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.