← Grumpy SEO Guy
Grumpy SEO Guy
How to Build Your Own Portfolio of Authoritative Websites to Rank Your Clients, Part 1: Domain Acquisition (How to Build a PBN the Correct Way) - Episode 03
00:50:50
Loading summary
Transcript71 lines
- [00:00]
Grumpy SEO Guy
This is Grumpy SEO Guy. Episode three, Building a portfolio of Authoritative Domains, Part one, How to find and buy them. You're listening to Grumpy SEO Guy, the SEO podcast that doesn't waste your time with nonsense that doesn't work. I'm the Grumpy SEO Guy, and I'm sharing with you the strategies that have helped me successfully run my SEO agency for the last 14 years. In this podcast, I'll be sharing my knowledge and experience, discussing tips and strategies, and. And trying to help you cut through the confusion that permeates this industry. If you listen to this podcast, you will know more about SEO than 99% of people on the planet. Ready? Let's get started. I'm the Grumpy SEO Guy. Let me tell you why I'm grumpy today. I'm grumpy today because there are no clear and precise instructions for how to buy authoritative domains. Don't worry. I'm gonna tell you how. But before we do that, my lawyer tells me that I have to say this right now. A quick disclaimer before we get started. Everything I say here is based on my experience and opinion from 14 years in the industry. I don't officially know how Google or any other search engines work. Everything I say here is hypothetical and based on my experience, this podcast does not constitute advice or services. What worked for me may or may not work for you. Okay, back to the show. But first, let me answer the question that you probably have right now. Why do we need authoritative domains? Why can't we just use regular domains? Great question. Let me explain this. The more authority a website has, the more power a link from that website has. This is referred to as link juice. So the higher the authority, the greater amount of link juice a link from that website has. Why is that important? Because the more link juice you get, the more authority you have, and the higher your website will rank. If you remember from the first episode, authority is king. Content is not king. As I mentioned on that episode, 99% of the clients we've had did not have content problems. They. They had authority problems. The reason they were not at the top of page one isn't because their content wasn't good. It was because they didn't have sufficient authority. When we increased their authority by giving them backlinks from authoritative websites that we own, they got to the top of page one. So why is this important? Well, the search engines do it this way because if you didn't need authority, you could just buy a whole bunch of domains and make backlinks from them and rank whatever you wanted. In fact, back in the day, there was software, and the software would build thousands of backlinks for you at the touch of a button. Now you might be thinking, why would I want to go through all this effort of doing the research, getting domains, getting hosting, putting content on it, and spending all this money if I can just push a button and get thousands of backlinks? Well, the backlinks were super low quality and spammy. They were on blog comments and forum profiles. And it's not the solution you're looking for. Trust me. I would recommend doing that if you want to get penalized, but I wouldn't recommend doing it if you're serious about ranking your site or your client's sites. I'm just explaining it so you know how SEO kind of used to work. So back in the day, quantity was preferable to quality. In fact, there was no quality metric back in the day. Now it's literally the opposite.
- [03:06]
Listener
Okay?
- [03:07]
Grumpy SEO Guy
One very authoritative link today will rank you higher than thousands of the kind of links that we're talking about, okay? If the right website with enough authority links to you, you will be at the top of the search engines.
- [03:19]
Listener
Okay?
- [03:20]
Grumpy SEO Guy
I've done it for my clients. I've seen it happen countless times. That's how the search engines work. Now, if you wanna get domains like that and you wanna learn how you can do it, keep listening because I'm gonna explain exactly how to get domains like that. If you wanna go buy some software and push a button and get thousands of spammy backlinks free, probably don't keep listening to this episode because we're not gonna talk about that. Okay? So know that if you're ever doing backlink research on somebody, and we'll talk about that a little bit in this episode. If you're ever doing backlink research and you see thousands of shady links from, for example, forum profiles or blog comments, they probably used a tool like this. And that website is probably not at the top of page one.
- [04:00]
Listener
Okay?
- [04:01]
Grumpy SEO Guy
So. So it's probably spammed, honestly. And lucky for you, we're gonna talk about that in this episode. How to tell if a domain has been spammed by looking at its backlink profile. Now, these were not high quality backlinks. These were spammy backlinks from blog comments and from forum profiles, but they were still backlinks and they still worked. And then the short version is the search engine said, hey, guys, this is bad. We need to do something so that these low quality Backlinks don't work anymore. Oh, hey, I know. Let's use a concept of authority. It's a very short version. At any rate, authoritative domains provide more link juice in their backlinks and links from authoritative domains will almost never be considered spammy. But links from things like blog comments and forum profiles, especially if there are thousands of them, will often be seen as spammy. So if you're getting links from authoritative domains, you get more authority and you rank better. That's why we use a portfolio of authoritative domains to rank our clients. That's why I'm going to tell you how to buy authoritative domains. Now, I'm going to tell you what you need to do to get a bunch of authoritative domains so that you can build your own portfolio. I just want to make a note here. I like to call it a portfolio because it's a collection of authoritative domains. That's the way my agency ranks our clients. We have a collection of authoritative domains that we use to boost our clients authority. You may hear the term private blog network or pbn. I don't like that phrase because a network means a group of sites that are linked together. You should never ever link your sites together like that. If you have some authoritative domains and you're using them to link to your clients, never link those sites together. Why? Because doing that says, hey, all these sites are connected. You don't want that to be the case in real life. You would never have a bunch of websites that are linked together that also all link to the same website. That's called a footprint. The that's something the