Yesterday I posted about how we could use the -950 penalty to our advantage to find cheap sites to buy. Today I made arrangements to purchase one using this technique. Mind you… I’m yet to figure out how to get a site out of a 950 penalty because I haven’t yet had reason to try. But now I have one to play with and am going to blog about whether this avenue proves rewarding or a complete failure.

What I purchased was a site in a very competitive niche that is lingering in -950 land for virtually all relevant search terms. It only has about 65 pages indexed in google and only about 300 backlinks pointing to the domain. Most of the backlinks look like they are a part of an old reciprocal link exchange attempt as the site has a handful of “resource” and links pages. It isn’t the general type of site that I purchase since the domain is only 3 years old with no DMOZ or Y! directory listings. Frankly I can’t see how the page is respected enough by google to be in the result set in the first place given these factors, but it is… although in 950 land.

I contacted the site owner expressing my interest and asking about revenue. The owner indicated that the site hadn’t been making much the past few months. (obviously). I then made him an offer of about 20x’s monthly revenue and he accepted. Paying 20x’s current earnings isn’t a technical bargain… in fact it’s pretty expensive until I mention that the price was slightly over $1,000 and leads in this niche pay about $15 per lead. With that background it’s a pretty good bargain to get a site that is in the base keyword result set - although penalized, hasn’t made an effort to expand into the less competitive long-tail, generates some revenue currently, and can give my other sites in the niche backlinks from within the base keyword result set. Heck, for the backlink value alone it’s worth the price.

So, here’s what I’m going to do. First I’m going to point some deep backlinks from this new site to my main site in the niche. Next I’m going to redesign the site and clean the code up without adding new pages. I’m going to attack the -950 problem by first looking at the reciprical link pages. I’ll probably “no follow” them at first and if that doesn’t work just delete the pages. I think those pages might be a major part of the problem. Next I’ll gradually get a couple of high quality links pointing to the homepage, add a little fresh content to the existing pages, and take a fresh look at internal navigation and anchor text. Again, the goal of this first round is to just get the site out of the penalty.

This site is never going to be a page 1 result for the base keyword in this niche. However, I think I can make it page one for a ton of long-tail terms once its out of the penalty box. If that’s the case it will pay for itself with a couple days of revenue. Will it work? Who knows, but it seems like a pretty good gamble to me. I’ll keep you updated on whether it sinks or swims.

Some of you might have heard about what is being called the “950″ penalty through the forums at webmasterworld.com. Essentially it is a penalty that moves sites that ordinarily would rank much higher to the bottom of the result set. It seems that some entire sites are hit while others are hit only for certain keywords or pages.

The consensus of a continuing 11 part thread is that the penalty is some form of over-optimization penalty. People report sites going into and out of the penalty on a regular basis. However it has proven to be a penalty for which there is hope to escape from if you own an affected site. Sites subject to the penalty still return as a part of the result set, but simply don’t rank where they otherwise would due to the penalty. The most common reports of success involve “de-optimizing” internal linking structure or improving the quality and diversity of inbound links and anchor text.

Identifying the affected sites takes a little guess work because not all sites listed near the bottom of a result set are there on account of the penalty. Some are there as a result of their ordinary ranking. Identifying sites where only a few pages are penalized for certain keywords is extremely difficult as a result. However, identifying sites where the entire site is subject to the penalty is fairly easy and should be the focus of your attention.

To find these sites simply set your search preferences on google to return 100 results per page. Enter one of the main keyword combinations for your targeted niche and go to the last page of returned results. Scroll down to the area of the area of the last 50 results and you will find sites potentially hit by the penalty. Identify a couple of sites that look like quality domains that might be there because of having optimized for the keyword too aggressively. Visit some of the sites and identify other pages of the site that should rank for keywords in their page title. Search again for those other pages and go to the end of the result set and see if the site is there for those queries as well. Do this a couple more times and you can be fairly confident that entire site is subject to the penalty.

A few other things that you can be confident of are: 1. The site owner isn’t making any money from organic google referrals (read: potentially cheap) 2. The site owner probably doesn’t understand the cause of the problem and probably isn’t even aware that the site is suffering this penalty 3. The site probably is an older site with a little bit of respect from google which is why it gets included in the result set 4. The site probably has a fair number of backlinks which probably have some age but might simply be too focused.

Put all of these factors together and you probably have identified a site that hasn’t been making the webmaster much money lately and that is ripe to get good rankings again with a little bit of work. Your chances to rank with one of these sites is much better than with a brand new domain, and with a motivated site owner, probably not that expensive either. Go deep sea fishing and pick up a bargain.

I’m always talking about the value of buying old sites. The most common question in response is “how do you find them?” Of course there’s a million ways to find them such as searching outdated directories (Y! Directory falls into that category and DMOZ is about there too) or checking the Wayback Machine. One of my favorite is to browse through the Yahoo directory as it existed in 2001.

But the easiest way that I have found for generating large lists of old sites in your niche is to first visit a handful of sites created pre 2000 and look for graphics that would have been common back then. Examples include the free stat counter graphics at the bottom of pages, award logos or certain animated gif’s that were popular back in the day (remember the guy holding the “WELCOME” sign?). Then, I’ll search Yahoo for all links pointing to the old link counter site or award site along with my keyword.

Here it is in practice (not the best example, but you will get the point). Lets first check the section of the Yahoo Directory from 2001 to find hit counter sites that existed in 2001. Then simply do a backlink check on Yahoo to find all of the sites that link back to the hit counter. Take this query as an example. If you want to limit results to sites that mention your topic, just insert your keyword in the query. Since the old fashioned hit counter went out of style several years ago, you can assume that the vast majority of sites linking to the hit counter are pretty old and that the webmaster might have lost some interest in the site and isn’t paying much attention to keeping it current. (Read: “Cheap”)

Then comes the hard part… chasing down a site owner with outdated whois info and with no contact information on the page. But that’s a post for another day.

So you want to dominate your niche but you just can’t get your great new domain, “my-great-new-site-about-the-niche [.] info” to rank. What’s the problem you ask? Well, perhaps you should have stopped by the used site lot before falling in love with the new, improved version.

I’m constantly reading forum posts of people that you know are fighting a losing battle with a brand new site. They are doing all of the right things from an SEO perspective, but the fact is, that without a lot of luck or an inordinate amount of work they just aren’t going to be successful. You see, if google was going to pick someone up in a bar, it would generally pass by the young hotties on the dance floor in favor of the grandmother sitting in the corner. Site age is a huge factor on how google ranks sites and it’s one of the few things that you can’t change about a site. You either have it or you don’t.

So what if you don’t have an old site? What do you do? Buy it… Today! Actually, don’ buy it today. Buy it in a few weeks after I can get a few more posts up about what to look for because age isn’t everything. In rare instances I have bought old sites that were so close to death that I couldn’t revive them. But usually I find fairly easy success in running with an old domain. My best example is the site I paid $1,000 for a little over a year ago that now nets that much on average per day. That might sound far-fetched but its far more likely than getting your new young thing to do the same.