{"id":169,"date":"2016-09-24T20:24:40","date_gmt":"2016-09-25T03:24:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.canirank.com\/blog\/?p=169"},"modified":"2020-11-25T10:50:21","modified_gmt":"2020-11-25T18:50:21","slug":"google-poisons-the-well-expiring-domain-auctions-now-come-with-extra-risk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.canirank.com\/blog\/google-poisons-the-well-expiring-domain-auctions-now-come-with-extra-risk\/","title":{"rendered":"Expired Domain Auctions: Now More Risky as Google Poisons the Well"},"content":{"rendered":"

In medieval times desperate defending\u00a0armies would sometimes dump diseased corpses<\/a> into\u00a0wells as they retreated. Rank\u00a0with bubonic plague or tuberculosis, the well water became undrinkable, crippling\u00a0the advancing army by depriving them of\u00a0safe water sources. Never mind that this kind of scorched earth tactic also hurt the\u00a0defenders’ own countrymen, depriving\u00a0entire villages of their sole source of clean water: the end justifies the means, right?<\/p>\n

Now it seems that Google has dipped into the history books with the\u00a0latest tactic in their long-running war on manipulative SEO. Early evidence suggests that purchasing domains from expired domain auctions may have been one of the signals used to detect and deindex Private Blog Network (PBN) sites in a recent mass penalty<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In other words, if you build a website on a previously expired domain purchased through GoDaddy Auctions<\/a>, NameJet<\/a>, or other expiring domain auction sites, you’ll now need to be extra careful to avoid having your domain classified as a PBN site and penalized or even completely deindexed<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

That’s right: the well of expiring domain names has just been poisoned, depriving us all of one of the best\u00a0sources for quality domain names at affordable “wholesale” prices. Anyone wishing to avoid the risk of being classified as a PBN site is now left with only two options to save your domain and your investment: pay a premium to buy a domain on the secondary market, or register an inferior, but available, domain name.<\/p>\n

How does Google detect\u00a0PBN websites?<\/h2>\n

Modern machine learning algorithms such as those deployed by the search engines often rely upon a combination of signals to classify or evaluate websites. For example,\u00a0we might build a classifier to identify animals like this:<\/p>\n

\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Animal Classifier<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/thead>\n
Color:<\/strong><\/td>\ngray<\/td>\ngray<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Trunk:<\/strong><\/td>\nyes<\/td>\nno<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Tail:<\/strong><\/td>\nyes<\/td>\nyes<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Size:<\/strong><\/td>\nHuge<\/td>\nTiny<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Result:<\/strong><\/td>\nElephant<\/strong><\/td>\nMouse<\/strong><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n

Note that not all gray, tailed animals are elephants, just as not all low-quality sites built on expired domains are part of a Private Blog Network: some are just crappy websites, indicative\u00a0of incompetence perhaps, but not nefarious intentions. If we were building a classifier to detect Private Blog Network websites, we might look for a number of signals that these sites have in common:<\/p>\n