search engines can use to see that you're up to no good. Now I'm not saying SEO is up to no good, but I'm teaching you how the SEO industry really works. Okay, so now that we understand why we need authoritative domains, let's talk about how to buy them. I want to start by saying the first thing you might think of is, well, I'm just going to go buy some domains. I'm going to go to whatever registrar I like and there's many, there's a few big ones. I'm not going to name anybody right now, but you know, you can go to the website where you buy a domain from and I'm going to buy some domains. Okay, you can totally do that. However, those domains will not have any authority if you just buy them. They will not have any authority. Why? Because they're brand new domains. They don't have any backlinks, they don't have any content they don't have any history, they don't have any anything. Brand new domains have zero authority. Now I'm not saying don't do that, but if you do that, if you want them to come authoritative, you're going to have to wait until they get their own authority, which means you're gonna have to write content, you're gonna have to get back backlinks, and you're gonna have to wait and you're gonna have to develop them the same as you would develop a client's website that you're trying to boost the authority of. And you don't want to do that because, I mean, you might like. I'm not saying don't, but you probably don't want to do that because you want some authority now. So the only way to get authority now is to buy domains that already have authority. That's what I'm gonna tell you how to do. Okay, now before we do that, I just want to mention this very quickly because you need to do this whenever you're going to buy a domain. It doesn't matter if it's a brand new domain or an author domain. There's one thing you need to do before you buy any domain. Well, actually there's a lot of things you need to do, but you need to do this no matter what. You must check to see if that domain has a clean history, which means it has never been used for spammy purposes. Now, it's okay if somebody has owned the domain before. It's okay if the domain has a history. That's not a problem. What is a problem is if it has a spammy history. So there's a couple ways to do that. But let me explain why you need to do that. First, just because a domain is available to buy does not mean that nobody has owned that domain before. Okay, it's possible. Let me just give you an example. It's possible somebody had that domain, spammed it, and then decided they didn't want it anymore and let it expire. And then nobody bought it because it was spammed and now it's just available to buy again. And so you come around, you say, oh, this would be a cool domain. And so you buy it and you don't know that a person owned it before and it may still have some of those penalties that it had from when that person spammed it. So I actually had this happen once. A colleague of mine introduced me to her friend who was going to buy this domain for her business. And just as I was Just explaining something to her. And I said, well, you know, you need to check the history of it. And I looked up this domain and it had been spammed. It had been spammed hard. And I said, if you buy this domain, you will never rank for anything. And I don't know if she listened to me, I never, she never talked to me again. So I don't know, maybe, but anyway, this is what you gotta look for. Okay, so how do you do that? Well, one way is to do what's called a historical whois lookup. Okay, Whois, if you've never heard that term, is a word that refers to who owns a domain. Okay, It's W H O I s whois. What you wanna do though is get a historical whois because that will show you not only who currently owns the domain, if anybody, but who used to own the domain. But really the only. You don't care who owned it. The only thing you care about is how many people owned it. Okay, we'll talk a little bit more about that later. But you just want to see if there's zero records. When you do a historical whois lookup, then nobody's owned it before. It's fine. It's a brand new unused domain. Okay, now when we're buying these authoritative domains, that's obviously not going to be the case. Obviously somebody owned them before us, but it's not a problem. Okay, so let's talk about buying authoritative domains. There's a couple ways to do this. I'm going to share with you the easiest way. Now the most obvious way is to just buy a domain from a private seller. Maybe somebody has a domain and he's selling it and you buy it from him and you pay him and he transfers it to you. By the way, never take anyone's word for that because as soon as you pay them, who knows if they're actually going to transfer the domain to you. You should definitely get an escrow if you're going to do that. And there's companies that do that. But that's not even the topic that we're talking about right now. So, you know, whatever. Okay, I'm sharing this method with you because this is exactly how I have done it in the past. This is what you do, you go to a website, expired domains.net.
- [10:18]
Listener
Okay?
- [10:19]
Grumpy SEO Guy
That's expired domains. This website will show you a list of expired domains. Okay, what is an expired domain? If you've ever owned a domain, you know that you have to re register it every year or you don't own it anymore. An expired domain is a domain that somebody stopped paying for, okay? Now if you stop paying for a domain, there's what's called a grace period, where you can still get it back, you know, because maybe, maybe you just didn't pay for it. Like, have you ever not remembered to renew your domains? Yeah. Okay, so there's still a grace period. It's fine. But I think you have to pay a little bit more during the grace period. It's like, hey, we're not gonna give this domain away yet, but you still have to pay for it and you have to pay us extra because it's past the moment that you had to pay for it. Okay? So the domains expire and they don't register them. Then they often go to auction. So basically what you're doing is you're identifying domains that fit your criteria that are available at auction. Let me start by saying most of the domains that are at auction are garbage, alright? Most of them are terrible and you don't want them. And I'm gonna share with you what you need to know to make sure they're not terrible. Because the good ones are amazing, but it takes some time to find them and most of them are trash. Let me put it this way. There's a reason people let most of these domains expire, okay? It's because they're worthless. Like, I don't mean worthless in terms of domain name, okay? A lot of people, you know, just, they buy up domains and then they just hold them forever until somebody wants that name. That's not what I'm talking about. We really, we kind of don't even care about the name with like a couple