How And Why To Avoid Dropped Domains

How to tell if a website is a “dropped domain”

In the world of webmasters you will often hear the words “dropped domain” mentioned a lot. Even though this is pretty basic webmaster term you still find many webmasters who do not understand what the term “dropped domain” means. Even less know how to identify such a website. It is important to understand the meaning of this expression, and how to identify a dropped domain if your to become a long term successful webmaster.

As a budding webmaster you may wonder if you have never heard of this term before why do you need to know what it means now? Well believe me, if this is the case then you are about to receive one of the most important lessons you should have already been taught from within the webmasters world!

Ok let’s say you’re looking for an advertising opportunity on another website, any experienced webmaster will want to make checks to be sure that the quality and traffic levels of a particular website is as good as it looks on the face of things and will stay that way in the future. Typically you would go and look at the alexia stats tool: www.alexa.com

If you end up having an advert that is placed on a dropped domain, the chances are in 2/3 months time the quality of that website, and its traffic (if recently dropped) will fall away rapidly. Its page rank will no doubt drop back to zero, and the knock on effect to you will be massive reductions in traffic that will be seeing your advert due to the pr / quality drop of the website.

What we mean by “dropped domain”
This term is applied to websites that were fully functional for a lengthy period of time and then for whatever reason the owner has failed to renew their domain name so the domain then “drops” from registration until it gets bought by someone else who then puts their own website on to it. If very recently dropped the domains page rank and traffic will still be there. But not for very long!

This website is now tagged as a dropped domain amongst us webmasters.

Ok here are the reasons why this is a bad thing:

1) The quality of this website has been built by the original owner and its quality is down to all his relevant content that he has added and also to all his relevant incoming links. Now the new owner will not have any of the old content so will have to start a fresh with his own content which 99% of the time is different to what the site originally had on it. So straight away the original quality of this site has been lost.

2) All the incoming links to the website will be relevant to the original content on the site, so with none of this content now on the site all these links will be seen as less relevant by Google. So again another cause of the drop in quality of the website.

3) All the original pages of the website will no longer be there, and all of the incoming links to those internal pages will now be totally worthless as the pages that they pointed to will no longer exist. A key feature of a strong site is to have lots of pages with lots of incoming links to them. This is one of the factors that give the biggest quality drop.

I will also explain and highlight the relevance of this by looking at it in this way, as in theory this is the exact same scenario:

Ok if the football club Liverpool Fc was sold to a new owner but this new owner did not get any of the players, manager or even the stadium and he went off and built a new stadium and started the club afresh, what do you think would happen to the club?

Well I’m sure it would drop into the lower leagues and lose a lot of its fan base and most of its sponsors, and then advertisers would walk away due to the club no longer being in the public eye. So basically the club will have has lost everything that had been the cause of it being a quality football club.

So now you understand just how important identifying if a dropped domain is when choosing where to place advertising, here is how to check to see if a domain is dropped or not.

1) Check the back links that are coming into the website, if the domain is “dropped” the back links will be relevant to the original sites content and pages and not relevant to what is now on the site. This can be checked by putting the full website url into this very handy site explorer tool provided by yahoo: http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/

2) Use the go back in time service to have a look back at how the website appeared up to 12 years ago. Now this points out straight away if the content and site structure has changed. This useful too can be found here: http://www.archive.org/index.php

And that’s how you tell if a website is classed as a dropped domain or not. It’s quite easy really when you know how and as said before 99% of the time when someone buy’s a previously used domain it will no longer have any of the original content from the site, so they will just put on it what they want and this is what makes identifying these sites very easy.

I hope you all find this very useful and please feel free to link to this article if you wish to share this useful info with your own readers.

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Tags: dropped domains, webmaster tools, webmasters
Posted in Internet Marketing