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Last week, I released a podcast that I did with Hayden Miyamoto where he explained how he is pulling in $30,000 a month with small niche sites. As suspected, people loved the podcast! Hayden was able to share a lot of his “secrets” that he uses to build micro niche sites after Google Penguin in that podcast.
So, today I am releasing a new podcast interview I did a couple of days ago to dig a bit deeper on how Hayden is using expired domains to build links to his niche sites. In particular, we discuss exactly HOW and WHERE he is finding the high value expired domains. These are some advanced tactics that most people starting with niche sites are not familiar with. In fact, I didn't even know you could find expired domains using these methods until recently.
How to Buy High PageRank Domains for $9
Before you dig into the podcast, I want to mention a couple of things. First, you do NOT need to use these practices to be successful with niche sites. These strategies are geared more towards people that are ready to scale their business up to thousands of domains, or perhaps build hundreds of sites every month.
However, if you only have a few sites or even a few dozen, this is certainly not anything required to do well with small niche sites. In fact, I have about 300 sites myself, and I've never used any of these tactics with expired domains. Hayden and I discuss this in the podcast, keyword research and finding the very low competition niches can allow you to build sites with very few links that still rank.
So, if some of these tactics sound a bit complex (and they are), you don't need to worry about it, you can do just fine without them (I make a full-time income with niche sites, without using these strategies).
Second, I wanted to point out what Hayden is NOT doing. He is not talking about buying recently dropped domains or expired domains that can be purchased at auctions. The domains he is finding may have been expired for many years and are available to be registered by anyone at any domain registrar for $9 or $10. These are available domains that have been long forgotten about.
So how does someone find expired domains that once registered can have a legitimate PageRank of 5, 6, or even 7? We discuss this is detail on the podcast.
A Word of Caution
Some of the tactics covered in this podcast would not be considered “white hat”. Using your own sites to link to your other sites is essentially done to manipulate the search engines. Google is not a fan of this. But as Hayden explains, isn't the whole point of SEO to get your site to rank higher in Google? So technically, any link building is against Google's policies.
In addition, Hayden also discusses selling links – this is also against Google's policies. So, I feel like I need to warn you that Google frowns on many of the tactics discussed in this podcast – so proceed at your own risk.
What's Covered in the Podcast
Here is a list of the topics, websites, or other items that we discussed during the podcast:
- Using expired domains to “own” your links
- Multi Class C IP hosting
- How to find high PR expired domains
- Xenu Link Sleuth
- Scrapebox
- Open Site Explorer to check links, domain authority, and MozTrust
- Ahrefs
- How to determine pagerank of an expired domain – PageRank Chart
- What is TrustRank and MozTrust?
- How to Find and Register expired Blogspot or Blogger domains
- Selling Text links on Text Link Ads
- Hayden's tool for finding expired domains
- Hayden's video demonstrating how to find expired domains.
As discussed in the podcast, I am going to try my hand using some of the software that Hayden is making available to me to see what kind of expired domains I can find. I'm excited to see what I can dig up. Then I plan on coming back and sharing some of my results.
And of course, Hayden has created some free videos again to give a walk through of how he is finding these expired domains. You can watch his videos here.
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72 Comments
Conversation
Can’t wait to give this a listen to when I get home. Question, are you thinking about building your own network like this?
I don’t think I would ever build a network to the extent that Hayden has; but I’m certainly considering building something on a smaller scale. We’ll see, and I’ll keep everyone posted.
Thanks Spencer and Hayden,
The last two podcasts have been pretty eye popping for me. I am curious if you are looking into building your own high pr site network as well.
I’m also curious what you think about SEOmoz that Hayden touched upon in his videos and the keyword analysis tool from there. There are some keywords that seem to have different difficulty levels based on Long Tail Pro vs SEOmoz tool. Have you used SEOmoz before and what are your thoughts on the keyword analysis tool that they have?
Thanks as always!
