How Expedia Buys Its Way To The Top Of Google

Re:How Expedia Buys Its Way To The Top Of Google by hkmurakami on Saturday December 28, 2013 @09:24PM (#6977916)

The most hilarious example I know for black hat seo is in japan, where expired domains for congressional candidates get bought up by these spammy companies for their link quality.

(The Japanese govt pages have high page quality, and link directly to these candidate domains, thus giving these candidate pages high link quality status in google's eyes. The candidate pages become info-spam-blog pages that peddle things like cosmetics and link to the mother payload pages to impose so rank.)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:How Expedia Buys Its Way To The Top Of Google by davemel37 on Saturday December 28, 2013 @10:08PM (#6978085)

google resets PageRank on expired domains.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:How Expedia Buys Its Way To The Top Of Google by davemel37 on Monday December 30, 2013 @03:34PM (#6986747)

I just found this recent thread on this topic, specifically related to Google penalties on domains that expired.

http://www.seroundtable.com/google-old-penalties-expired-dom...

It seems like old bad links can hurt an expired domains rankings.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:How Expedia Buys Its Way To The Top Of Google by hkmurakami on Saturday December 28, 2013 @10:23PM (#6978136)

Correct me if I am wrong, but if the govt pages continue to link to these newly reborn link spam pages, certainly these expired domains have higher link value than a brand new fresh domain?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:How Expedia Buys Its Way To The Top Of Google by davemel37 on Saturday December 28, 2013 @10:29PM (#6978162)

you are mistaken. This was the case until about 2008 or so... here is a quote from matt cutts.

"On expired domains, Matt said Google tries to reset pagerank/links for all expired domains to zero when they are registered by someone new. They don’t try to penalize the expired domain, but they also don’t want to give credit for the previous owner’s links."

http://www.seo.com/blog/conferences/matt-cutts-does-domain-r...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:How Expedia Buys Its Way To The Top Of Google by zorpner on Sunday December 29, 2013 @01:44AM (#6978690)

This is actually a major selling point for WHOIS privacy services (for SEO) these days, if you maintain the domain with the same registrar and continue to use their domain privacy service, the records won't change and Google won't cancel your rankings. So, if you're thinking of selling a well-ranked domain, add the privacy services, because they typically boost the sale price.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:How Expedia Buys Its Way To The Top Of Google by lemma on Sunday December 29, 2013 @10:56AM (#6979922)

I could be wrong about this, but I think I remember reading that Google became a registrar in part to get info behind the privacy services.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:How Expedia Buys Its Way To The Top Of Google by girvo on Sunday December 29, 2013 @12:26AM (#6978533)

The keyword there would be "tries", I'd wager...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:How Expedia Buys Its Way To The Top Of Google by hkmurakami on Saturday December 28, 2013 @11:24PM (#6978358)

Thanks for the correction! :)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:How Expedia Buys Its Way To The Top Of Google by riffraff on Sunday December 29, 2013 @04:48AM (#6979036)

how would that work? I mean, the old links would still point to it so the juice would still flow in that direction. What if the content stays the same but the owner is different?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:How Expedia Buys Its Way To The Top Of Google by davemel37 on Sunday December 29, 2013 @11:35AM (#6980076)

By discounting all links from before the date it expired.

People used to snatch up expired domains and use the internet archives to put back up the same content and than slowly add links to their sites...

Because of this spam, Google just ignores links to a domain that expired that are from before it went live if the new registrant is a different person I presume but don't know.

[ Parent | on HN ]