Interesting goings on at Google lately. It seems that picking up expired domains might be a valuable practice again. Previously, Google was dropping all PR and backlink reputation from expired domains to cut down on the SEO possibilities.
In the last month, I’ve grabbed two domains that previously held content but expired and were picked up by those playing the parking page monetization game. Both domains I acquired were showing back links in Yahoo and MSN, but nothing in Google – and accordingly weren’t showing a PR value at all.
Upon parking* them myself for some content development projects (less than 3 weeks ago) I was surprised this afternoon to find both domains now had solid PR values (4 and 6) with backlinks showing in Google.
I’ll keep these names to myself for now, but it may be worth testing the waters again for expired names which have last see life on the web as a part of domain parking monetization projects.
*in the interest of disclosure, my parking pages are nothing more than a coming soon page without any type of advertising on link stuffing.