-Tim
Some of the SEOmoz stats are actually used in Long Tail Pro. So, I think SEOmoz puts out some great stuff. I think their keyword tool is valuable; however, as I wrote in this post: https://www.nichepursuits.com/how-to-analyze-the-top-10-google-competition-for-your-keyword/ – relevancy is very important. So, you need to do some additional analysis on your own as well based on how relevant the results are to the keyword.
Hi Spencer doesn’t SEO moz help you with relevance with their metrics?
No, I don’t believe that SEOmoz really looks at the relevance of the keywords – they simply analyze the overall strength of the pages/sites. So, even an extremely strong site might be easy to beat if it doesn’t target the keyword as well as you.
Right I agree. However SEO moz seems to give you that info by showing their metrics in addition to Hayden’s APA.
Hey man I usually like your stuff but you really shouldn’t post things like this, it’s bad for everybody in the long run.
Steve – Hayden has an interesting approach, and I think people find it interesting to see what others are doing. I’m not trying to say everyone should do what he does.
SPENCER – as you know only to well
THIS IS PURE BLACK HAT – seling links oh my god.
Is this the new process your following. Introduce your reader and listeners to the dark side! and have them loose their sites.
I hope you and the readers get that these are short term methods to play the system. donot point these things or methods at a site you want to keep for more than a few months.
How hard do you think it would be to write a filter to stop this stuff happening? easy Matt’s team cant yet be bothered that’s all. Look at penguin it stomped on an industry.
And surely you don’t believe that i cant take one of his sites and using websites on the web starting with whois I cant see then number of sites he owns. with a few subscriptions i can then find the servers where some sites are hosted and continue out to the edge of his network? diverse IP’s and whoisguards cant stop following links out.
Sure its interesting to read this stuff but heck its not an addition to a business.
Tom – No, I’m not recommending these tactics to everyone. I gave a clear “word of caution” in the post that these are against Google’s policies.
Also, I agree that these should not be used on “authority sites” or other long term business type sites.
I am certainly not saying everyone should even do this with niche sites – I won’t all the time. But I’m always open to testing new things out, so I may experiment…but of course I will know that its extremely risky.
He’s not selling links. He’s building a network of sites.
Hi Marc
In the podcast he does talk about selling links from his network of sites to other people.
Spencer awesome podcast you have there.These days you seems to me moving nichepursuit in the direction of podcasts too and not just posts.
Also i think you should “market”niche pursuit more.Lots of people need to know some of these stuffs.Epic!
Kenneth – Feel free to help me “market” niche pursuits and share this post. 🙂 Glad you enjoyed it.
Great podcast , learned a lot from it. You mentioned about using different hosting for different blogs, can you recommend some good and cheap hosting companies for hosting such network
This is invaluable information Spencer and Hayden. The type of stuff I wouldn’t release to the public, because of all the controversy and stupidity that will follow up in these comments.
Like omg, this is so black hat.. Yea and every other form of link building is considered black hat, as well.
Building links is against Google’s policy!
Thank’s for this wonderful podcast and the information you release here on NichePursuits.com. I’ve been a loyal reader for a little over a years now.
I wanted to say the same thing 😛
To all those “oh my god black hat stuff…” – go and follow google guidelines and be “white hat” – in the mean time I’m going to bank a lot of dollars just by adding this technique to my seo arsenal 🙂
Spencer – great podcasts, I don’t listen to podcasts at all but those two are f***** awesome !! 🙂
Your noth missing a serious point.
I will state all backlinking is against T&C’s sure thats true.
Lets us an anlogy to help teh argumenet.
You can life life as a buddist monk (Iwish i had)
You can life life where your prepared to lie a little to the wife when she asks if her arse looks big in these super tight jeans designed for a super model.
Or you can break shop windows and steal from the shop.
The first one is to idealistic for most and doesnot work.
the second is advisable – you get traction and its always good to lie to MattCutts
The third will sooner or later get you banned.
Lets be also clear I like Haydens work and will expand my own based on some of his ideas (thanks Hayden) but from his own comments he got pandadered and penquined to death. all cool but NOT if your looking for solid business advice. This is high risk poker.
