Last week I covered how to win GoDaddy auctions. Let’s say you’ve just won your first GoDaddy auction (hey, good job), now let’s talk about what you can actually do with that domain, or more specifically how to use expired domains for SEO.

Expired Domains for SEO

You can use expired domains for SEO to pass on their link juice and occasionally any traffic an expired domain is still enjoying (once you get it back on its feet of course). Let’s talk about your options once you secure an expired domain in terms of reaping the benefits of that site in both links and traffic.

The 301 Redirect

This is pretty straightforward. You just point the entire domain to the site you’d like to rank using a 301 redirect. This way, when the Google bot crawls the site you’re redirecting from, it will automatically go to your site and note that redirect and consequently will forward all of the influence and link juice that directing from domain ahead to your pointed to domain which you want to rank.

You can also redirect specific pages of one site to another using a free WP plugin. A prominently placed link high in the text is just as good, however, so you might just do that.

Develop the Site

Secondly, you can develop the site from the ground up. You might want to do this for a number of reasons. Maybe you want to use the site in earnest and simply see it as a jump start to developing an authority site in that niche because it already has some sites linking to it and an established presence. On the other hand, you might just want to use it as part of a private blog network in which case you’d want some content on it and you can insert your link to your sites you want to rank.

You might even check the archive of the site to look at how the site looked before it expired and you can think about recreating those pages. This is effective because that’s the content which earned the links and traffic that site enjoyed in the first place, so just something to keep in mind.