It’s been a while since I’ve done an aged domain case study and, this time, I have a little twist. I wanted to take an aged domain up against a site with a lot of traffic and a low DR. This is something I’ve been looking at for a couple of weeks now and, spoiler alert, this happens.
That – is some parabolic growth of about 15x in the space of a few weeks – and it’s still growing.
I bought a couple of sites last year and this one cost me around $11,000. I’ll talk about how that site was set up at some point but the results were pretty underwhelming and I’d just left it on the backburner.
I was actually considering just flipping it at a loss and letting someone else grow it when I stumbled into this little gem.
For anyone who doesn’t know what they’re looking at – this is a site getting a fair chunk of traffic but with very few backlinks. Very little authority in the eyes of a search engine and it just so happens to be in the same niche as the $10,000 site I bought.
On top of that? It’s a multi-trillion dollar market which means there are plenty of products to sell or adverts to run on the site.
If that wasn’t enough? The content is so incredibly easy to reproduce (and improve on).
It’s mostly numbered lists and in these topics, the Google results pages are usually a war of who can get the higher count. Users will click the top 14 over the top 13 and that higher clickthrough can really help speed things up.
So I spent a little time with a script that helps me replace their top 13 with a top 50. I produce a much bigger list in very little time and can pay a freelancer to help tidy things up. Presto, we have much better content in very little time and our aged domain has a lot more authority than the competitor.
Our end result will hopefully be that a big chunk of that traffic goes to my site instead. We’ll run some ads and turn that backburnered projected into a new cash flow.
On top of this – the growth on that chart is after very little content was published as a proof of concept and it hasn’t had a whole lot of time to age in. Now that I know we’re able to compete in this market the goal is pretty straightforward. Published a lot more content and get some ads in place.
This isn’t really an exciting niche for me so a little down the line I might do a ‘rank and reveal’ for it or even just list the site on Flippa. My excitement for the project is just to test how easy it is to bully a low DR domain with an aged one. Depending on how workloads look it might even double as a case study on content velocity since it’s relatively easy to produce.
It’s an SEO case study (read: there won’t be overnight results) but given the growth so far I’m motivated to keep it going and if that keeps up we’ll start seeing some revenue numbers soon.