Backlinks to an expiring domain - can dodgy backlinks ban a site/domain

[Rodica]

Hello,
I'm a beginner who bought her first site 1 week ago - and am very exited to see those $10 AdSense revenue ... it somehow reaffirms my belief that it's really possible to make passive income

As a beginner, the below questions might make you laugh but i do not know how to interpret my discovery.

Here it goes:

After a recent read of an article on this forum on how to go about acquiring expiring domains and what to look for, i have come across an expiring domain which claims a PR3 and a decent traffic. I did a backlink check on market samurai (since Yahoo Site Explorer is out) and found out that the domain has a few links from PR5, PR4 & PR 3 sites and a bunch from PR0 sites.

The domain does not appear in the Way Back Machine - i can tell what niche it was in by the URL but still wanted to check how the site looked years ago (domain is 4 yrs old)

Back to the links: i clicked one by one on all the high PR backlinks and realized that what the owner did was post various comments onto .edu and other high PR sites by using different names on different sites (and when you click on his name it opens his site). Is that legal? All his/her comments address the topic discussed and are "meaty" comments but posted 1 year later than the other people's comments. Did he do that on purpose as no one is overseeing that old topic and did not delete him?

After doing a page source view, i can see that those sites had a no-follow clause, so that could not have boosted his site's PR rank, right? yet his domain claims PR3 according to google toolbar.

I'm not familiar with black hat SEO. Is this it?

I really like this expiring domain's name but am afraid to purchase it now thinking that maybe his site was banned by Google or something due to all this commenting he was doing using different names.

Please help me

Thank you kindly.

[KenW3]

Congratulations on buying your first site Your questions do not make you appear to be a beginner. Knowing the right questions to ask is most of the struggle sometimes. I can answer some, and will list them below as I see them.

can dodgy backlinks ban a site/domain

No. A site will not be deindexed or lose pagerank based on questionable backlinks. A backlink cannot hurt your site, but they may not necessarily help, either. If G allowed bad backlinks to cause harm, then some people might purposely try to hurt competition.

I have come across an expiring domain which claims a PR3

The way to determine whether a page actually has the rank you see, or if it is false is: Go to Google.com and type info:yourdomainname.tld (TLD is your top level domain). You should get one result, and it should be the same domain you typed into G. If the name returned is different, PR is being passed by another site. I cannot show you an example of false PR, because any example normally does not last, but problems are found this way when buying ranked domains. The info: on G check shows a redirect.

the domain has a few links from PR5, PR4 & PR 3 sites

That is one of the checks to determine whether represented PR is accurate. A page with PR has to have at least one domain pointing at it that has the same rank or higher.

The domain does not appear in the Way Back Machine

There are several reasons Archive.org doesn't crawl sites, including being blocked by a robot.txt, password protection on the site, or content not easily crawled. Methods also exist to 'clean' site history from archive.org if a name was used for problem purposes.

After doing a page source view, I can see that those sites had a no-follow clause, so that could not have boosted his site's PR rank, right?

Correct. The nofollow attribute is to tell G that the link should not affect the destination target's rank. (This is not a BH SEO method.) A nofollow link does not pass anchor text either, but has value as a backlink.

thinking that maybe his site was banned by Google or something due to all this commenting he was doing using different names

Commenting using different names is not a problem, but possible removal of backlinks is always a risk when buying names with PR and that is a judgment call based on what your backlinks research has found. From the way you described the backlinks, I would consider them questionable.

If the site has a PR, then it cannot have been banned by G. To see if a site was deindexed by G, you can type: site:yourdomaniname.tld and a site that was deindexed (or has not been indexed yet) has no results.

You mentioned using Market Samurai, so I assume you know about MajesticSEO.com as it is integrated into the paid version. They have a site explorer.

SEO Spyglass has some of the better features for domain name due diligence, but you can get some of that for free at http://www.ahrefs.com/ and it has a backlinks check tool. (The site is in beta, and does have a subscription for more features, but right now you can do 15 searches a day with up to 10 backlinks results.) I would suggest going there to use their site explorer to see if you can find where the PR is coming from.

