Ethics around acquiring an abandoned domain?
Hello, Indie Hackers!
I have a few domains that I've been using to experiment some growth tactics in a specific market. Recently a domain that was abandoned had expired and I picked it up.
The original domain had a simple web app that was fairly successful until the owner abandoned it about 4 years ago. The site was running on Heroku and was shut down. There are still a fair number of inbound links to the home page from major sources (CNN, MSNBC, etc.) that get click traffic with links containing valuable keywords for this market.
What are your thoughts and concerns about setting up a similar web app to capture the traffic, build up the SEO and link strength again, and possibly using this to domain to direct users to the other apps/sites I am running?
Biggest reason to go for/buy existing domains is for the authority/SEO juice it has.
If you want to be safe/friendly; go send a short email to the previous owner about your plans.
Clearly they abandoned it because they couldn't make it work despite the current incoming traffic. If your app becomes successful, it's because of what you did so I would shake the feeling that you're taking something from them somehow.
People have been doing this for years, many quite successfully. Regards to ethics, it's fine. If they still wanted it they'd have renewed it.
Regards to the EFFECT, not sure about this anymore. If you 301 it to an existing site in order to inject the backlink juice of expired domain into yours, you might be dissapointed if there's no topical relevance.
Tobin - your issue is less about ethics and more about the legality. Does the company have any patents or trademarks for the name/webapp? You can always launch a different app under the same name and trademark it. More importantly, if that app has failed despite all the media coverage then what makes you think that you can make it successful? My experience with media coverage has been that it generates very little traffic and real business. Hype is more for fulfilling your own ego and is usually done by wasting VC dollars. I had a company that had coverage from several major media outlets and I never generated any real business because of it. Rest it all depends on your own personal circumstances. Good Luck!
We just released an app that helps with finding these domains and provides up-to-date SEO info (think DomCop, but free and faster), right now from GoDaddy auctions https://domaincub.com/auctions but have an alpha that shows all .coms ever used. Email me if you want early access, adding more TLDs soon. domaincubteam at gmail
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