Do expired domains have residual value?

[paul]

I have been looking at some expired domains which are available for re-registration. Some have a long history at archive.org and some still show Google PR. I have looked at some of the backlinks and they often come from newspaper reviews or other sources which apparently never check for broken links.

My thought is to register some of these, write a page or two of content which bridges the former theme to a subject I choose, which them becomes an on theme link to some other site(s) I have.

For example, I register orlandopictures.com which still shows a few links and has PR. I write a couple of pages about how pretty pictures of Orland are and how much I would like to travel there to take some pictures for my Florida travel website. (names/places picked from air :)

I understand Google is a registrar and would have no problem telling the name had expired and was under new ownership. My question is if anyone has actually tried this and how long any PR benefits continued.

Thanks,
Paul

[Chris]

Google has a history of zeroing the PR of any such expired domains to prevent spam. I don't think they have 100% success with it. Also that doesn't take away from other engines or residual direct traffic so for $8 bucks if you can find a domain, buy it.

[Generalissimo]

Especially if it's still linked to on about 30 sites in all their pages, as I found for several domains on a network of unique reference sites that had dropped!

[apthost01]

Most certainly they do, I know people who live off snagging expired domains and putting them up as parked pages. You can literally make a fortune!

[Cutter]

If there are incoming links, the domain has value. There may also be people clicking through the links driving real traffic.

That being said, be aware that there are people who practically make it a full time job to catch dropping domain names. There is software you can buy which will daily check all dropping domain names and can automatically query google & yahoo for backlinks and PR. The good stuff will get auctioned off for a lot more than $8. What this means is most of the truely good stuff is going to be taken.

[paul]

Thanks for the thoughtful answers. Chris's reminded me not to get so focused on Google I forget the other engines. Cutter, your description sounds like the description of a long tail situation.

We certainly live in interesting times. As the web grows and ages there are more and more opportunities for success. I got started on this line of thinking when I stumbled across a way to buy these kinds of sites without taking a lot of my time. The names are certainly nothing to write home about, but if you have a collection of VERY niche mini sites it is not difficult buy sites where you can easily write content that transitions from old to new.

The kind of sites for which this makes sense has changed because the cost of domain registrations and hosting has come down. When I had to pay $10 for registration and $5/mo to host a domain the economics were very different.

I have been paying $30/mo for a PR7 link. If I put the same amount toward buying old PR2 or PR3 sites I could get four per month. Hosting these days is essentially free, so the question becomes "Are the links from 50 low PR sites, plus the other benefits of ownership, greater than a single PR7 link for a site I don't own?"

The correct answer, as always, will be "It depends." It depends on the sites for which I need links. It depends on my skill in purchasing the domains with the most links, relevance, possible future value, etc.

What I always found the most interesting about investing was the way two people could look at the same facts, come to completely different conclusions based on those facts, and then both succeed or both fail because of how they executed.

The web is even more interesting because it is less well understood than traditional investments and it has a technical dimension that fogs up the issues.