After snagging another expired domain and setting up my own niche on it, I noticed something very interesting that I just can’t keep quiet about.
Merging Keywords Between the New and Old Pages
An actual keyword merging takes place between the previous page and the current new one.
Imagine there was a page called «Colorado tours». I redirected it to the homepage, where my content was about choosing an electric kettle.
Checking the keywords in Ahrefs, I saw that I reached the top 30 for the query «electric kettles in Colorado».
To say I was blown away is an understatement.
I have plenty of such examples on this site, and keyword merging happens on it all the time.
Checking via domain com Worked
But I think the main trick to why I noticed this was that before buying this domain, I checked it with a «domain com» search query — the site was in first place and ranking for keywords, meaning it was still in the top rankings.
And I saw the merge very quickly, because I think if a domain sits idle for a long time and Google notices it, it downgrades those pages for a while, so I shouldn’t be seeing such a fast merging effect just a week after launch. It’s simply impossible in such a short timeframe.
In other words, as far as Google was concerned, this site hadn’t been sitting idle, so Google hadn’t dropped it from the top.
Seriously, just one or two weeks after creating the site, the keyword «electric kettles in Colorado» reached 30th place.
Pick an Active Niche Site in the Top Rankings
So ideally, you want to pick a site that never drops out of Google at all.
I’ve never seen such a clear reason why you need to pick a strictly niche-relevant domain and restore the pages that were on it, or try to redirect a page to one that is just as relevant as the old one.
Meaning Google has already assigned relevance to this page, it has age, and Google understands what it’s about.
It’s indexed and ranking.
So why waste it on nothing or an off-topic niche if you can redirect it within the same topic?
So I ended up with a working formula for reaching the top rankings as quickly as possible.
A Working Formula for the Fastest Route to the Top
The working formula: pick an active, niche-relevant site with crappy content => preserve the URL paths => post good, converting content => thereby boosting behavioral factors on the page and immediately building more links to prompt Google to check out what’s new and interesting, boosting the site in search => get results as fast as possible. I don’t think it’s possible to do it any faster.
What do we get:
- We avoid the time lag while Google figures out what the site and page are actually about. That’s months of waiting.
- We avoid the sandbox, where the site simply gets stuck and can’t reach the top. That can also take months.
Why You Shouldn’t Pick Off-Topic Domains
You’ll dilute the site’s focus. Imagine grabbing a domain that has vinyl windows heavily hardcoded in anchor text everywhere.
And you want to launch a niche site about headphones. If the expired domain has lots of anchor text for vinyl windows, you’re simply misleading Google.
In that case, it’s better to pick a neutral expired domain that doesn’t have a specific niche in its anchors. For example, a news site. It’s about everything and isn’t tied to any single topic.
However, it won’t be as powerful as a niche-relevant expired domain that already has established anchor text and relevant pages.
How This Works on a Live Top-Ranking Example
I would have drastically cut my time to reach the top rankings if I had known this earlier and understood how Google merges a domain with a new one and why it’s important to redirect niche pages to matching relevant pages.
All SEO books are dead to me; all recommendations and opinions pale in comparison to Google’s top rankings. GOOGLE TOP IS KING. Everything is clear there without unnecessary words.
By the way, if you think this is all nonsense and that I’m just an armchair theorist, here’s a bombshell that will blow your mind today — https://carbibles.com — this site uses all the principles I described above.
It took a niche-relevant, POWERFUL link-boosted domain, redirected it page by page, assigned the niche to the site, and demonstrated that the site is trusted and focused, given that it gets plenty of backlinks and receives traffic even for informational queries.
For example, this page is purely informational, but he redirected it specifically so as not to waste link equity.
It was Suspension Bible — it became Guide to Car Suspension.
By the way, I found another trick along the way in how he boosts the site’s trust through outreach.
He places outreach links on informational articles rather than transactional pages.
In other words, he boosts the overall trust of the entire site, not just the money pages.
Often, outreach prospects don’t want to link to money pages — they want something genuinely valuable and informational. That’s how he found a compromise.
Now for the Main Thing — Revenue from the Site
Everyone loves counting money — that’s why we’re all gathered here.
Sit back, grab some popcorn; today is going to be tasty.
Average earnings per 1k traffic for Amazon affiliates is $100. A site getting 1k visitors a day brings in an average of $3,000 a month.
This site is doing great with traffic. 430k unique visitors a month according to Ahrefs.
Which means the ESTIMATED monthly revenue is… $43,000 or 2,881,000 rubles.
From a single site.
It could be more, it could be less, but not by much.
This is life-changing money, or at least lifestyle-changing money.
It gives you freedom, and how you use it is completely up to you.
But the fact that this is a real business is 100%. How I didn’t arrive at this sooner, how I wandered around doing complete BS. Well, what’s done is done. It’s a journey. Some get there sooner, some later.