Fun With Expired Domain Names – Ranking Tops For Poker Terms

Posted on: May 20th, 2006 by Jeremy Schoemaker

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)

Post written by Jeremy Schoemaker

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.

More about Jeremy at http://www.shoemoney.com!

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23 Comments. What Say You?

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

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

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

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

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

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

  4. Chris Packer
    May 21, 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?

  5. Randy
    May 21, 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.)

  6. roger
    May 21, 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.

  7. ShoeMoney
    May 21, 2006 at 6:26 am

    We have a in house system we use.

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

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

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

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

  10. Jason Sparks
    May 21, 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

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

    yes just a 301 wildcard

  12. samskpunk
    May 21, 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

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

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

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

    Thanks man!

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

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

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

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

  17. garrett
    May 22, 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

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

    Anything you’d like to share or make available?

  19. ShoeMoney
    May 23, 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.

  20. Mark
    June 5, 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

  21. Ken Savage
    April 6, 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

  22. Scott
    August 28, 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! :)

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