My client bought about 80 bloody useless domains with no keyword relevance etc - all pointing towards the same URL prior to engaging my services. Does anyone have any suggestions regarding what I can do with these domains. Obviously I'll let them expire but they have a couple of years left to run and I just wanted to check that there was nothing I could really do with them before I just forgot about them! Thanks for any advice.
My 1 1/2 cents: I personally would offer them for sale for what he paid for them and hope to unload a few and cut my losses. The time, effort, and money spent on making using each a viable site could be better spent in optomizing and marketing original site. Shannon
You could list in buy sell or trade area here. If they have potential you could list on a site that routinely sells domains. As Perrow said, showing a few might invoke comments of those used to buying and selling domains which lets me out but you might get some honest replies. Shannon
William, I would remove the redirects from them asap. There was a session at SES NYC where this came up and G & Y stated they would consider this a punishable offense. Not sure about MSN. If your client decides to sell them, PM me a list of the names. I might be interested in one or more. -jay
If they truly are useless and you don't think they'll fetch anything why not use them as a giveaway or competition prize or swap them for links or give them to charity? Get rid of them so they are not hanging round your neck like a fat albatross and if you can't recoup the money try and get some marketing/pr value out of them.
Brian, Don't shoot the messanger 1,2 maybe even 10 domains redirected are ok but 80, 100, 200+ are going to potentially get you in trouble. -jay
A lot of domains can seem useless but may have type-in and linktraffic from sites linking to the site it used to be. If you have linktraffic, built content can easily get you ranked well. I am not saying produce doorway pages, but you should consider finding a use for the domain names if that traffic is somehow relevant to his business.
If they are useless it wont add up at all. Should consider selling to get a small fraction back. I mean they must have some value, I mean they must be something better then ajskdjkasd.com Please post a list, I buy domains daily and many people on this forums do as well and might find something we might like.
Please post the list. I would have liked to give some feedback, but without some example of what kind of domains they are, can't offer much.
why not create several mini sales sites possibly link them up to the main site? If not try sedo and see if anything happens through a couple of links to each site and see if you can get traffic into them
Maybe MSN should register a few hundred useless domains and point them to Yahoo and Google to knock them out of their own SERPs .
Regarding the pointer domains issue. I would just add that if you have 301 redirects you should be okay, since that tell the search engine the destination domain is the real domain, please ignore this domain, etc. However, if you are just pointing all those domains simply via IP, you could get into trouble. I had a site removed from Y for this. I had totally forgotten about the pointers, they were setup years ago, before I knew what I was doing and that it could cause problems with dup content, etc. So now I have them all removed or using 301 redirects and things are looking better. Still not back in Y though... ;-)