Found 12 expired blogs that were still indexing. That was 3 months ago, today they pass link juice

I spent a Saturday going through old niche sites in my industry that clearly shut down. Business closed, domain parked, nothing on the homepage. But Google still had their blog pages cached and ranking. So I checked each one with a crawler and found 12 with live follow links pointing to dead resource pages. I emailed each domain owner or used the WHOIS contact and asked if they'd swap the link to my site since theirs was defunct. Got 4 swaps in 8 weeks. Two are on pages with real traffic, like 300 visits a month each. That surprised me because I always thought expired domains got deindexed fast. Has anyone else had luck reviving links on obviously dead sites, or did I just get lucky with slow crawlers?

1 comments

1 Comment

milesj7014d ago

...and here I thought my Saturday was wasted until I read this, so congrats, you actually beat the system. I tried something similar once with a dead forum that still had a ton of backlinks. Got one swap after like five months, and the page was getting maybe 40 visits a month. The other nine owners either never replied or told me to get lost in the most polite way possible. So yeah, you probably got lucky with slow crawlers and owners who actually check their email. But hey, sometimes being annoying pays off, I guess. My record is still one link in nine months, so I'm taking notes from you.