exceptions that I'll get into. We care about the authority of the domain, okay? So whatever the name is, it's probably fine. So anyways, there's a reason most people let bad domains expire and there's a reason nobody buys them after that. It's because they're terrible and they're worthless. They probably are spammed, they probably are penalized. And I'll talk about how to find those things. So you go to expireddomains.net, and it will show you a list of domains that are currently available at auction. Now these auctions are going to be at GoDaddy. So what you need to do is while you're on expired domains.net, you click a button at the top that says Domain Lists. When you click on this, you'll see a bunch of different choices, one of which will be for GoDaddy Auctions. If you click that, it will take you to all of the domains that are currently at GoDaddy Auctions. Now you can buy domains at other places. I'm not saying you have to use GoDaddy auctions, but for this episode, that's what we're talking about. What I would recommend doing from that page is clicking on the column header that says dp. That's going to show you the number of backlinks from different domains. And as you will learn, one of the most important things that you can look for is the number of backlinks from different domains, which is also sometimes called referring domains. We'll talk about why that's important later. What you want to do is sort by the highest number, because remember, most of these domains are going to be worthless, and you don't want to waste your time looking at domains that have zero backlinks because they're not going to have any authority. So sort by the column that says DP and then just kind of work your way through the list by checking the stuff that we're going to talk about in the rest of this episode. I'm not necessarily recommending or not recommending GoDaddy as a registrar, but there's a lot of domains at GoDaddy Auctions, and I have bought a lot of domains at GoDaddy Auctions. The auctions work a little bit differently from ebay, if you're familiar with ebay, but I will talk about that in a little bit. So you go to expired domains.net and you get a list of domains. Now there's a bunch of things that you have to look for, and there's a bunch of things that you have to confirm. Here's what you have to do in no particular order, but I usually do it in this order anyway because it's just how I do it. Okay, the very first thing that you want to do is you want to see if the domain is indexed. What does indexed mean? Indexed means the search engines know about the domain and may give it in the search results. So any webpage that is indexed has the possibility of being in the search results. When somebody searches for something, any page that is not indexed will never show up in the search results until it becomes indexed. Okay, so what you want to do is you want to check and see if the domain is indexed. If it is indexed, that's good. It means it's in good standing with the search engines. It doesn't mean the domain is safe to buy. It just means it hasn't been penalized so badly that it got de indexed. So to check to see if a domain is indexed, you go to the search engine of your choice. I would check all of them. I would definitely check Google, but I would definitely check Google. If you only check one, I would check Google. And you type site S I, T E and then you put a colon and then you type in the domain and then you put a dot and then you put whatever the TLD is, so.com, net, whatever, and then you hit enter. If you see no results, it means the site is not indexed. If you see one or more results, it means the site is indexed. Now, more is always better, but as long as the domain or some part of the domain is indexed, you're probably okay. Now, if it's not indexed, does that mean it's penalized? No. Does that mean it's spammy? No. It might just mean that the previous owner didn't do anything with it. And the search engines are not gonna index a site that has no data on it. So not being indexed is not necessarily a red flag. Being indexed doesn't necessarily mean that the domain is worthy of buying. But I always feel a little better if the domain is indexed. Okay, the next thing that you wanna do is you wanna check the name of the domain. Like, what's the actual domain? Now, the name doesn't really matter, but I'm going to give you a couple exceptions to this. The first thing is you probably don't want a domain name that's very specific. For example, if the domain name is dishwasherrepair.com. i just made that up. I don't even know if that's a website. I'm just using this as an example. If the domain name is dishwasherrepair.com and you're not going to put content on it that has anything to do with dishwasher repair, that's gonna look suspicious. Okay, why would a website called dishwasherrepair.com have content about, for example, you know, exercise? It wouldn't. That literally makes no sense. Okay, that's going to be a sign that the search engines are gonna say, hey, wait a minute, something bad is going on here. So as long as the domain name is not super specific, it's fine. The other thing that you need to look for is the TLD.
- [16:50]
Listener
Okay?
- [16:51]
Grumpy SEO Guy
So TLD is like.com or.net, it's whatever the extension is.
- [16:55]
Listener
Okay?
- [16:55]
Grumpy SEO Guy
Dot coms are preferable. Everybody knows.coms.coms are great. The only rule I'm going to give you here is don't buy.info sites.
- [17:06]
Listener
Okay?
- [17:06]
Grumpy SEO Guy
Let me tell you why. When.info sites first came out, they were 99 cents. It was way less expensive than every other TLD. What do you think happened? All the spammers bought them and spammed them.info sites were used for spam. Why? Because why would you pay $10 for a.com, when you can pay 99 cents for a.info if you're buying, buying thousands of websites, you wouldn't. You would literally buy the 99 cent domains because you're spamming and you don't really care what happens to the domain. So I'm not saying this is true, but the story goes that there was a Penalty applied to all.info domains because of this. So if you had a.info domain, it would be more difficult, if not impossible, for you to rank it for anything. And now I'm just gonna ask you one more question. Have you ever seen a dot info site rank for anything? I think I've seen it once and I remember because I remember going, whoa, that's a dot info. You never see those, okay? So don't buy any dot info sites. Just trust me. I don't care if everything else is perfect, I don't care if it's indexed, I don't care. Don't buy any dot info sites.
- [18:18]
Listener
All right?
- [18:18]
Grumpy SEO Guy
That's my advice. The next thing that you're going to look up is the age, okay? And you can get the age and stuff from expireddomains.net, you could also do a historical whois search and find out how old the site is.
- [18:30]
Listener
Okay?
