Millions of dollars are spent each year acquiring expired and expired domain names at auctions. Domain name registrants let their domain names expire and people, including domain investors, will bid on them when they are offered for sale through an auction or drop capture platform.
There is a segment of domain name buyers looking for expired domain names for SEO purposes. They may try to create a website with an expired domain name to take advantage of inbound link traffic, or they may choose to redirect the domain name to another website for the “SEO juice” that these expired domain names give off.
A Google policy change announced today on its search blog, The key word, may have an impact on the domain name expiration auction market. Here is an excerpt from the article on domain names:
“Occasionally, expired domains are bought and reused with the primary intention of boosting search rankings for low-quality or unoriginal content. This can mislead users into thinking that the new content is part of the site more old, which may not be the case. Expired domains that are bought and reused with the intention of boosting search rankings for low-quality content are now considered spam.”
I wish Google would provide a little more clarity on this. If BostonDogWalkingService.com (unregistered example) was owned and used by a Boston dog walking service that went out of business and the domain name expired, what if an investor buys it for resale? Will a subsequent buyer who owns a dog walking service in Boston be penalized?
It seems that Google’s intention is to penalize the domain name if someone creates a spam website or forwards it to another existing website specifically for SEO purposes. However, I am curious as to what will happen if another user subsequently purchases the domain name in good faith for a new business.
While this seems a bit unclear at the moment, I’m guessing that Google doesn’t want people to buy domain names just for SEO purposes, and they will penalize those who do. If this starts to happen and these SEO types of domain names lose value, I suspect it will hurt the expiration auction market. There have been numerous times that I have come across a random domain name auction with extraordinarily high bids due to SEO value rather than inherent domain name value. These types of domain names may have less value.
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