Tuesday, December 21, 2021

I Accidentally Bought A Blacklisted Domain

A while back I read about this SEO strategy where this guy bought old domains with some authority on them and then used those to create a variety of different backlinks to his site. It seemed like a solid strategy especially in the long run as you could always add additional links to those sites as well, and long story short I figured I'd try it out for one of my lead generation sites I was planning on creating.

I started my search on Godaddy as they have their own domain auction; however, I found many of the sites had absolutely no power on them, and the ones that did cost thousands of dollars so I decided maybe I would try and search elsewhere. After looking for about an hour I came across a site that had a very limited selection but the pricing was rather solid from what I had seen elsewhere so I decided I would take a further look. I plugged them into my backlink tools and it seemed as though the sites had a solid amount of strength and a high number of backlinks; however, the lost amount of organic traffic should've raised a red flag. Despite my better judgment, I decided to buy a plumbing related backlink and boy did I regret that,

I built a rather nice website around that domain and optimized it to rank for my local area, but after 3 months I noticed there was no real traction not even local impressions just from people searching and seeing our GMB. It really made me question my SEO strategy as I've had clients rank who ranked on the first or second page at that point in time in much more competitive industries, and even the ones who didn't still saw a solid number of impressions. I decided to ask one of my other SEO friends about it and he said it could be blacklisted you should check and if it is see what for. I thought to myself "Blacklisted, no way I haven't even done anything major on this site that would cause such a thing"; however, I decided I would give it a shot and find a tool to see if it is.

I ended up finding some free site online that checks for blacklist penalties or any Google infractions that a website has committed and you guessed it the website had been blacklisted or rather shadowbanned and wasn't appearing for most if not all of the keywords I had targeted. I took a further look into it and found thousand of spammy links from foreign sites that were unprotected and immediately knew that something was up. See originally I had just checked the power of the site and never ventured further, but now I was going to have to check every single link and disavow those that hurt the site.

After 3 days and over 16 hours, I finally finished disavowing every harmful link and for those of you wondering the website is well on its way to a positive ranking. We currently sit outside of the first page, and most often on the third page but this was a major improvement from a few months ago where we found ourselves with a penalty and not appearing at all. For those of you interested in this strategy really make sure to do your research as there's no shortcuts to SEO.

submitted by /u/JRoss824
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from Search Engine Optimization: The Latest SEO News https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/rlbk9k/i_accidentally_bought_a_blacklisted_domain/>

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