- [18:30]
Grumpy SEO Guy
So look, you want to find out the age. Why? Because. Well, there's two reasons. First reason is because all else being equal, older sites are better. Why? An old site with a history is pretty guaranteed to not be spamming a brand new site that might be spam. The search engines don't know yet. Older sites, all else being equal, are better. Now, an older website that's spammed versus a newer website that isn't spammed, I would buy the new one. But if it comes down to it, older is better. Now, it's not going to be a huge benefit if you've got a four year old site and then you've got a nine year old site and who cares? Don't put too much emphasis on age. But older, generally speaking, if you can only Buy one domain and they're the same price and all the stats are the same. You know, buy the older one. But even then it doesn't even matter. I'm just mentioning this so you're aware of it. The other thing that you need to do with age is you need to check how many times has the domain had a different owner. So in your historical whois search, you're going to see how many times the domain name has been transferred. Why is this important? Well, let's say you have a domain that's nine years old, and let's say it's been transferred nine times. You got to ask yourself, why would that happen? Why? What, what's wrong? What's going on with this domain that it was transferred nine times in nine years? Why don't people want it? Did somebody do something to it? Like, is it spammed? Did the next guy buy it and not know that it was spammed and then he was stuck with it? Like, why has it changed ownership nine times in nine years? That's weird. Again, it's not necessarily a reason not to buy the domain, but it's something to consider now. Same domain as 9 years old and it's had one owner. It's probably awesome. I mean, that doesn't mean you don't do the next steps that I'm gonna tell you, but it means that's pretty cool. Like, fewer owners is better. Okay, what's the next thing you have to look up? The next thing you have to look into is, is the number of backlinks that a domain has. You can get some of this data from expireddomains.net, but I would also recommend going to the following websites and researching the domain that you're thinking about buying. The first website is ahrefs.com now, just a quick little note here. The name comes from the HTML code for when you're putting a link on a website. It's a and then space and then href and then equal. I don't know if you've ever built a website, you might remember that. Anyway, that's the name. I think some people are like, what does this name mean? Now you know, okay, go to ahrefs.com and search for your domain and it will tell you, for example, it'll tell you a lot of stuff. But what you're looking for right now is the number of backlinks and the number of referring domains. Okay, what does that mean? The number of backlinks is the number of backlinks that a website has from everywhere. It's pretty straightforward. The number of referring domains is the number of domains that link to the website. Okay, how are those not the same? Let's say, for example, you have a domain and it has 100 backlinks. Okay, you're like, that's pretty cool. A hundred backlinks. Okay, cool. And if that domain has one referring domain, that means all hundred of those backlinks come from a single domain. So it doesn't really count because it's not like 100 people linked to it. It's one website linking to it a hundred times. Now compare that against a domain that has 100 backlinks and it has 90 referring domains. That means. And I'm making these numbers up, but that means that perhaps 89 websites link to it once and one website links to it 11 times.
- [22:10]
Listener
Okay, so that would be.
- [22:11]
Grumpy SEO Guy
That would be 100. Which of those do you think is better? More referring domains is always better. Okay, backlinks. The number of backlinks, honestly, doesn't even matter that much unless you're viewing it in relation to referring domains. Okay, for example, if you have a domain that has a million backlinks and 100 referring domains and you. Gosh, that sounds really spammy. Okay, and then you have. Then you have another website that has 1000 backlinks from 500 referring domains. Which one do you think is better? The second one is much better because it has way more referring domains.
- [22:48]
Listener
Okay.
- [22:48]
Grumpy SEO Guy
It's probably way less spammy. The first one sounds super spammy anyways. Okay, so do you understand number of referring domains? Higher is always better. So in addition to ahrefs, you also need to look up the domain on a website called Semrush and on a website called majestic. So semrush.com and majestic.com those are both similar to Ahrefs. They have different focuses, but they will all give you things like number of backlinks, number of referring domains, anchor text, which is what we're going to talk about in a minute, and so on. You need to do all of these things because one website might be wrong. Okay, so what I do, I make a spreadsheet and I put columns. I put one column for Ahrefs, I put one column for Semrush, I put one column for Majestic. Sometimes I use a website called Ubersuggest, which is Ubersuggest.com, which is a similar. An SEO tool. And the reason I do that is because if every single one of them tells me that the domain has a lot of Backlinks and has a lot of authority, then I believe it. If, for example, two or three of them tell me that a website does not have a lot of authority, but another one does tell me it has a lot of authority, I'm probably not going to believe it.
- [23:54]
Listener
Okay?
- [23:55]
Grumpy SEO Guy
Now, I'm not saying that any of these websites are flawless in their concept of authority, but if we actually, if we have time for this later, I'll talk more about this, because this is related to some things that happened like 10 years ago anyways. But if every single site tells you that it's an authoritative domain, it's probably an authoritative domain. Okay, now the next thing we need to look at is anchor text. If you remember from episode one, anchor text is whatever the actual text is that links from one site to your site.
- [24:23]
Listener
Okay?
- [24:24]
Grumpy SEO Guy
So it could be your keyword. It could be something that's referred to as a generic, like this site, or click here. But anyways, if you remember from episode one, anchor text is the most powerful linking signal there is.
- [24:36]
Listener
Okay?
- [24:36]
Grumpy SEO Guy
So one of the most powerful ways to rank a website is to put the keywords that you want to rank for in the anchor text from the authoritative website. Now, we need to check this. Why? Because if you remember from episode two when we were talking about over optimization penalties, having too much of the same keyword in the anchor text can penalize you. And if you remember from episode two where I talked about a client I had that got negative SEO'd, he got negative SEO'd by having too much of a certain keyword that I'm gonna talk about in a minute in the anchor text. Basically, what happened was a competitor built a bunch of spammy links to his site using specific spammy keywords, and his site got penalized as a result. Okay, so we're checking the anchor text. What are we checking it for? By the way, Ahrefs will tell you this. Semrush will tell you this. Majestic will tell you this. Ubersuggest will tell you this. But it's important to look them up in the different places so you can have a wider view of what's going on. Okay, listen, so there's a couple things you need to look for for the anchor text. The very is this. You want to make sure there's no spammy anchor text. Now, what do I mean by spammy anchor text? There are three classifications of anchor text that you must avoid, and I'm going to call them this. The first one is pharmacy. Anything dealing with buying drugs online. I don't Mean like recreational drugs, although that's included, but I mean like prescription drugs.
- [25:54]
Listener
Okay?