You didn't say what you are paying, but PR alone is generally $50 or so for a PR3 from places like registercompass.com or domainface.com, and then other domain name attributes may or may not add to the pricing.

[Clinton]

Excellent post, Ken. I've learnt one or two things.

But I disagree about the PR. You don't need to have one site with higher PR linking to you. The way I've always understood it is that a page can become a PR3 with enough PR2 links.

[KenW3]

@Clinton You are correct - my mistake. Having one matching or higher PR backlink is just an easy due diligence parameter, to avoid having to do analysis of the pages pointing to a site being considered for purchase. Mr. Page's formula has an exponential increase between levels, so it is difficult but entirely possible.

There is a decent PR tutorial at SEO Gold http://www.seo-gold.com/seo-tutorial/pagerank

@Rodica If you buy the domain (or any site with PR), you may want to add Domain Privacy immediately. This is so there is no visible change in ownership in the Whois records.

[Rodica]

Thank you Ken. I learned a lot.

Currently, the domain has a BIN of $200 but so far the bids have raised the price at $25 - good to know that a good PR domain sells for average $50.

Useful article as well.

For the site i recently bought, i put privacy protect when i renewed the domain, but i did not realize privacy protect is good when it comes to "hiding" the change in ownership. Thanks again!

[Clinton]

Rodica, I don't quite buy everything the Google FUD machine puts out on the subject of nofollow. I reckon nofollow links count for more than they let on. If they are not providing toolbar PR they may be providing algoPR or anchor text relevance or something else. Google may be also comparing the ratio of dofollow and nofollow links on a site with other sites in the same sector.

Ken, if you get the domain into your account and then put the privacy on, doesn't the WHOIS history show that the domain was yours before the privacy was turned on? And if the nameservers and the site's IP haven't changed post-privacy couldn't people conclude that the last publicly visible owner is also the current owner?

[JJMcClure]

Rodica, I don't quite buy everything the Google FUD machine puts out on the subject of nofollow. I reckon nofollow links count for more than they let on.

Why? I don't get the point of google giving people a way to say 'I don't trust this site enough to link to it' and then ignore their own method? For bought links, it makes even more sense for google to ignore the links since they invented nofollow specificallly for that purpose.

[Clinton]

... they invented nofollow specificallly for that purpose.

How do you know?

Miillions of SEOs are going to look very foolish if it emerges in the next few years that Google's main motivation with nofollow was to identify those sites that jump on the latest SEO bandwagon

[JJMcClure]

How do you know?

Miillions of SEOs are going to look very foolish if it emerges in the next few years that Google's main motivation with nofollow was to identify those sites that jump on the latest SEO bandwagon

How would that work? A new site appears using nofollow, what criteria would tell you (as google) that they're spamming your index and not just using it the way it was intended? They nerfed PR sculpting after they realised people were doing it so why eliminate this as a potential criteria/bandwagon for identifying spammers if that's what nofollow was actually for?

Sometimes things are exactly what they appear to be, I think nofollow is one of them. Beside, anyone still using nofollow for SEO benefits is wasting their time but I imagine all those idiots who were PR scuplting for 12 months after google nerfed it, without realising, probably did feel pretty stupid.

[KenW3]

I reckon nofollow links count for more than they let on. If they are not providing toolbar PR they may be providing algoPR or anchor text relevance or something else.

This article on PageRank Sculpting from Matt Cutts covers nofollow anchor text use by G. Matt says the essential thing to know is that nofollow links do not help sites rank higher. My understanding of that position is that no benefits are passed from a nofollow backlink. Even so, I have to agree that nofollow links are likely to be worth something, which is certainly more than G is letting on.

if you get the domain into your account and then put the privacy on, doesn't the WHOIS history show that the domain was yours before the privacy was turned on? And if the nameservers and the site's IP haven't changed post-privacy couldn't people conclude that the last publicly visible owner is also the current owner?

@Clinton, I suppose you know that in your question is the answer to tracking down owners of expiring domains, and of sites you may want to purchase, that have active domain privacy I have no doubt G has those records, and so does DomainTools.

@Rodica, I have been helped to the realisation that my habit of applying domain privacy is being paranoid. Because of the Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt campaign by G referenced above, I am probably over-thinking the process when attempting to keep information private.