Steal Million Dollar Homepage Pixels
pixelpirate.club
pixelpirate.club
I work as a technical-SEO consultant and we had the funny idea of checking all these domains about a year ago: None of them are worth buying! None of them has any SEO-potential!
- the page-rank passed from milliondollarhomepage.com to these domains is minimal (huge PR divided through tons of links is worthless)
- domains expired for a long time get some sort of "reset" from Google (we experimented with this - strong domains last used years ago do not rank faster than "fresh" domains)
Therefore, in the case of PageRank and SEO-potential: It is better to try to buy domains of local companies in your area that went out of business. These are much stronger.
And in general: Buying old domains for backlinks is a waste of time. Getting high-quality backlinks from legit sites and improving your own domain in regards to technical optimization and usability is much more effective - and scalable.
Edit: Improved formatting
In your opinion, is this ethical?
There are easier ways to get a website ranked. Publishing good and useful content, creating a valuable product, optimizing your site (for crawlers and users), and following a sane marketing strategy is much more important than backlinks and page rank. I never had any problems outranking poorly made sites that had a much "stronger" link-profile than my sites.
Needless to say: You will also build a better product/business if you do not waste your focus on cheap SEO-tricks ...
But I do not judge people using these tactics: SEO is daunting-game and - as long as Google acts as intransparent and unpredictable as it has in the past - people will focus on "esoteric" tactics.
I follow a lot of indie game development forums, and one of the most striking things to me is how many people want to hit success with garbage casual mobile games by focusing heavily on app store tips and tricks.
SEO tricks are useless, but that's not the same as saying SEO is useless:
> optimizing your site (for crawlers and users), and following a sane marketing strategy
That's a lot of what (non-jerky) SEO is these days.
One can argue that it's not something worth hiring an SEO consultant for, as there's enough info floating around out there to do this yourself if you're moderately savvy. But there are folks who aren't savvy about that sort of thing, as well as folks who think it's just worth paying someone else to worry about it.
A highly-paid medical doctor saying "You need to eat less and exercise more to lose weight" is not unexpected. The problem is that people really want to eat crap and not exercise and still be healthy.
I (an industrial controls engineer) worked on a website for my employer's small business some years ago. I was given about 40 hours to design and implement the website to describe some 200 products that we've built over the years. Some had pictures, and some even had manuals. Most had some kind of a spreadsheet entry, but between Google (now Open) Refine and some intern hours we had a product page for each. "Magic algorithmic keyword SEO juice" was the desired strategy, such that each product page ought to zoom to the top of Google results for its search term, and I (not being a technical SEO consultant) was unable to effectively convince my boss that hiding 100 copies of the title and thesaurus-generated synonyms in white-on-white text at 0 point at the bottom of the page was not the way to do it, and that linking to it from a useful and therefore popular page would work better.
A lot of small businesses view documentation as pure overhead, to be minimized at all costs. The idea that you'd have a project manager or engineer write up the email you sent (or phone call you narrated) describing how to calibrate an XYZ blagometer, copy edit it, add some diagrams, and post it as an article or whitepaper to improve future sales is viewed as wasteful and not worth the effort.
The SEO industry is like the weight loss industry. When you hear an SEO consultant advocate creating good content, that means they're one of the good ones. If you hear them describe miracle cures, they're a hack.
Technical SEO - as I use the term - describes tasks like the following:
1) Performance optimization (One of the most important tasks)
It's basically me telling my clients that their Devs were right all along and that they have to improve their site's speed
2) UX feedback (Help in terms of usability and user experience because unusable sites will rank much worse on Google)
This is basically me telling my clients that their "fancy" 200.000 $ redesign will never rank in Google and that they have to use a "boring" design. (Their Devs were right again ...)
3) Improve internal linking (Prioritize important pages with high search volume, deprioritize less important pages)
More complicated, but this is one of the most important tasks for "big" websites (e-commerce, news, travel, ...) and one of the biggest levers to improve rankings
4) manage URL-corpus
One of my clients' had every single article of his indexed on more than 5 different URLs (eg. https://www.website.com/correct-url, https://www.website.com/correct-url/, https://www.website.com/correct-url?preview, https://www.website.com/correct-url/?preview,https://www.web..., https://www.website.com/?1234). Each URL hat internal links pointing to it, so the domain's "power" was split through hundreds of thousands of URLs. Google hates this and traffic exploded after fixing this.