- [25:55]
Grumpy SEO Guy
For example, Viagra. Buy Viagra online without a prescription. No. If you see even one backlink that has anything to do with that, the domain is spammed, trust me, don't buy it. The second one is gambling. You know, this could be casinos. This could be online betting. You know, just don't. If you see any backlinks that are related to that, don't buy the domain. The next one is adult. This could be webcams. This could be porno. This could be any variation thereof. Nothing against any of those industries. Okay, let me put it this way. Unless you're operating exclusively in those industries, you don't want them to be associated with the rest of the work you do. Again, nothing against those industries. It's just how the search engines manage things, okay? For example, you could have a legitimate adult website, okay? Totally legitimate. And if you link to one of your clients that's not in the adult industry, they might actually get penalized from it.
- [26:51]
Listener
Okay?
- [26:52]
Grumpy SEO Guy
Now this is related to something that's called a bad neighborhood. But just you don't want to accidentally penalize your clients, okay? And you don't want to. Negative SEO, anyone. Don't do negative SEO, okay? Like, you're probably going to get enough information from my podcast on how to do it, but, like, don't do it, okay? So anyways, listen. So the first thing that you're checking in anchor text is you're making sure there's no pharmacy keywords, there's no gambling keywords, and there's no adult keywords, okay? If that's the case, then you need to move on and you need to check how often do the keywords occur? For example, if you see any keywords that are like 80% or 70% of the time, don't buy that domain. It's probably spammed. If you remember from episode two where we talk about penalties, this is called an over optimization penalty. When people learned that having the keywords in the anchor text was a strong ranking signal, they did too much of it and the search engines decided to penalize people as a result of it. So, like I said, you definitely do want your keywords in the anchor text, but not a lot of it. And when we talk later about backlinking, I'm gonna explain more in detail how to do this. But for now, if you see, you know, 80, that's ridiculous. 80. If you see like 80% is all the same keywords, just move on to the next Domain. Okay, this one is done. Unless it's just the name of the URL. All right, if the anchor text is literally the name of the URL, like whatever.com or whatever, that's fine.
- [28:18]
Listener
Okay?
- [28:18]
Grumpy SEO Guy
But if you see any specific keywords that are like 80, like, if you see any specific keywords that are more than like 20%, okay, I probably would not buy that domain. Like 20. There's different rules to when the numbers matter and stuff, but like 20 is pushing it.
- [28:31]
Listener
Okay?
- [28:31]
Grumpy SEO Guy
It's probably an older site and the person probably over optimized it and that's probably why they didn't renew it and that's probably why it's for sale right now.
- [28:39]
Listener
Okay?
- [28:39]
Grumpy SEO Guy
So, you know, if you. Basically what you're looking for is you don't want any, you don't want any crazy high percentages of any certain keywords. Okay, I'm gonna give you some numbers later. But like, this is kind of more of an art than a science. I would say, you know, 15%. I would try to stay under 10. Personally, I would try not to buy any domains that have more than 10% of their anchor text as any one phrase. Okay, so maybe they were selling blue widgets on the website. If more than 10% of the anchor text is blue widgets, I probably would not buy it. Now, I might be a little bit conservative, okay? But we're talking about authoritative websites that we want to have for a long period of time. We don't want to take any chances, okay? We don't want to take any risks buying something that may or may not be over optimized. So 10%, for me personally, 10% is probably the cutoff. You probably won't actually see this that often, but I just want you to be aware, okay? The next thing that you have to check regarding links is this. Where do the links come from? What I mean is where on the planet do they come from? Where are the websites that link to them? What I specifically mean is where are the servers that are linking to them located? Now, I'm not trying to be offensive in this next part. I'm trying to be truthful. If you see a majority of backlinks coming from Philippines or India or Russia or China, probably do not buy the domain. Now, what's the reason for this? There is a lot of spam in those parts of the world. Nothing against those countries, okay? I'm not trying to be offensive. I'm telling you where a lot of the spam in the world is. And another thing that you have to consider is this. Let's say you're looking at a website. I'm just using a random name here. Let's say that it's dishwasherrepair.com. okay, let's say dishwasherrepair.com was an American company of a guy who repaired your dishwashers and that was his website. Okay, if the majority of his backlinks are from India, why would that have happened? Why would a majority of Indian websites link to an American company called dishwasherrepair.com? why would that happen? Because he was probably doing something he shouldn't have been doing with some spammy SEO and his site probably got penalized and that's probably why it's up for auction now. Okay, so would I not buy a domain if it has links from India? That's not what I'm saying. Russia, China, Philippines. There nothing, literally nothing wrong with links from those countries. But if it's mostly links from those countries, I would look into it a little bit more. I'd be a little bit more suspicious. I try to find out why is it an international website that did a lot of business in India? Well then it probably makes sense they would have a lot of Indian backlinks. If it's a website that looks a little bit spammy and you see a bunch of over optimized backlinks all coming from different Indian servers, I probably would not buy that one. Okay, now to be fair, I probably wouldn't buy it if it had a bunch of spammy backlinks coming from American servers either. But I'm just saying you kind of want to use those specific countries as a signal that says, wait a minute, I need to check this a little bit further. Okay, one more thing. With anchor text, if you see any non English anchor text, run it through Google Translate. I'm not joking, it's probably fine. But if it's another language and it's like buy Viagra online. No, just pass it still counts as spam even if it's not in English. Now maybe it's a website that had a lot of customers in another country and maybe somebody in that country was describing their experience with the company in their native language and link to it in their native language. Okay, that's fine. Literally not a problem with that. Okay, There is literally no problem with anchor text that is not English unless the anchor text is spammy. Okay, so if it's a foreign language and it's gambling, pharmacy or adult, it's exactly the same as if it's English. And it's gambling, pharmacy or adult. Okay, what else do we have to check? We have to go to archive.org which you may know as the Wayback Machine, and we have to make sure that the website doesn't look suspicious. So what you do is you go to archive.org, type in the domain name and you look and you see how many years will it show an archive for? You need to view at least one record from every year. Why? What are you looking for? Well, basically the purpose here is to figure out if the website looks like a normal website or if it looks like a spammy website. Remember, people use domains for things other than what you might presume based on the domain name itself. So if you're looking at a domain and everything sounds good and then you load it on archive and it was an online casino, you don't buy that domain.
