There are many, even among those administering websites, who don’t know the value of taking over dropped domains. Dropped domains can offer an amazing basket of advantages such as authority, back-links, and domain-age but can also carry some negative factors that can affect the ranking of your site.
Advantages of Dropped Domain Names
Domain age: One of the biggest obstacles facing you when you kick off a new website is that of getting a ranking because at that point in time with a new domain name, your domain age is zero and search engines have not discovered it. It does not matter when the original domain had been bought; the search engines are only sensitive to the time that has elapsed since they first crawled it. The reason why domain age is important is simple; Google gives it a lot of preference on the reasoning that if it has been around for a long time, there are users who have found it to be useful and Google too has built up some history with the domain name. This will enable you to get more traction on ranking than a spanking new domain name that is an unknown entity to everybody.
Back-links: Another great advantage of acquiring expired domains is that of back-links that had been acquired by the website over the years. Even though you have a new website, use of the old domain name gives you access to the existing back-links. You simply need to identify the back-links and redirect the relevant pages to pages that are more relevant to your context using 301s. By doing this you are able to effectively grab the link juice being earned by the dropped domain and take advantage of the momentum that would have taken quite some time for a new domain name to gather. The ranking value is the main reason why you find certain dropped domain names selling for hundreds of dollars rather than their value of a few dollars.
Authority: Among the main reasons why some sites draw a large amount of traffic and other sites much less is the extent of authority they have got by various techniques such as good original content and back-links from sites that are considered to be reputed in the particular niche. It can take a lot of effort and time for a new site to acquire good quality back-links and the resultant authority that comes with it. By acquiring a domain that has good authority you can start getting a large volume of traffic right from Day 1. However, it does need to be questioned whether the traffic being generated is targeted or just comprising visitors looking for content on the earlier site.
The real benefits accrue to you if your site operates in the same niche as the old site because then the traffic which is coming as a result of the old back-links will still find value in your site. Effectively buying dropped domain with good authority works very well for transferring the benefits of that authority to the new site without needing to slog it out for months to build it from scratch.
Conclusion
When out to buy a dropped domain name, you need to be also cautious that you do not end up with a domain that has a bad history and received penalties from Google or other leading search engines. Sites with heavy penalties are more common than you think because there are a lot of operators who want to make a fast buck with loads of illegal or useless content who abandon the site after some time after getting penalized. You can use a number of online tools that will examine the back-links and the page rankings as well as citations so that you can inspect them for discrepancies that may be indicators of penalties.
