{"id":93,"date":"2025-05-09T18:33:46","date_gmt":"2025-05-09T22:33:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/namescores.com\/blog\/?p=93"},"modified":"2025-05-09T18:33:47","modified_gmt":"2025-05-09T22:33:47","slug":"case-study-expired-domain-301-redirection","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/namescores.com\/blog\/case-study-expired-domain-301-redirection\/","title":{"rendered":"Case Study: An Expired Domain 301 Redirection Experience"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Having dinner with Scott (of <a href=\"https:\/\/namescores.com\" data-type=\"link\" data-id=\"https:\/\/namescores.com\">Namescores<\/a>) we were talking about the value in expired domains. I&#8217;ve always been skeptical of them, there&#8217;s lots of conflicting information out there and a lot of it sounded too risky for me. After telling Scott my first experience with an expired domain he asked me if I&#8217;d write up a summary on it as an example.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Writing this is &#8220;tricky&#8221; because it involves one of my very best earning sites and I certainly don&#8217;t want to make some of the details public and risk having my site stats suddenly skewed or manipulated, or worse attracting attention that could lead to any sort of penalty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So, with that in mind I&#8217;m going to disguise my site and details slightly, kind of like writers do when they &#8220;change the names of people involved&#8221; to protect their anonymity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>My website is about hamsters (it isn&#8217;t really, but that&#8217;s what we&#8217;re going with for this writing). I&#8217;ve had it for over 5 years and built it up to a respectable level of monthly traffic and revenue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I spent a ton of time and money building content and gaining backlinks for the site in the first two years, but since then it&#8217;s basically been a passive income source for me. At most I add a posting to it once per month, more often I just update an older posting rather than adding anything new to it, and I haven&#8217;t done any link building in over 2 years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The bottom line is my attention and interest in hamsters waned after a while, the site was earning fair revenue, and so I moved on to spending my time on other projects instead of continuing to grow my hamster site any further.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That said, traffic and earnings had been very level for the past 6 months. the occasional old post update here and there being enough to prevent traffic numbers from falling but it wasn&#8217;t growing either.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Then I came across an expired domain related to my site, it was HamsterPhotos.com (again not really, but it was a NICHEphotos.com domain), with dozens of pages still indexed in Google, and a pretty clean history. Checking on Wayback Machine it seemed that someone had run a cute little site full of pictures of hamsters on it for 8 years, and then it looked like the registrar held it for 1 year with a &#8220;For Sale&#8221; lander on it before letting it drop into the wild.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The DA\/DR were each still showing over 30 with various SEO tools, it was listed in DMOZ and even had a Wikipedia link.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I had some hesitations, the idea of using an expired domain and risking some sort of &#8220;hit&#8221; to my site worried me, but other than the domain holding that &#8220;for sale&#8221; page for the past year everything about this domain said it was a solid purchase and fit for my existing site.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So, I found a registrar offering a nice promo at the time and was able to register the domain for under $7 with the discount.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I immediately created a new page on my hamster site. I had lots of hamster pictures already available to me that had been used within the tons of postings on the site, so I simply gathered them all on this new page making a gallery of hamster images. It literally took just a few minutes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Then I went back to the registrar and setup the <a href=\"https:\/\/namescores.com\/blog\/topics\/expired-domains-for-seo\/\">301 redirect<\/a> for my new HamsterPhotos.com domain pointing the entire domain to my gallery page. I probably would have done better to make multiple pages on my hamster site so that I could setup redirects for the top pages that existed in the past on HamsterPhotos.com but I didn&#8217;t know if this was going to have any benefit at all or not so I didn&#8217;t put in that much effort, my thinking was if I got a few hundred extra visitors over the next year by investing $7 and a few minutes of time that would be great.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Well, without adding any other new content to the site and still not doing any other link building efforts, I surpassed that hope of a few hundred extra visitors in a couple of weeks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In fact, my overall traffic saw a boost instantly, and my weekly numbers were up by about 4% just 2 weeks after purchasing HamsterPhotos.com and pointing it to my gallery page. Revenue saw a slight uptick as well but with display advertising being the primary income on the site it&#8217;s harder to gauge since CPC&#8217;s can fluctuate up and down normally.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Now 4% might not sound like much, but remember this site was doing well&#8211;if not plateaued&#8211;already, so a 4% traffic bump was significant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Then at just over 4 weeks I noticed the traffic bump more than doubled, I was up around 10% and it wasn&#8217;t all coming to my gallery page, it was spread across my entire site, and when I dug in to the Google Search Console I realized suddenly many of the terms I ranked for were climbing in rankings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>My position in the SERPs was boosting for dozens and dozens of keywords. Lots that had been on page 2 for months or even years were now on page 1 in the 6 &#8211; 10 spots, terms that had been low on the 1st page were now top 5, and quite a few that had been in the 2nd to 5th spots were now #1 &#8212; and they were bringing in more organic visitors daily.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That one expired domain was giving me direct traffic via the backlinks it had in place and had increased the authority of my existing domain boosting tons of search rankings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This all began with me finding the HamsterPhotos.com domain in September 2024. It&#8217;s now May of 2025 as I&#8217;m writing this and the boosts have stuck, my hamster site is once again leveled off in traffic and revenue, but it&#8217;s about 10% (give or take week to week) over where it was prior to September.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Since then I&#8217;ve purchased quite a few more expired domains, none for my hamster site as it&#8217;s so niche there&#8217;s not a lot of good related domains that drop for it, but for other sites and projects I have and I&#8217;m a converted believer, until actual data ever shows me otherwise expired domains are the best way to go.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I hope this example is helpful to anyone considering using expired domains and would appreciate reading thoughts or experiences from others in the comments here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Having dinner with Scott (of Namescores) we were talking about the value in expired domains. I&#8217;ve always been skeptical of them, there&#8217;s lots of conflicting information out there and a lot of it sounded too risky for me. After telling Scott my first experience with an expired domain he asked me if I&#8217;d write up [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":95,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-93","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-expired-domains-for-seo"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/namescores.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/namescores.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/namescores.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/namescores.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/namescores.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=93"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/namescores.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":96,"href":"https:\/\/namescores.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93\/revisions\/96"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/namescores.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/95"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/namescores.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=93"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/namescores.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=93"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/namescores.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=93"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}