SE domain worthiness
 

Iknow the answer to this question depends largely on factors such as the exact keywords, but I am looking for a general guideline.

If you're out buying up expired domains with search engine listings, how deep in the ranks can a page be before it is useless? First page? Second? Fifth?

The reason I ask is that the program I wrote to find expired domains takes a couple of hours to search for expired domains on seven major engines with a list of about 400 keywords/keyphrases when I have it set to go five pages deep. The time it ttakes includes performing all the whois operations and everything, but it is still a long time.

I could probably cut the list of keywords and phrases down to 50 or so, but I don't like the idea of missing domains because I didn't include a common variation on a search. Should I just cut it back to less than 5 pages deep or is it worth going that deep into the results to find domains?

I suppose I could also make the program multi-threaded, but that's more of a last resort.

I appreciate any advice on this.

SpaceAce

I think I would go 2 pages deep... unless you think pages that are indexed deeper may be re-indexed to a higher position.

expired domains don't have a SE listing

DUH

I guess that's something to consider, but I don't think I would spend too much time trying to improve their rank.

I will assume DarkJedi is kidding :)

SpaceAce

in that case, good luck finding any

I am not sure what you're talking about. I've already found hundreds, many with page 1 and page 2 listings on Google and Yahoo. It's been a few months since I did this, but my test runs tonight don't seem to be showing any less results than usual.

SpaceAce

.. go for domains with a pagerank of at least 2 and you´ll be laughing.

Is there a way to check the PageRank of an expired domain? An easy way to trick the Google toolbar or an online interface? That would be really useful.

Although, if I snag the domains off page 1-2 of Google in the first place, they probably have a high PageRank, eh?

SpaceAce

After #20 on Google, it is worthless, most people don't search beyond that. That according to a tutorial I read once:)

I would pickup any domain even if its in page 10, if you know what you are doing you are not morer then 60 days away of having it it be number 1 depending on a few factors, i.e. how long it has been indexed, if the url once pointing to it is still indexed at a decent rank, the link title of the inbound link to that page etc.

2 hours?! Have you thought about doing the crawl on a server, and getting people to subscribe to the data? You could also sell the processed data to other companies...

There's just something Not Quite Right about 1000 people running your application, all simultaneously raping the search engines for 2 hours straight... wouldn't it be better to do it once, and explode that data to your customers? :)

It's not how many ideas you have, it's how many you make happen

Not real sure if Google or when they dump 404 pages but depending on the next spider run is when they would dump. So he may be correct on locating domains that are expired. Thing I would do if that is the case of grabbing expired domains is do the cache lookup to see what they had as keywords to rank. Just buying them in the hopes they will still rank is slanted thinking. Once you reup the domain it will not have the same rank becasue fo the keywords.

My 2 cents.

That program wouldn't be for sale would it SpaceAce?

I have seen others like it online but I don't really feel like looking for them at the moment. It's been a long night. Anyway, just let me know. I appreciate it.

[email protected]

You will pick some that still have pagerank and some that have been dropped from google and show a grey pagerank bar. Don't underestimate the greyed ones, they haven't been banned and if they still have Dmoz and yahoo listings, they'll be back if you take the 404 off before the next crawl.

Thanks for all the idea and comments. Sorry it's taken me so long to reply.

reddawg,
I am not sure if I believe they are useless after #20, but I bet they decrease rapidly in usefulness the further into the results you go.

rowan,
the program isn't "raping" the search engines for all my customers. The program I am using is a personal project, not a commercial venture. Also, all it does is do a search and go through the pages of results, just like a person would.

EscortBiz,
The problem is, I don't know what I am doing. not when it comes to getting a page to #1, anyway. I am sure I can turn a profit if I start off with sites that have decent rankings, but I havenever had the patience to take a site from #200 to #1. Mostly, I want them for their ability to help the PageRank of my other domains, plus to grab sales from them if I can.

SquarePants,
That's basically the principle behind it. Search engines don't have time to bust expired domains as soon as they become dormant.

stocktrader23,
I hadn't considered making it for sale. Right now it is pretty user-unfriendly. It doesn't have a web iinterface or anything and you need to know at least a little bit about PERL regular expressions in order to keep the search engines up to date. For instance, to find a domain name, the program has to look for a pattern of text in the results. I just updated it last night to work with Google, Search.com, AOL, Netscape, Yahoo, Webcrawler and Altavista, but in a few months it may need to be updated again. Updating the engines only takes a few minutes, if you know a little about regular expressions. Otherwise, I would also have to provide an updating service. If you want tot alk more, you can ICQ me at 8106140.

Dildozer,
Basically, you seem to be saying grab what I can, right? Do you have an opinion of how deep into the results I should go? I can have the script go 100 pages deep as easily as 5 pages, it's just a matter of how long it will take.

SpaceAce

SpaceAce,

I'm not saying grab what you can, but if the pagerank is greyed out, check for sites that link to it and check their pagerank. You can get a pretty good idea of the future pagerank that way. Don't worry about sites that are below 20, it won't matter once you take ownership of it.

I wouldn't recommend selling that tool either, there are enough people raping the SE's as it is.

" Is there a way to check the PageRank of an expired domain? An easy way to trick the Google toolbar or an online interface? That would be really useful"

yes there is, I use AvailableDomains from http://www.alphacomsoft.com/ to check, pretty good software.

Dildozer,
I see what you mean, now. Thanks for the advice, it makes sense.

funkmater,
Thanks for the link. I will be sure tio check that program out.

SpaceAce

SpaceAce ICQ ME please 46335817 , tks.....

SpaceAce,
You inspired me so much that I wrote my own script which hits up google and checks top listings against whois for registration status.

Thing is, I go 10 pages (100 entries) deep in google on all kinds of keywords and kw combos (2 and 3 word key phrases even) and I get VERY few that are unregistered on whois.

So, either 1)I'm fucking up, or 2)you have registered every fucking thing already, or 3)you are lying. (I'm not proud, its probably me fucking up.)

Can you prove your scripting prowess?

Show us a couple of good google listings that are unregistered right now. I'm not trying to get some free listings out of you or anything, but my experience is that Google is pretty fucking clean.

Thanks man...

OK, here you go. This is an OLD list, so these are probably all dead, but this what I happen to have on hand that I am not interested in, anymore. Also, this list does not include Google or Yahoo, for reasons I am sure you'll understand.

First column is the domain name (if you see an illegitimate domain name, it was probably a buggy version of the script), second column is the keyphrase, third and subsequent columns show the engine and page it was found on.

As you may have guessed, these are not the cream of the crop. Those I mostly keep myself.



Edit: fuck me, that's the new list! Hang on while I see if there's anything here I want.

I am currently (as in, right this second) working on a new script to crawl directories without performing searches to find even more domains.

SpaceAce

I keep thinking the title of the thread says "SE domain worthless".

LOL... a peek at the future?

What a schmuck I am. I hope no one saw that list. I wil post it, again, after I go through it.

SpaceAce

I think I am going to hang on to these for now. There are a lot of page 1/page 2 from search.com and Altavista. I'm not willing to give them away so soon.

SpaceAce