Its just a warning.
Tom – Interesting that you will be trying out these tactics, but tell everyone else not too. Also, lots of “whitehat” sites got hit by Panda and Penguin as well. So it just not these tactics that are risky (which they are), but all SEO is risky to some degree.
Hey Casey – Yep, I know some people won’t like this. But it does give a sneak peak into what lots of other people are doing out there (perhaps not exactly this, but similar things).
Thanks for sticking around as a reader!
Ok this is in the only time I’m doing this in these comments. Haters will be haters, and both Spencer and I put tons of disclaimers in the post and the podcast… but I think this will be useful to some people.
Black Hat, Blue Hat, White Hat, Pink hat… It’s all bullshit. It’s all designed to manipulate Google. To make a 1 million dollar business following Google’s guidelines will take you years, and that makes it much higher risk then the techniques I have described here. Projection math is never good, but I should be able to clear a million easily this year. And if my sites all get crushed I can figure it out and come back and make another million next year. This is how SEO works.
If I had to define “Black Hat”, I would define it as “Highly Effective”. White Hat would obviously get the opposite definition.
Example: Blog commenting, Web 2.0 profiles, forum profiles. That all started out as big black hat techniques years ago. They got used and accepted into the mainstream, and suddenly they were no longer black hat. And they were also much less effective because so many people were using them.
People create hysteria around black hat so that other people don’t use it. This is great for Google, great for the “Black Hatters” already out there, and great for the White Hatters (or Black Hatters masquerading as White Hatters which is the majority of the case). And then there are the people that buy into it and never make a dime because of it.
I equate it to fighting. If you’re in a fight, say you’re a kid in school, and you kick someone in the nads, or scratch them, or pull their hair or twist their fingers – the bullies will say you’re FIGHTING LIKE A GIRL. True meaning? You’re fighting effectively, and people don’t like it because it levels the playing field.
All I can say is please keep this thread going. I have thoroughly enjoyed all of them. Thank you both VERY much. I finally feel like I am learning some important information, period!
Thanks Bryan! I plan on continuing to share what’s working for others…
The question is
Why are you in a ist fight in the first place!!
You clearly didnot get my analogues 🙂
But thats also missingmy point which im clearly doing a very bad job of.
Your building a private blog network. Period. This is not new. BMR got closed and so did many others. the fall out from thats is amazing.
Sure Spencer Ill use black hat. I just dont like people saying its knida not white
Or more importantly Haydens idea that you can sell links from these properties as wel.. Yikes it gets worse.
Why – Because people trust you spencer. Your now supporting the use of black hat techniques (cool) and sell ing links form the sites as well (not cool).
Hayden I don’t hate you quite the opposite. Your doing some great work here. All i tried to do was highlight the dangers so new guys dont get burnt buying 50 PR4 sites and pointing them to 10 of their sites and get de-indexed in Panda 4 or penquin 2 or blah blah 7 without understanding thats going to happen.
Its fine for you and me where the cost of building these structure’s is a rounding error in the profit and loss account.
I hope thats explains it better spencer.
Selling links is a bit of a funny double-standard with Google. I mean, they say it’s bad if you sell links, but then it’s okay for Yahoo to sell a spot in their directory for $300 a year? As well as other top-level directories with high PR? Oh well.
Whatever the issue, all I can say is what Hayden laid out here is a non-rehashed (imo), awesome material which I would otherwise not have learned if not for your posts.
The podcast and the video are both free, so thank you. I may not be able to use this information for what it’s intended for but it definitely has value, it widened my scope of things and it can be used for some other purposes.
Great info.
Another great podcast Spencer! Thanks for sharing the great info Hayden.
I enjoyed the entire podcast, but Spencer, that music at the end made me cry.
Wow that is insane!!
I do have a question tho.
Since a lot of larger “dudes” online (Pat Flynn and yourself) are not going for the authority site approach and a bit less for the niche sites.
One critical item (in my opinion) is list building.
Do you know if Hayden also collects emails on his sites?
and
If he transforms these sites into authorities in the long run?
