Buying an Expired Domain With a Manual Penalty From Google

Till now, I have only shared my success stories with expired domains. In this post, I will discuss one of my failures with buying expired domains.

In October-November 2021, I was on a spree of buying expired domains from GoDaddy Auction. One day I found a domain name called Linux4One.Com. I checked its DA and DR, and it was around 35. I checked the backlink profile, and it was decent, with backlinks from many Linux sites.

I also checked it on Archive.org, and everything looked good. The domain was previously a Linux blog with tons of articles. I also checked in Ahrefs and found the site was receiving over 100k visits before the domain expired. I decided to buy the domain name and redirect it to the Linux category on my main blog.

The current bid on the domain was around $200. At this price, the domain was a deal breaker. So, I couldn’t resist myself bidding on it. After a few bids, I won the domain name for $235. Then, I paid $15 for renewal, so my overall cost was $250.

GoDaddy takes one week to transfer the domain name to my account. As soon as I got the domain name, I installed WordPress. But when I added it to Google Search Console, I was utterly shocked. There was a warning at the top of the Search Console. It was saying the domain has a manual penalty for publishing duplicate content.

After going through all the details, I understood that the previous owners of the domain name were stealing content from others’ blogs. They were getting good traffic until they got caught by Google. And after it, the site went to 0, and then they didn’t renew the domain. It came to Auction, and I ended up buying it.

I still had a chance to create a new project, get some new unique content written, and explain everything to Google that I am a new owner of this domain and will publish fresh content. Google may have removed the penalty. But I was not sure whether the project would work out in the long run. So, I dropped the plans.

So, this was one of my failures in buying expired domains. If you are also looking for an expired domain, check everything thoroughly. You would not want to buy a domain with a penalty from Google. I have already shared a post explaining what you should look at before bidding on an expired domain.

If you follow those tips, you won’t buy the wrong expired domain. That’s it for this post.

As I wrote in the last several posts, I started multiple projects on expired domains. Every new project required initial funds to grow. So, around March 2022, I urgently needed funds to run the business.

There was no better way than freelancing and earning the required funds. So, in April 2022, I resumed working as a freelancer. In tomorrow’s post, I will share the experiences I had last year as a freelancer.

Thanks for reading this post. Have a great day ahead!