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)
About the author...
Jeremy Schoemaker – who has written 2415 posts on ShoeMoney.com.
Hi I am Jeremy Schoemaker and ShoeMoney.com is my blog. 99% of the post here are done by me but you will see others occasionally make guest posts. This blog is fun to write but for my day job I run several online companies.
Images provided by ShutterStock
Why Do You Give A Crap About What People Think About You? 
If I could – starting over 
PPV Advertising 101 – Untap the Potential (Part 1 of 3) 
{ 22 comments… read them below or add one }
That is increadible…. Thank you for sharing your results dude
wow I would give my left nut for rankings like that for those terms.
Shoe, what website or service do you use to look for expiring or recent expired domains?
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?
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.)
Did you just fall off the stupid tree and hit every branch on the way down? These should not rank with NO FOLLOW tags.
We have a in house system we use.
ShoeMoney Is this you? I about busted a gut lauging. I found it on your sisters photogallery/
Personally, I’d sue to have that taken down
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
yes just a 301 wildcard
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
The truth finally comes out… he made his fortune as a rock star!
Thanks man!
Dude, I would shut that down so quick her head would spin. Shoemoney – Karaoke not a good mix.
Shoe, can give me a lesson on hopw one would search unregisterd domains manually ? I have no inhouse system =(
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
Anything you’d like to share or make available?
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.
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
damn guess not. and to think I’ve been waiting my my warm terminal since posting the above comment for an answer. shhesshhh
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!