I do transform some of the better sites into larger sites, maybe 50 pages or so, and collect email addresses on some of them as well. But I don’t put enough attention into any given site to really market to those email addresses. The exception are my non-Adsense portal sites for my furniture businesses.
Well said, Hayden! I like your analogy, something most cannot wrap their heads around because there so far up googles ass.
Sorry for the profanity, Spencer. Like I said earlier, these techniques (posts) only bring controversy, its all fun though.
This is great content that will apeal to those of us who like to experiment, or who have already dabbled with this side of the business – the dark side.
TomJ…
I read a few of your comments and I simply don’t understand your mindset or your analogies ….
“Why are you in a fist fight in the first place!!”
Because he wants to make money…. simple!
“Your building a private blog network. Period. This is not new. BMR got closed and so did many others. the fall out from thats is amazing.”
A private blog network that YOU CONTROL is nothing like BMR whatsoever…. Apples and Oranges…
“Sure Spencer Ill use black hat. I just dont like people saying its knida not white”
There is no such thing as “white hat” … if there is, explain! You will have a hard time trying to tell your theory to webmasters such as Tim Carter from askthebuilder.com… who got whacked for following Google Webmaster Guidelines to a tee.
“Or more importantly Haydens idea that you can sell links from these properties as wel.. Yikes it gets worse.”
What’s wrong with selling links? All of the top ranking websites do it, why shouln’t Hayden… or anybody?
“Your now supporting the use of black hat techniques (cool) and sell ing links form the sites as well (not cool).”
I think Spencer is showing us how other people are successfully making money using interesting techniques… VERY COOL! There is nothing wrong with selling links… every auction listing on eBay is a link that has been sold, as well as all paid classified ad sites, directory sites, Flippa listings.. Warrior Forum WSO’s …. I could go on and on forever… one might even be able to argue that any type of affiliate link is a paid link since you are compensated if a sale results…
“All i tried to do was highlight the dangers so new guys dont get burnt buying 50 PR4 sites and pointing them to 10 of their sites and get de-indexed in Panda 4 or penquin 2 or blah blah 7 without understanding thats going to happen.”
What you describe as “dangers” sound like opportunities to me… In fact, I can’t wait to get started… I would like to see a list of top ranking sites in very competitive verticals who have not bought links to improve their position in the serps… other than brand name companies… they all do! Anyone starting out should have a few high pr links in their arsenal to give their sites a boost.
You forgot to ask him how he uses them! Drip feed? Blog roll? With other methods? Anchor text? You need to record part 3 and finish the series 🙂
I’m a black batter and proud of it. I have long term sites and quick money makers. So what if Google deindexes my sites lol. I have more.
This was all discussed in the previous podcast, see the link above in the post to Podcast 9.
For those looking for some info. on anchor text data after penguin, here is some really great data that was compiled a month after penguin touched down.
I hope this is useful.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ajy-T_bQFud5dFYycl9NZnk0cV8tZnlEanhFVFhNM3c#gid=0
Thanks Casey! I’ve been looking for something like this.
Hayden/Spencer:
The last two podcast have been excellent and I love the concept of resurrecting dead domains. IMO, some of the comments have been over the top in regards to your process. You have made it VERY clear that one should proceed with caution on the leasing of links. That stated, I have been able to rank very high on my sites with very few links and all targeted back to my other keyword similar sites that are ranking well. None of them were effected by either of Googles “animal” attacks in fact most climbed in the rankings. I believe that you are spot on when you talk about making your sites news style. Google is really putting an emphasis on this style for the future. I’m look forward to reviewing your videos on your domain search process!
Thanks again to both of you….
I
I’m an affiliate marketer with less than 10 niche sites making around $20k a month from affiliate income (not adsense). I got lucky with my niche I guess.
Either way, it has gotten a lot harder after penguin, my sites dropped and I had to resurrect them. I still haven’t gotten to pre-penguin levels ($50k a month) and I was thinking of ways to do it, and building a blog network was it. I got so much incredible value out of these podcasts I can’t really put into words.
