It’s not just domain investors that you see drop catching expired names these days. In fact, lots of traditional internet marketers and search engine optimization experts have also realized they can often find hidden gems within the lists of expiring domains. They can catch authoritative domains for registration cost and then immediately start using them to help increase page “authority” going to their networks of other established websites. What do I mean by this exactly? The process I’m talking about is called redirection.

We’ve all been redirected from one page to another before. Lots of you might be wondering how setting up a simple redirect could really have any type of SEO impact or value. The truth is, it really comes down to exactly which type of redirect you’re setting up. There are two different types available, a 301 redirect and a 302 redirect. Before I compare these two and tell you which one is better I’ll first explain how your other websites can actually get value from them.

When learning about SEO and increasing your search engine rankings you’ve probably seen that incoming links are important. Not only should your website have lots of good unique content on it, but there should also be a variety of other relevant website pages linking back into it. When search engines see lots of other pages linking back to yours then it signifies there must be some important information there. Backlinks can (and should) come from all over the web. Social media profiles, blog posts, social bookmarks, and reciprocal link exchanges are just a few of the most common methods people use to build incoming links to their websites. But, did you know that a properly setup domain redirect can also count as an incoming link? Purchasing expired domains and setting them up as redirects into other websites you own can be one of the easiest (and cheapest) ways to build more good quality incoming links! You don’t want to redirect just any domain, though. You want to focus mainly on domains with authority.

Every webpage on the internet has some type of authority assigned to it. The amount of authority that a page has comes from a number of different factors. The number (and quality) of incoming links going back to that domain or page, along with the amount (and uniqueness) of content on that page, plus a variety of other metrics will all come together in an algorithm to form it’s overall authority. The more authority that a specific page or domain has on it, the more juice it can pass along to whatever it’s linking (or in our case, redirecting) to. The more juice your website has from these types of incoming links, the higher it will rank. That means when you’re scanning expired domain lists and looking for names that you can drop catch to redirect, you only want to focus on getting domains that have some decent authority attached to them. Look mainly for expired domains that already have some incoming links pointing into them. That’s most commonly found through expired domains which were previously developed. You can also use websites like Ahrefs.com and MajesticSEO.com to see how much authority a domain you’re interested in currently has.

Now that you know which kinds of domains to look for and how they’ll help your other websites we need to discuss setting up the redirect. One great thing about domain redirects is that most registrars will let you set them up from directly inside your control panel. That means no hosting accounts are needed for using this method. Just always remember to setup a 301 Redirect if you want to use it for SEO purposes. A “301 Redirect” tells search engines that the content has permanently moved and all authority which the current domain has associated with it should now point over to the new domain which it’s being redirected to.