The theme we like to orchestrate through our education, is to keep things safe, do what is good for Google, and you will be rewarded longer term, and with less stress. In addition, you will be positively contributing to the web.
A strategy we have previous mentioned is to find expired domains and replace the old site with a new and improved version on the same theme. Although this strategy might be great in a lot of instances, it might not work every time, or might not reach its full potential. We have devised a strategy that will in effect do the same, only without the issue of using an expired domain.
So here is what you do. Again, you purchase the expired domain. You check archive.org to view what the site used to be before it expired. You create similar content (hopefully better written, and more informative). In this scenario it’s not essential to use the same URLs for the pages, but good to create pages on the same topics as before, especially if external sites are linking to individual pages of the expired site.
Now you can redirect the expired domain to the new site. From there you check the backlinks of the expired domain. Go to each site that was linking to the old site and inform them that old domain has changed to the new one, and they are effectively linking to a “dead” site.
This task does require a bit organization. I would advise you use a spreadsheet with all the links. You can likely export the list of backlinks from wherever you were able to check them. If you export as a CSV file you can work on that. Create a few more columns, useful ones that I would use are:
URL – obviously the URL of the site that is linking.
Emailed – a yes or no, whether you have emailed the site yet.
Email Address – if you have it, then it’s useful to know their email address, in case you want to email them again.
Phoned – you might want to be a bit more proactive and try to phone them, it’s much harder to say no on the phone than ignore an email.
Phone Number – like wise in case you want to follow them up again on the phone.
Update – a column for you to write some notes on the progress, e.g. he said he would sort it out next week, check back again on the July the 7th.
Success – once you have the link changed then you can update this column as complete.
This can be quite a time-consuming task, so you might even want to hire a digital assistant to do this for you. But if you can achieve it, then you have just scored a whole lot of links at very little expense, you have improved a lot of other sites by updating dead links, and you have replaced a site that previously ranked in Google, with a new one with improved content and design. You have done all this without the risk of worrying about whether your expired domain faced any unknown penalties, as your domain is brand new.
Of course, as always there is a waiting game for your rankings in Google, I would allow 3-6 months usually, or in a more competitive industry, possibly over 12 months. It would also be better to stage the links over time, take your time to get the links, perhaps over 3-6 months to collect all links.