Today we have a mind-blowing case study on how someone bought a domain for $285 (according to namebio.com) at a GoDaddy auction and ranked the website in Google’s top results without any link building. Just by creating content!
Look how simple and straightforward everything is! Anyone could do it, right? 🙂
Here is where he published his case study, feel free to check it out: https://www.facebook.com/groups/TheProperPBNGroup/permalink/1309803772533849/
Website revenue:
Intrigued? I’d like to bring you back down to earth a bit. Fairy tales don’t exist, and I’m going to show you why.
The Bitter Truth. Case Breakdown.
I work in a team, and among us are enthusiasts who will dig through other people’s sites until they find the exact listing. That’s precisely what happened in this case. Out of curiosity, members of Dmitry Sokhach’s team located this site because the author had previously posted information about buying it, leaving clues that could be traced if you dug deep enough.
Here is what the person posted:
Here is his current chart:
At the time, I also looked into the details and all the data matched up, but since the revenue was small (around $1,000/month), I didn’t bother investigating further.
So, it was bought in March, but visibility in Ahrefs already appeared in mid-April, which means he published the first content around early April. Ahrefs doesn’t pick up keywords overnight; it takes roughly two weeks for indexing and visibility to show up—at a minimum.
In his case study, he lists May as the launch date (May 2019: Beginning of the site). Oops, already a discrepancy with Ahrefs statistics. And there will be even more discrepancies like this 🙂
He claims he ranked the site WITHOUT building links, explicitly emphasizing this in the comments:
«I said (without building links) yes the domain had links but I didn’t build any new links. that’s the meaning of (without building links)»
So everyone got the message: no links built. Now let’s dig a little deeper.
Sorting by UR, here is what we see:
- a link from a PBN homepage to the «best» money page
- page-by-page redirects from an old site with full content transfer
- Web 2.0 sites powered by tiered link building
Next, let’s look at all the PBNs hidden from Ahrefs, labeled as NOT FOUND IN OUR DATABASE
Dates of the posts where the articles were published:
- June 13
- July 29
- July 23
- June 10
- June 8
- July 21
He publishes posts relevant to his niche + adds camouflage links to authoritative sites.
If there are hidden PBNs and page-level redirects, the actual number of these hidden links is unknown. There could be a massive number of them given that the person knows what he’s doing. So trying to unearth absolutely everything makes no sense.
Bottom line: the site’s growth was NOT driven solely by buying an expired domain.
I can’t say for sure how many hidden links he actually has.
And don’t believe what SEOs say. Watch what they do 😉