- [33:05]
Listener
Okay?
- [33:06]
Grumpy SEO Guy
What you're looking for here is just normal looking websites. Maybe it was a company that's not around anymore. Maybe a person had a blog that they just decided they weren't going to manage anymore. That's what you want. You want normal looking websites, okay? Normal websites. So you want to check at least one page from every year. Because remember, domains can have different owners and it's possible that the website was legitimate and then somebody else bought it and turned it into a casino. And then somebody else bought it and tried to make it legitimate but didn't do it. So you need to check every year that there's a record for and you need to make sure. Okay, does everything look normal? Does this look like a normal website? If it looks like a normal website and I can't really tell you how to do this other than make sure it's not casino, pharmacy or gambling, like a normal website is a normal website. Like I'm not going to, I can't give you categories because it's literally anything that's not like anything that doesn't. If you're like this looks suspicious, this seems wrong, don't buy it, okay? Your gut is always right, okay? Like if you think that you're potentially right, okay, you know, oh, and if it's like, if it's like a hate site, okay, like for whatever reason, I don't know, these kind of things happen. Just don't buy it. If it's a hate site, like nothing good's gonna come from that, you know, it may have already been penalized. So just a normal website. That's the only like detail I can give you here. You just wanna make sure that it looked like a normal website. Nothing that's like, controversial, okay? I think that's the best way to put it, as long as it doesn't seem controversial.
- [34:34]
Listener
Okay?
- [34:35]
Grumpy SEO Guy
If it's like a fringe health site, you know, you might want to pass on that. If it's like a national supremacy website, you want to pass on that. You know, if it's pharmacy, gambling or adult, you want to pass on that. Like, nothing that's controversial, okay? Because your goal here isn't to make the coolest, most popular, most controversial website in the world. Your goal here is to get authoritative domains that you can link to your clients from.
- [34:55]
Listener
Okay?
- [34:56]
Grumpy SEO Guy
So that's my advice. Look in archive, check one copy from each year and make sure that it looks like a normal website. So I want to give you some specific numbers here. Three of the websites that I mentioned that you should use to look up domains on when you're doing research are ahrefs.com, semrush.com and majestic.com. what I would recommend doing is going to those sites and running a search for all of the domains that you're considering buying. And in addition to the other things I mentioned, like looking at the number of referring domains, what you should do with these tools is check the authority. So, yes, we are checking the authority by finding out how many referring domains and stuff they have. But each of these websites also gives you their own version of authority, okay? Because remember, the official authority number from Google is no longer published. So what we have to do is we have to use other websites that give an approximation of what it might be. So ahrefs.com is going to call this domain rating, okay? It's going to be a number from 0 to 100. What I would recommend is looking to buy domains that are somewhere between 10 and 40.
- [36:07]
Listener
Okay?
- [36:08]
Grumpy SEO Guy
Now if it's eight or nine, that's fine, okay? But you're probably not going to find too many for sale that are over about 40. And if they are, they're probably not going to be very affordable. It is a better use of your money to buy more domains that are in the 10 to 40 range than to try and get one or two that are 60 or 70 or 80. First of all, anybody who has a domain that's that powerful knows what they have. And if they decide they don't want to run the website anymore, they're going to sell the domain. So it's very unlikely that you will find any domains that actually have that high of a rating. And if you do, they Will be very expensive. So with Semrush, it's pretty similar. They have something called authority score, same thing as with ahrefs. I would look for domains that have an authority score of somewhere between 10 and 40. Don't get too carried away with it, okay? Because there's a lot of other things that are considered, but 10 to 40, you'll probably find a lot of sites that are 10 to 20 range. You might get some that are 30, 30s, maybe some that are in the 40s. That's good. That's awesome. You should try to buy those domains.
- [37:16]
Listener
Okay.
- [37:16]
Grumpy SEO Guy
But same thing, you know, you're not gonna find any that are really high because those domains, like, well, they're probably not gonna go to auction.
- [37:24]
Listener
Okay.
- [37:25]
Grumpy SEO Guy
The last site that I want to talk about right now is majestic dot com. Majestic actually has two different values. One is called Trust Flow. Sometimes you'll see that abbreviated as tf. And they have Citation Flow. Sometimes you'll see that abbreviated as cf. Same numbers again, I'm going to give you the same numbers. Anywhere between 10 and 40 is really good. So when you're thinking about buying a domain, it's strongly recommended that you check it on these three sites. So I want to say don't worry too much about trying to get like the highest values. I'll tell you, my agency has had very little problem ever ranking a client for the keywords that we're trying to rank them for.
- [38:06]
Listener
Okay?
- [38:06]
Grumpy SEO Guy
Unless there's a penalty or something, which then nobody's gonna be able to rank them, which, you know, Go back and listen to episode two if you want to know more about penalties. Like, unless there's a penalty. We rarely have trouble getting our clients to the top of the search engines.
- [38:19]
Listener
Okay.
- [38:19]
Grumpy SEO Guy
The overwhelming majority of domains in our portfolio are between 10 and 40 for the different ranking values that we just talked about. All right? I never said, oh, we gotta get the 50s and the 60s and the 70s. No, you don't know. That's. Trust me, if you have a variety of 10 to 40s, you're going to be just fine for basically anything that you want to do with regard to SEO. Okay? Now let's say that you've looked at all of these things, okay? Passed all your tests. The domain looks clean. It's got a good number of referring domains. The links are coming from good places. It's not spammed. It looks like a normal website. It's indexed, you know, it's decently old. Everything looks good. Okay, how do you buy it? So on expireddomains.net, there's a link that will take you to the GoDaddy auction. So GoDaddy auctions are basically. They're just like ebay, they're just online auctions. The only main difference is this. If you place a bid with five minutes or less left in the auction, it will add five more minutes to the auction. So you can't just place a huge bid at the last minute and win like you can on other auction sites. This might become maddening. Okay, I have spent days trying to win auctions on here. I'm not joking. You wait, you got a good price. It's good. Five minutes left. Four, three minutes, two minutes. Oh, somebody else placed a bid. Okay, five more minutes. Okay, four minutes, three minutes, two minutes, one minutes. And then you place a bid. Oh, five more minutes. Okay, you're waiting. It's all good. Are you gonna win? Are you gonna win? Oh, somebody else placed the bid. Five more minutes. And literally like all day. I'm not joking. So just be aware. That can happen. But if you win, you know it's worth it. Like, I've gotten some phenomenal domains this way. So just be aware. Like, they can happen. It's not like I'm gonna win at the last moment and I'm gonna win my auction. Cause no, it's gonna add five more minutes. But eventually one of you guys will stop and then the other person will win and know how much you're gonna pay. Look, it's very tempting to keep the bid going just because it's just five more dollars. It's just five more. And then like $100 later, you're like, it's just five more dollars. Like, no, I mean, do whatever you want. I don't care. But I'm just telling you, there's always other domains you can buy. Don't get too attached to one of them. Let me give you one more piece of advice. But I should have told you this at the beginning, but I didn't, so I'm gonna tell you now. But you are listening to this whole thing before you actually go do anything, right? Okay, good. Like I said, don't get a domain that has a very, very specific name, okay? Because if you have content that's unrelated to that, it's not gonna make any sense. It's gon weird to the search engines. The best way I have found to do this is to pick domain names that are like, vague.
- [41:05]
Listener
Okay?
- [41:06]
Grumpy SEO Guy
That kind of could be anything. You know, they don't have specific words in them or Maybe they do, but maybe they don't specifically refer to anything. And these names that are kind of vague could be used for anything. Maybe you make an acronym out of it.
- [41:18]
Listener
Okay.
- [41:19]
Grumpy SEO Guy
I don't know, maybe it's an abbreviation for something. I don't know. I'm just trying to give you some ideas because the domain, what you use it for, sort of, but not really, should be kind of related to what the name of it is. Which is why I said don't buy anything that's super specific unless you're gonna make a website that is just as specific and you're probably not. Okay, so once you win your auction, I feel like it takes a couple days and then you finally get the domain in your possession. Once you win it, you only have to pay. Well, you have to pay the registration, but then you only ever have to renew it like normal. So it's only expensive once. And that's when you first buy it. Every subsequent year you just pay the renewal fee, which depending on the tld is going to be, you know, however much it is. And you can transfer the domains to whatever, whatever registrar you like to use. I'm not going to make any recommendations right now, so just use, use whoever you like. Let me tell you this. Put private registration on it. Now, it might be called something different. It might be called private registration. It might be called, I think, whoisguard. Like whois, like we talked about whoisguard. Like, I think every registrar uses a different, like, description for this. But definitely, definitely, definitely use private registration. Why? Because if you don't, anyone who does a who is on it will get your name and your address and your phone number and you will just get more spammy phone calls. Put private registration on it. Now, somebody might have this question, well, what if every domain that you have has private registration? Isn't that going to leave a footprint? No, it's not. Do you want to know why? Because most people use private registration. Even people running normal websites use private registration because they don't want to get junk mail. So use private registration. Trust me. Hopefully it doesn't cost you very much because you're using a good registrar that doesn't feel the need to charge you anything or a lot for your private registration. But definitely, definitely put it on there. Trust me. Okay, now you know one third of how to make a portfolio of authoritative websites. The first third, which we just covered, is how to get authoritative domains. The second third is hosting. There is a specific way that you need to host these websites. It's probably not what you're thinking. And I'm just gonna give you a little teaser right now and say that if you're thinking SEO hosting is the way to go, you are 100% wrong. SEO hosting, as they call it, is a terrible idea. I'm going to explain why in another podcast. And the last third of what you need to do is making the content and you know, of course, making your website look how you want it. Maybe that's using WordPress, maybe that's using whatever, but we'll talk about that later. Let me tell you one more thing really quick, if we have time. Okay? There's one other way to get authoritative domains. So like I said, you can buy them from auction, which is what I recommend. That's how my agency has acquired most of its authoritative domains. You can also buy them from a private vendor. Maybe somebody just wants to sell a domain they're not using anymore. They don't want to do the auction thing. You agree on a price, it's all good. But like I said, make sure that you get an escrow if you're going to do that. And make sure you get a legitimate escrow, by the way, because there's a lot of fake escrow services. So anyways, okay, the last way I'm going to attempt to explain this to you without sounding suspicious or ambiguous, I'm intentionally not providing details here. But anyways, there are people whose business is providing authoritative domains to people. I can't really tell you how to find these people, and I can't tell you who I use because I value privacy and I don't want to give this person's contact information out. And all of a sudden he gets all these spammy emails with, hey, crappy SEO guy says you provide domain. I mean, he might like the business, but I don't want to annoy him. So I'm gonna leave it at that for now. Let me tell you how it works. I know a guy. This sounds legitimate. I know a guy. Anyways, I know a guy, and when I need domains, if I can't find anything at auction, I'll contact him and I will say, hey, I'm looking for this kind of domain, this kind of authority, blah, blah, blah, and he will give me a list of available domains, and if I like any of them, I pay him a finder's fee, which is absolutely reasonable. And then I register the domain. There's no auction, there's no silliness. Now, I'm not saying that you should do it this way, and I'm not saying that you shouldn't do it this way. I'm just saying it's another option. If you look hard enough, you will find people that do this. Okay, this person I use, they've been doing it for a long time and they're pretty well known in the industry. But again, I don't want to seem like I'm trying to get referrals or affiliate nonsense or any of that stuff. So, look, you can become very successful only buying expired domains at auctions, okay? Super successful. It's literally not a problem. I'm just telling you this so you know that there are other ways to do it so you can kind of get a better feel for how the SEO industry really works. There are literally people who make a living selling authoritative domains as brokers, so to speak, or as agents who find them.