One questions/issues:
* C/Class IPs – if they are bought from “SEO hosting” providers are quite an easy footprint to follow! Does hayden have a smarter way than that? I’ve got some ideas of my own (buying various shared hosting packages from various hosting companies) but I’d like to keep it affordable.
I do various shared hosting packages as you said. Diversifies a lot. I also do have some on seo hosts as well though.
Thanks for these great podcasts. Hayden is a great guy, after following his 2 video tutorials I was able to land myself a PR4 and a PR2 which I can now develop and linkbuild with.
All I can say is haters gonna hate. This is no different from article submissions, social bookmarking and so on.
Hayden,
I have been looking into different hosting for different ip’s. I have gone through mant different company reviews but i would really like to know what you would recommend if you just had say about 15-20 sites.
Thank you and Spencer for such insight.
Best
Cortney
Hi Cortney,
IXWebHosting is great in that it gives you 15 different IPs (search for coupons first). But you want to request them overtime since they seem to just constantly rotate IPs.
Thank you Hayden, much appreciated!
Spencer,
Really impressed at the last two podcasts after that little layover…… but you are giving away a lot of content (and some pretty awesome stuff) on this one… this is one tactic that was not picking up to fast, and now you are exploding it out here… Anyway, you’re the man, keep up the great work, lots of success on the App as well.
Jason
Thanks Jason!
@Chris Broholm,
How do you know that those domains are PR2 and PR4. Shouldn’t be they “NA” currently? ( Are you just calculating at present with the formula given from hayden of “2 pr less” )
@Hayden,
Does the PR of domain come back after putting the content in some days or you need to wait for the next PR updates?
Hey Sam,
One domain I was able to find still had the PR4, indicating the it had recently expired.
I ran it through all the metrics that Hayden teaches and with tons of links pointing to it, there should be no risk of a PR slap. I mean it might go to PR3 but even then I think it’s a good deal.
The PR2 is the same way, recently expired with good SEOMoz authority, so I expect the PR to hold.
Of course I got lucky finding these, as mostly you’ll have to check the metrics on a domain without PR and do some qualified guesswork (as per Hayden’s tutorials) to determine the possible PR. It’s trial and error no doubt, good luck with it!
Happy July!
I agree this has been one of the best podcast’s Spence has done, and Hayden brings it big time!
Keep up the great work guys!
Spencer and Hayden these past two podcasts you did were KO punches! Great stuff!
Man use to think the world was flat until someone had the courage to find out by setting sail out into the great big ocean.
Man use to think it was impossible to fly like the birds until someone had the courage to give it a go.
Man use to think walking on the moon was beyond our reach until someone had the courage to put their neck on the line.
Keep testing the waters, keep soaring like the birds, keep shooting for the stars because it’s courage like you’re showing and sharing that’ll keep us all ahead of the curve.
Thanks for the encouragement Nick!
Great Information here. I’ve been working on building a good High PR blog network myself and Haydens strategy sounds pretty awesome. I have heard though, to stay away from dropped domains, so i’m wondering how much the domain drop affects the link juice. Or does it affect it much at all?
It’s hard to say, but generally I’d say that no it doesn’t affect it (or not enough to be noticeable.).
I look for drops at this point mainly to check the likelihood that a spammer has taken hold of it. If there are multiple drops, it’s a lot more likely, and a domain being spammed to death… well that does affect the link juice 🙂
Hayden you are insane…….. much respect mate
Hi guys,
Great podcast. I tried finding the footprints that Hayden talked about for blogspot but haven’t been able to find the one he’s talking about. I tried about 10 variations with no luck.
I don’t think he really said exactly what it was. Any chance of getting that blogspot footprint?
Thanks again for the pod!
Very good podcast! It’s one of them one that come along ever so often and you listen to it 4 times and make notes – I thought it was that good!
Already found 5 great domains myself and building a bigger empire! Thanks for sharing!
Fantastic Podcast!
I’ve got two quick questions, hopefully one of you can answer!