...
A lot of other related tasks are not that easy to explain for me in text (I am a non-native English speaker and this comment already took me 20 minutes up until here ...) and my guidelines vary from website to website.
But, essentially, I help clients to adhere to web standards and optimize their websites for their users. The last "spammy" backlink I build for a project other than my side-projects (experiments) was probably more than 5 years ago ...
There's still the black market SEO where people hire spambots to send links, but that's been thwarted / voided by just adding a nofollow to links in user generated content like comments.
Also "proper web engineering" doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.
There's honestly not a great meatspace analogy to the situation, no matter how you look at it. But it's clearly not the same as just buying foreclosed real estate.
Kind of like when a big company buys a smaller company and keeps the brand name.
Exactly. If it's basically the same business under new management, there's nothing wrong with keeping the name. If it's a new business with no relationship to the old, trading on the name to grant false credibility and bring confused customers into their own shop, that's unethical.
If you do it only to freeload off someone else’s reputation, that doesn’t seem great to me. For the comparison to real-estate, I have nothing to add beyond what PhasmaFelis wrote.
I never understood how this works. What do you do with these domains? Do you just redirect them to the main business site or do you create a supporting site on them that heavily links to the business site?
Anyway the old domains won't get any new attention if you don't work on that and then you can just can work on your main domain.
It doesn't have to get any attention. Links (or a redirect, or other things) from it will still (massively, depending on the quality of the domain) improve your ranking.
You could also throw some unrelated content on it, and will likely rank for quite a while until somebody complains loud enough that Google manually sets up a -100 on your domain.
Yeah no kidding. Like saying that a 5 star hostel is nicer than 1 star one. Obviously, it's much more epxnsive. If buying a $11 expired domain is good enough to help get the page indexed, then it may be worth it even if does not help your rankings.
>Therefore, in the case of PageRank and SEO-potential: It is better to try to buy domains of local companies in your area that went out of business. These are much stronger.
yea this is old method that is saturated. there are many of ppl with programs scanning for expired domains
Obviously, this is kind of a dumb idea... but I tried to create it in the voice of a guy who really, really thinks the MillionDollarHomepage is most important thing in the world. Glad people are enjoying it.
Also hello from Tempe as well! Are you still at GoDaddy? I'm a dev lead over at DriveTime. Always fun to run into folks in AZ here.
It doesn't really work all that well (most of the domains are still actually registered but don't resolve), but it's clever!
The real question is, will the pixels be reloaded differently if you buy a domain and place a different image there.
Judging from a pastebin linked from a neighboring comment however, most domains are quite specific enough that pixels can be left as is (you can't really use "clinicalimaging.net" for something other than, well, clinical imaging). In the other words you are really buying a domain and its historical legacy including pixels.
<marquee>
Both features were used <blink>heavily</blink> at the time.
</marquee>At least I hope it's an Easter egg, and not left in to provide legacy support ;)
https://github.com/om3n07/MillionDollarHomepageDomainTravers...
A billion dollar homepage by the same founder [1]
[1] https://calm.com
There was this article about the MDH where he outlined the exact PR strategy including hiring one of the best PR consultant at the time (sadly I can't find it because I'm on a phone). Point being, the site wasn't an accidental success like a lot of people think it was.
Sure it wasn't 100% guaranteed to be successful as nothing is, but the launch and PR was done like an engineering project. No wonder he is doing it over and over.
Regardless of the worth of incoming hits from tmdhp, I think this pixel pirate club is a funny idea and a blast into the past!
Here is a list of all the domains that are available (as of when this post had 2 comments): https://pastebin.com/SXWzgxnH
So, it is not just checking DNS resolution.
Lots of links to random forum posts, where the images are just broken.
Also keep in mind that many of these domains might not have SEO value, but they may actually have email value (they're still getting emails) which can be monetized.
I didn’t know icons could be used in a url.
This site is using a bit of clientside JS [1] to automatically redirect the user from "xn--h4haaaa.ws" to "pixelpirate.club" and vice versa, depending on if your browser supports "Emoji domains" [2].
I nearly got when when I first saw them, and there was more availability, but couldn't think of any use for one so held off. I really should have logged all of the domains, and seen if anyone puts anything interesting up on them.