Update: Keeping in mind that PBNs still work, they currently have a history of being targeted by Google and likely are not the safest option. This is why we now focus on creating businesses that don’t solely rely on SEO traffic.
First off, sorry for being so quiet here, I’ve had a hectic few months which has left me no time to post. But I figured I’d try to make it up to you by giving you an outline of what I’ve been up to. I will make it short and to the point:
Extending my Crawler
I have been working with one of the interns to extend the crawler. It is now purring like a kitten, and finds about 2000 expired domains a day (with approximately 15 minutes of input from me). This has proved to me that this technique is not saturated, though likely it requires having a brute-force tool like this to get a good ROI.
What’s Next for the Crawler and Expired Domains?
The cream of the crop will be registered and setup on my personal PBN. Out of 2000 domains a day that is usually only a few domains though (PR5+ or PA45+ with strong trusted links).
I will also manually spam-check a certain amount of domains each month and purchase the strong and clean ones to resell at a reasonable price. Everything else that have good metrics but I have no time to spam-check will just be given away for free as part of a list, in an effort to grow my email list.
Selling to SEO Agencies
I expanded on the my idea about link sales and selling to seo agencies. One of the interns took it upon himself to call up SEO companies and offer a 4 week trial of my network. He recorded the rank increases – which in all cases were significant – and we are now in business. This is quickly proving to be extremely profitable and the sales from this have already dwarfed what I get from link brokers. I am paying special attention to ranking in Canada and Australia.
What’s next for Link Sales?
In the near future I will be working on scaling content for the agency packages I sell, as well as improving the quality of the content on the existing domains. After that is done I will likely get booths at conferences to scale the sales. Finally my long-term goal is ranking content with my authority sites in order to lease presell pages, or even SERP packages of presell pages in which these sites dominate several spots on the SERPs. This is every SEOs wet dream, and something I used to take a special pride in. Again I will likely be focusing on Australia and Canada (and possibly Mexico).
Monetizing informational Sites
Scott was going to get back into Adsense, but we pushed it down in priority as the PBN was more important. I had noticed however that my stronger PBN sites were beginning to rank for the terms they were link building their clients, which motivates me to do a little bit of targeting on them. Something I will likely launch another internship for.
Google News
Ben has had several sites go in and out of Google News in the last year. These sites on their own earned between $1500 and $4000/mo. We got them smacked by continuously pushing the limits of automation, but plan on getting a bunch more sites in again. The main benefit I see is not so much Adsense related earnings, but more likely email collection and renting out traffic on these sites to SEOs. This warrants its own series of posts.
Real Estate
This has nothing to do with SEO, but it has taken up quite a bit of my time as I got an investment property in Toronto. I mention this because I do believe that this is where any smart SEO should be investing the funds that SEO can garner – into something truly passive and long-standing. SEO is slowly transitioning into “Inbound Marketing”, which unfortunately does not have the same ROI as good old fashioned gaming and loophole exploiting. That’s not to say there isn’t money to be made right now – as of writing this all the methods I’ve taught on this blog still work and work well – but who knows how long that will last.
That’s it. Hope everyone is having a fabulous Monday! If you have any questions just leave a comment.
Link says:
Hayden, I’ve been waiting for an update like this for weeks.
I’m really interested in emailing with you about your expired domain lists. I’m finding about 10 a day that meet my quality standards (which seems to be a bit lower than yours) but my budget allows for many more than 10.
Thanks for talking about all of this. You’re right on the bleeding edge, this is a great case study.
Hayden says:
Shoot me an email – haydenmiyamoto AT gmail DOT com
Bradley C. says:
It seems that the rumors of your death have been greatly exaggerated. Glad to hear that you are still alive, Hayden.
pmc says:
Thanks for sharing again Hayden! I also sent you an email regarding the list and tools programming.
PS for ranking in Canada/Australia, are you targeting .ca/.au? I’ve been getting some better gems with cctld’s but not surprisingly registration is very difficult on most of them (restrictions, needing local company established etc).
Cheers and thanks again :)
Danny says:
Niche+Adsense is drying/dried up. I changed a handful of my successful MNS to Amazon/Affiliate with 100+ quality posts. These sites are doing well.
Like Hayden I’m selling expired domains and using the PBN for SEO consulting. PBN links are as powerful as ever.
Penguin 2.0 will be the nail in the coffin for churn and burn sites, imo.
P says:
Hayden, I’m trying to find domains using basically the techniques described in your video. But I am having discouraging results early on. All of the quality domains I have found are currently expiring at a future date — I wonder if this technique has become so competitive that many of the good domains are being backordered? Every truly expired domain I have found is either weak or spammed.
Anyway, it seems like you are still getting good results, so I guess it’s just a matter of volume.
P says:
As I suspected, the expiring domain names I was watching were snapped up. Maybe I need to crawl older sources.
Ashley says:
Hayden;
I’m curious how you have your PBN set up. Do you allow the SEO companies to log in and buy links? Can they see all of your sites in your interface? I’ve been concerned to send people my list of sites.
Ashley
Came says:
Wow nice ! How many pages do you crawl per day to achieve this result ? It sounds like something really hardware consuming.