Building links for your small business’ website is a central tenet to gaining top search engine rankings. A plethora of strategies to help you accomplish this swirl the Internet…some are legitimate, and some will get you in pretty deep trouble (i.e. link farms, etc.).
We spend a lot of time here at the search engine optimization e-blog exploring the best and most legit ways of doing this.
One strategy of building links budding web entrepreneurs can consider is buying an abandoned website that has an existing cache of inbound links already. This can be a quick way to jumpstart your link-building efforts.
It’s been estimated that nearly half of businesses started in the U.S. fail within four years. In the old days, this exclusively meant a brick-and-mortar storefront was abandoned, leaving the real estate for someone else to pick up and use for productive purposes. In the online world, the site owner may keep his “online real estate” around in hopes of making it work one day.
These kinds of businesses or their website more specifically, are ripe for the picking at rock bottom prices. As far as cash outlay, this option may be more expensive than other link building strategies but the time you will save will make up for it. As the old saying goes – “time is money.”
One of the easiest ways to find these link jewels is to do a search on Google for outdated copyrights. For example: “copyright 2003” + your keywords
One of the easiest ways to spot an abandoned website is to find one whose copyright date is several years old. Sites that are consistently maintained will change that date each year but if it’s abandoned, the copyright year may be from 5+ years ago. Nothing says a site has given up like an old copyright date.
Another way to find abandoned or underperforming websites you can pick up for cheap is to type in “temporarily down for maintenance” or “under construction” plus your keywords. This is another indication that a site could be abandoned.
Once you locate a potential site, make sure its domain hasn’t expired. If a domain expires, Google wipes their entire history and infrastructure clean. Meaning, the value of any links and PageRank is reduced to zero so it would be a waste of time to purchase it for link building purchases.
We’ll have more on how to effectively build links through purchasing abandoned domains. Check back with the search engine optimization e-blog for more on this and other tips on building search engine rankings and effectively marketing your small business online.