May 20 2006
Jeremy Schoemaker

Fun With Expired Domain Names - Ranking Tops For Poker Terms

By Jeremy Schoemaker 23 comments

About 3 months ago I found a domain that was unregistered but showed over 9,000 backlinks in Yahoo and MSN. The domain was qtw24.com. I noticed that 90% of the links were no follow comment spam but I thought it was a oppourtunity to test a few things that I could not pass up.

I registered the domain and 301 redirected it to forums.shoemoney.com. I pretty much forgot about it until a friend told me that he saw it was ranking really well for some poker terms. I started going through the logs and looking for search terms.

Low and behold. These rankings are at the time of post. I do not expect them to last.

The domain forums.shoemoney.com is a pr6 (on first update)

The domain forums.shoemoney.com ranks #3 for texas holdem on MSN

The domain forums.shoemoney.com ranks #18 on Yahoo for Texas Holdem

The domain forums.shoemoney.com ranks #20 on Yahoo! for Online Poker

And many other terms. You get the point.

As you can see my forums contain absolutly no onpage text containing any of these keywords.

A interesting thing is that Google gives this site no love (keyword wise)

  1. RaymondE said on May 20th, 2006 at 10:07 pm

    That is increadible…. Thank you for sharing your results dude

    [Reply]

  2. blue said on May 20th, 2006 at 10:09 pm

    wow I would give my left nut for rankings like that for those terms.

    [Reply]

  3. Ken Savage said on May 20th, 2006 at 11:01 pm

    Shoe, what website or service do you use to look for expiring or recent expired domains?

    [Reply]

  4. Chris Packer said on May 21st, 2006 at 5:33 am

    After all the fanfare after nofollow was released I thought MSN and Yahoo! were supposed to be supporting it. I guess this means nofollow only applies to Google?

    [Reply]

  5. ShoeMoney said on May 21st, 2006 at 6:26 am

    We have a in house system we use.

    [Reply]

  6. Randy said on May 21st, 2006 at 6:45 am

    I had noticed some of those rankings a while back for the poker terms in Yahoo, and was wondering how you’d managed to rank for those words. (Wondered about why, too, since you didn’t have any poker content or anything like that.)

    [Reply]

  7. roger said on May 21st, 2006 at 8:24 am

    Did you just fall off the stupid tree and hit every branch on the way down? These should not rank with NO FOLLOW tags.

    [Reply]

  8. earl said on May 21st, 2006 at 11:18 am

    ShoeMoney Is this you? I about busted a gut lauging. I found it on your sisters photogallery/

    [Reply]

  9. GeorgeB said on May 21st, 2006 at 2:35 pm

    Personally, I’d sue to have that taken down :)

    [Reply]

  10. Jason Sparks said on May 21st, 2006 at 2:46 pm

    hey shoe, do you just slap up a default 301 for all incoming requests and send them all to the same place? Or do you have some smarts in the system to send them to distinct locations?

    Thanks,
    Jason

    [Reply]

  11. ShoeMoney said on May 21st, 2006 at 6:16 pm

    yes just a 301 wildcard

    [Reply]

  12. samskpunk said on May 21st, 2006 at 6:59 pm

    A interesting thing is that Google gives this site no love (keyword wise)

    becasue of the quality of link? Google show no link for the name

    [Reply]

  13. Mike Seiler said on May 21st, 2006 at 7:51 pm

    The truth finally comes out… he made his fortune as a rock star!

    [Reply]

  14. Jason Sparks said on May 22nd, 2006 at 11:19 am

    Thanks man!

    [Reply]

  15. Tracy said on May 22nd, 2006 at 12:45 pm

    Dude, I would shut that down so quick her head would spin. Shoemoney - Karaoke not a good mix. 8)

    [Reply]

  16. Chris said on May 22nd, 2006 at 3:03 pm

    Shoe, can give me a lesson on hopw one would search unregisterd domains manually ? I have no inhouse system =(

    [Reply]

  17. garrett said on May 22nd, 2006 at 9:39 pm

    i thought if a domain expired, the links were pretty much worthless. I guess not though. I found an expired domain with about 3000 links, and then tried a 301. It didn;’t work for me. Maybe i didnt do it long enough

    [Reply]

  18. Ken Savage said on May 23rd, 2006 at 1:08 am

    Anything you’d like to share or make available?

    [Reply]

  19. ShoeMoney said on May 23rd, 2006 at 10:24 am

    Spider the internet for broken links… whois on the domain. If its not taken then do link analysis with msn and yahoo (google does not keep info for deleted domains)

    That is the basic principal.

    [Reply]

  20. Mark said on June 5th, 2006 at 8:40 pm

    Shoemoney,

    I’m new to the whole “blogging” thing. As a novice in this field, It’s nice to see you sharing your information / tricks with the rest of us.

    Regards,
    Mark

    [Reply]

  21. Ken Savage said on April 6th, 2007 at 9:06 pm

    damn guess not. and to think I’ve been waiting my my warm terminal since posting the above comment for an answer. shhesshhh

    [Reply]

  22. Scott said on August 28th, 2007 at 10:42 pm

    Hey Shoe,
    I am interested to see if and when these rankings started to slide and if you saw any long term negative effects on the shoemoney forums site because of the redirect?

    Keep up the good work! :)

    [Reply]

  23. Expired domain names | DropShipArea.com said on September 14th, 2006 at 3:44 am

    [...] Sometimes the result is completely unexpected, but predictable. [...]

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