An instructive story about an expired domain. The niche is gambling, and the guy is clearly from the CIS, so I don’t want to publish the site itself to avoid drawing unnecessary eyes to the resource.
An expired domain was acquired – they brazenly changed the site’s topic without any extra hassle.
Position #14 appeared for the main keyword.
Next, to hit the top positions, they started building links.
Around 30 links were built, reaching #1 in the top for the main keyword
But that didn’t seem like enough gold: having the keyword in the domain name clearly boosts CTR, resource trust, and conversions.
So the «if it works, don’t touch it» principle was cast aside.
After reading enough Telegram channels claiming that migrating to an EMD boosts rankings, they decided to move to an EMD domain.
Here is one of the posts and a good chart:
They set up a redirect and… position #6 instead of first!
Then they decided to un-redirect back to the old domain, realizing they broke the «if it works, don’t touch it» rule, but Google was no longer forgiving.
Full chart:
And so it keeps hanging around positions 5–8:
As the saying goes:
