A number of years ago, picking up domains that had expired was a useful strategy. You could occasionally find some gems that had backlink value. That strategy died when google supposedly started zero-ing out any pagerank equity in a domain that expired and was registered by a different owner.
But even without that, a good exact match keyword domain could be a big plus for search engine rankings for that phrase.
However, I had a weird issue that I never solved with a dropped domain that I picked up last year.
I thought it was a decent, keyword rich domain name that I could build a site around. As near as I could tell, it had never been developed before – there was no history in the internet archives.
But after months of use, Google absolutely would not index it. I’ve never seen that happen before, and couldn’t explain it. The only reason I could think that would happen would be if it had been banned in a previous life by a previous owner. But I thought all that owner history was supposed to be cleared out with the expiration?
In any case, I never actually solved the problem. I gave up, and put the site on a new domain. The new domain was indexed in days, even before I got the redirect from the old domain working.
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