domain status.” It goes in a sort of domain aftermarket. For a period of 30-60  days (I can’t remember the exacts here), it gets put up on the domain bidding market. If someone scoops that domain up in this period and the original owner STILL does not renew it (yes it’s possible the original owner can still renew an expired domain within the 30-60 day period, but the person must pay a lot more than normal to do so), then that domain is sort of “saved” from deletion. The age of the domain and the PR are “saved” and transfer over to the new owner.

Now age is one of the key factors google looks at when ranking sites. It’s one of the ONLY factors that SEO’s can’t easily manipulate. A website’s age is a bit like their reputation — you can’t “cheat” age because it simply takes time. Well, actually you can kind of cheat (for now) if you buy aged expiring domains.

The key is to find domains with a good number of real backlinks to them. And if you know how to look for them, you can find some really good steals. I’ve found domains with hundreds (even thousands) of good backlinks still pointing to them. In the best case scenario, the PR of the domain stays as does whatever ranking it had before it went into “expiry status.” In the worst case, you lose the PR and the rankings get reset. It used to be you always kept the PR and ranking, but google is getting smarter about detecting this sort of thing, so there is a shelf life with this strategy — a shelf life that’s nearing the end. There are some tricks to try and prevent this from happening, but I won’t go into that here.  Now even if the worst happens and the PR + rankings are reset, you STILL keep the backlinks pointing to the domain. This still makes it way the hell easier to rank with that domain, though it will take longer.

So find an expired domain name with some PR and more importantly some strong backlinks and you’ve just shortcuted the whole ranking process substantially. You are far far less likely to get sandboxed, even in competitive niches.

It’s way the hell easier to build up a “new” site on an aged expired domain with some good backlinks pointing to it than it is on a brand new site. Quite often, you can put up some new content, get a few new backlinks, and you’ll be rolling in traffic after a month or two, as opposed to a year. In some cases, you can even save a year of “bullshitting around in the sandbox” because of a good aged domain.

So why do you save a lot of time buying an aged domain with backlinks to it? Well, google seems to put a lot of “trust” in the age of a domain now. Keep in mind when I’m talking about “age,” I’m not talking about a domain that was registered years ago but never had a site up. I’m talking about a domain that had a website on it for a substantial amount of time (years). Don’t think that buying a domain that’s 10 years old that’s never had a site on it is going to be treated any different than a brand new site. Aged domains that actually help you rank are always domains that have had full websites on them with a good number of (natural) backlinks to them over the years.

Once you get a good aged domain, you can either turn it into a money site or use it for backlinks. Either way benefits you greatly. Of course, you still need to put content back on the site and build it up into a legit site.

My personal recommendation is to look at getting aged domains for entire niches. Aged domains with niche keywords in them and with relevant backlinks to them can be a powerful SEO tool or are a great way to start ranking in that niche fast.

Let me tell you a story. I once bought an aged PR domain with close to 1000 legit links.  We are talking links from education sites, real companies, and real websites — no internet marketing or SEO nangaly fangaly links. Real links. The domain was close to 12years old with a site that had been on it that long. The site had the exact keyword I was looking for in a niche, and quite a valuable one at that. Basically, it was the “perfect” domain name. I spent nearly 3000 dollars acquiring said expiring domain. Expensive, yes?

However, once I had control of the domain, I put up a couple pages of content and let it sit. Within a week the site was getting hundreds of people a day. It was ranking for the exact keyword (which was the keyword I was targeting at the time). By the second week, the domain started ranking on the first page for the generic single word in the domain name. I had spent a year and a half trying to rank one of my other websites for the exact term, yet in the space of 1 week, the aged domain with quality backlinks and the right keyword in the domain had outranked it, and even ranked for the single word generic term (a term with over 150 mill results).

Final Word

I rambled on in this post to show you guys that there are other “ways” to rank your sites than the obvious “build spam link” mentality that I see most of you have. Think a bit outside the box when you get links and you’ll find that ranking isn’t as hard as you think.

Best

Spider

Random Posts