1: Do the sites that you link to with the PR domains also have to be on separate IP’s? For instance, I have 5 PR domains and I use them to link out to 20 niche sites, will Google know that I am linking from one site (a high PR one) to multiple niche sites on the same IP?
2: Hayden, do you worry about copyrights in the domains? Should we always check before we buy them. I found a PR4 and multiple PR3 .co domains but a lot of times those domains were owned by companies.
Thanks so much for all of this!
-Blake
1. If everything you link to is on 1 IP, then yes, this would look suspicious.
2. I avoid branded domains typically.
Nice one Spencer. That is very unique aide to find good domains. I have few ideas floating around me now 🙂
Please share more inspiring podcasts like these.
I was listening to this podcast and I am a little confused about the registering of previously existing blogs. Hayden mentions Blogspot specifically. And I also think wordpress was mentioned.
Yet, both of those sites say that you cant register previously registered sites. I found a wordpress blog that says it was deleted. When I went in to register that name…wordpress says that page is already taken.
Can anyone clarify?
Great podcast.
I used to do this years ago (learnt from Terry Kyle I think), but hope to get back into it.
Btw, does anyone still check Google to see if a potential site is deindexed? I also like to check the wayback machine (archieve.org) just to make sure it wasn’t a spammy site.
Does the content we place on the reinstated sites make a difference? Should I be optimizing for keywords and doing SEO on, say, a PR4 site that I buy?
Or can you just make relevant text links and not rank it for any specific term at all…?
Just wondering because I’m at the content adding stage of the process and I’m not EXACTLY sure what to write or if it really matters…
was loving the No Hat SEO webiste, all of a sudden the domain was parked.
Any ideas what happen? 🙁
Its still alive and well: http://www.nohatseo.com
Well there is no videos, but the podcast was very interesting. How can i get those videos?
Just went through the podcast. Really interesting stuff. I have a question though. Did he say that he didn’t use Class C hosting for his blog network or he did?
He uses different c-class ips for his domains.
I have 3 reseller hosting accounts which I use for clients as well as my own sites. Would this satisfy the IP requirements needed to build a PR blog network? All of the accounts are on my 3 WHM control panels but they are separate accounts. Thanks for the great info.
Hi Spencer,
great podcats – gave me lot of ideas.
I am learning about affiliate marketing and have some nice success. Can you please help me with one issue?
Hayden mentioned that he post each domain on a new IP, with CNAME record. How to do this? I have VPS – should I create ‘CNAME (Alias)’ and use my new domain as ‘host name’? I would really appreciate help with this 🙂
Re Hayden – how he write so many articles for all his websites? Does he pay freelancer writers and how he find them? And does he use some software for managing all articles? It would be great to know.
Keep up with good work!
Cheers
Dean
Dean
Great podcast but this would have been a lot easier to follow with a video. Going to go check out the example on Hayden’s blog now and hopefully grasp it a bit better!
Just listening to this now and wanted to query one thing.
Hayden said that if you had a PR6 site linking to 100 sites that each site would become a PR4.
But what about link dilution? Google have published an algorithm for this and if you input the data for a PR6 site with 100 outgoing links – then the results show it will pass on enough “juice” to make those links PR3.
If it had 200 outgoing links then they would become PR2.
And so on.
I know this is a simplistic view, but I guess I’m questioning what Hayden said about this.
Thoughts on this?
I’ve been searching for domain names lately and I found several that have the da and pa that I’m looking for. If I look on the who is records for the domain it shows it has a expiration date from over a month ago. If I go to namecheap or godaddy and try to buy it. It says it’s already taken. Would you be able to explain why this is? If it’s expired shouldn’t I be able to buy it? Is there different stages of a domain name being deleted? It’s not like any of the domain names are a keyword or high value. I’ve been reading all these articles lately of people buying domains like this on the cheap and not through bidding wars and I’m lost as to what to do now. Thanks Man.
Shaun
Thanks for sharing this tactic though it’s not easy to get high pr domains these days.