Win your Oscar at getting easy links

A lot of time has passed since my last post, but I hope it’s been worth waiting: you should know I don’t write if I haven’t any good ideas to share, and I think the one I’m going to explain you is an interesting one.
Anyway, I don’t want to waste your time and I’ll go straight to the point so you can judge.
Every SEOer knows that an easy way to get links with little effort is to acquire domains that actually have incoming links and redirect them to your site.
And nowadays every SEOer knows that this might easily turn into something dangerous, in this post-Penguin world.
But in my opinion playing the redirect game in a safe and effective way is still possible if you get the right domains and you point them to a similar website (or page). Nothing new here. Besides the fact that I’m going to share with you the real domainers goldmine so that you will not scratch your head asking yourself where the hell you have to look to find these right domains, when you’ll need one.
Because, of course, even if you’re not very into domaining, finding expiring/ed domains is not that difficult. But finding good ones usually requires a lot of time and it’s not easy to have relevancy and links at the same time.
Here’s where I’m helping.
Let me ask you: have you ever thought of an industry in which every year lots of domain are registered and lots expire; an industry that might fit almost every need?
Are you saying film? Yes. You’re right!

Stars, lights, and forgotten domains

The film industry is our unwilling ally, and we’ve to thank it for being so kind with us.
Because every year hundreds of films are released, and each of them has its own 1or2YearsNiceDomain-TheMovie.com. Usually these domains exist for a couple years, then are shutted down, unless the movie is an important one.
Have you seen I Can’t Think Straight? I haven’t. But this movie had an official website, cited on Rottentomatoes…

Go click on that link, now. You’ll end up on a parked domain…

Defining your plan

You can now easily see that there are many opportunities here: many official films websites are let expiring, and not all of them are re-registered by others s the one I’ve shown you. Moreover, whatever your website is about, you can be sure there’s a film about it, or that can be related in some way. And this kind of websites have usually good links and if you stay in topic they will certainly help your rankings.

So what you’d want to do, maybe, is this:

1. Compile a list of movies related to your business
2. Check if any of them had an official website
3. Check if any of these websites has expired
4. Register the domain
5. Create a relevant page on your site
6. Redirect the domain

Does it sound hard, uh? Yes, it is. That’s why we’d rather want to do this:

1. Compile a list of movies websites
2. Check if any of these websites has expired
3. Register the domain
4. Think how it might be related to your website and create a relevant page
5. Redirect the domain

There is a big difference between the two processes, of course:

• The first is time consuming and you might end up with zero results at all, althought in theory it should provide an higher relevancy.
• The second is quicker and even if you might find domains with little correlation with your site, it’s still up to you to choose wheter register them or not and find an angle to legitimate the redirection.

I’ve followed the second path for my researches but I won’t show you the exact details, since I’m sure that, if I showed here the method I used to find the movie domain I’ve uses as example, it would be abused so much that it would become unuseful in a few time.
Anyway, I’ll give you some hints.

1. Old movies don’t have any official website so refine your search.
2. If you use advanced queries on Google, I suggest including -inurl:”themovie.com” (if the domain is still indexed it’s unlikely that it’s available to be registered).
3. Crawler like Xenu have nice responses like “no such host”…
4. SeoMoz APIs and SEO tools for Excel will speed up checking the status code, incoming links and registration status.
5. If an English websites still exists, maybe a non-English version has expired (ie. Italian, French, Spanish, ecc…)

Final note: I was kidding in the post title. It’s not as easy as I promised and spammers and domainers are on it. But there’s room for good opportunities if you understand how to look for them.
Your Oscar is waiting for you. Go and catch it.