- [46:03]
Listener
Okay.
- [46:04]
Grumpy SEO Guy
You could probably do it yourself if you know how to write the right kind of scripts. And I don't know how to do that stuff. So, like, I don't know, I just use this guy. He's cool and he's helpful, and the domains that I bought from him have been pretty good. So I just want you to be aware that's a thing, and you can definitely do it that way if you want. Okay, that's everything you need to know. If I forgot anything or if you have any questions, feel free to reach out. Ooh, one additional note. I don't know if we have time for this, but I'm going to try and include it anyway. Do you remember I said when I use all the different tools and I compare them when I'm checking the authority of a domain? So I use Ahrefs and I use semrush, and I use Majestic, and I use ubersuggest, and I make a spreadsheet and I compare them all because I want to make sure that they all agree. The reason for this is because in the past, there have been various metrics used to determine the authority of a domain. And the reason for that is a little bit longer. But basically, there used to be an official metric from Google called PageRank or PR. And as soon as it became a thing, people realized that the more PageRank you have, the more link juice you got from links, and people started selling links on them. People eventually found out that you could spoof Page Rank so you could make a website look like it had more authority than it did and therefore make people pay more money for backlinks from you. I'm not saying it's possible to spoof these different metrics however, in the past, different places, and by the way, not a place that I've mentioned in this podcast, but different places were pretty well known as being the authority on authority.
- [47:30]
Listener
Okay?
- [47:30]
Grumpy SEO Guy
And you would go there, you would type in your sites and it would give you all these different values, and that was pretty much what people were using. It may have been possible to fake your ranking on some of them. So again, a website might look much more valuable than it is, and you could get people to pay you a whole lot more money than you would otherwise. Now you're not actually getting more link juice from it. You just look like you're getting a much more authoritative link than you actually are. That is the reason that I compare all of the different sites. I'm not saying it's possible to fake anything right now.
- [48:01]
Listener
Okay.
- [48:02]
Grumpy SEO Guy
But I'm saying it's probably less likely to fake all of them. So, for example, if two of the websites say a website is authoritative and another one doesn't, you know, it's probably good if two or three of the websites say that a website is not authoritative and the fourth one does say it's authoritative.
- [48:16]
Listener
Yeah.
- [48:16]
Grumpy SEO Guy
I don't know if I'm gonna believe one. It's a little bit different. It's a little bit shady. Again, I'm not saying any of these values can be faked presently. I'm just saying I feel safer using all of them to get an overall picture rather than just relying on a single place. Now, one more thing I want to say really quick. I know somebody is going to ask this if I don't say it, so I'm going to say it. Depending on your level of paranoia, you may or may not want to use Gmail to register these domains that you're buying.
- [48:50]
Listener
Okay?
- [48:51]
Grumpy SEO Guy
If you're worried that Google is reading your email, and if you're worried that they're gonna say, wait a minute, this person owns all of these domains and all of these domains all link to the same site. Wait a minute, they're gaming the system. Then don't use Gmail. I'm not saying that's the case, but actually, if you're worried about it, don't use any email that is connected to a search engine. Okay, so what does that mean? Don't use Gmail, don't use Hotmail or Outlook. Why? Because those are owned by Microsoft and Microsoft owns Bing. And don't use Yahoo, and I don't know, whatever other emails there are that have search engines. I'm not saying you need to do this, but the safest way to do it would be to get your own domain, use your own non search engine mail client. In other words, you can use whatever mail client you want, but don't buy the Gmail thing. You know how your host will let you use Gmail as your email for $5 a month? Like, don't do that if you're worried about it, because that's still Gmail. I don't know if Google can read that.
- [49:43]
Listener
Okay.
- [49:44]
Grumpy SEO Guy
But if you're concerned that might happen, don't do it. Okay, problem solved. Let me give you one more preview. In the content episode, I'm going to give you the same suggestion and if I forget, I'm telling you it now. If you're worried that, for example, if you have WordPress running with most of your sites, if you're worried that the search engines are going to read your email where you have all the registration emails and say, wait a minute, all of these WordPress sites are owned by the same person and all of these sites are linking to the same person. Ooh, manipulation. If you're worried about that, don't use a search engine email. Okay, now we're good. I just wanted to say that really quick. That's everything for this episode. Thanks for listening. Don't forget to subscribe. I hope this episode was helpful. And if you have any questions or if there's anything that you want me to talk about on a future episode, you can email me@hellorumpyseoguy.com and I'll talk to you later. You're listening to Grumpy SEO Guy, the SEO podcast that doesn't waste your time with nonsense that doesn't work. Join us next Wednesday when we talk about the right way to host your authoritative domains.