This is already going to be pretty long, so I’m not going to go into great detail on every point and it is broken up into 2 parts. Just want to give you a basic outline of what I do.
Acquiring domains is arguably the most important part of building your own private network. Although my methods in evaluating domains have changed over the years, there are a few key points that have never changed for me.
First, buying domains for a private network is all about risk management. The idea is to purchase domains with little to no risk in regards to their quality and strength and to them being outed as part of a network. Do I ever buy domains that look a little more risky? Yes, but I factor it into how much I’m willing to spend. If a domain looks like it may have had some issues in the past, but I can get it for only $50, I will sometimes take a chance on it.
Second, remember that the reason you are buying a domain for a private network is because of its existing link profile. The stronger its link profile is, the stronger the links off of the site are going to be. That is the whole reason you want to buy old domains. Things like domain age or how it was used before (minus illegal or extremely spammy activity) really do not matter to me.
The reason you are setting up a private network is because, like me, you believe links are still the #1 ranking factor in Google. Otherwise, why bother?
Third, names matter. See point number one. When I build sites for a private network, my philosophy has always been to build sites that could stand on their own. There is little to no difference between one of my network sites and one of my “money sites” other than the network site happens to link to a few sites I’m trying to rank.
Because of that, domain names matter. I am not going to buy a domain like best-mortgages-for-first-time-home-buyers.tld and turn it into a site about health and nutrition. I only buy domains with names that I can repurpose. I want to build sites that will last and that do not make it obvious they are a part of a network.
You are not always going to find a domain with a name that you can directly relate to the niche you are building in. Domains with people’s names are often the easiest to use. For example, I can turn a domain like CharlesBarr.tld into a blog or website about whatever I want it to be.
How do I shop for domains?
I mostly stick to auctions these days. I used to have quite an apparatus setup with Scrapebox feeding Xenu feeding a spreadsheet to find broken links to domains that had expired in an automated fashion.
These domains could be bought for just the cost of registering them.
It worked great… twelve years ago. The problem now is that there are so many people scraping sites for dropped domains that it will be pretty rare that you find one that is available and even more rare that you find one that is worthwhile.
I get most of my domains in auctions now. If you pull up GoDaddy auctions right now, you will see thousands of domains to look through. Going through them one at a time is not very efficient. I use a service called Spamzilla instead. Spamzilla lets you create filters for sorting the domains in auctions.
There are other tools out there too. DomCop is another solid tool. Before that, it was RegisterCompass. I use Spamzilla because it offers the most options and also costs the least.
Next week we will go through how I sort through the list and some of the other key factors I use in choosing domains to bid on.
