The new Top Level domains have now well and truly entered the Domainer aftermarket, but Majestic has uncovered some disturbing echos of past practices starting to emerge with the new TLDs.
We thought it would be interesting to see if any of the new TLDs had made it into the Majestic Million list (The list is free to access, but requires you to be a registered Majestic user). What we found was evidence of new networks starting to take shape.
We’ve noticed a trend with lots of the new names.
1. Looks Like .XYZ Domains is Contaminated Already
The .XYZ domains appear to be the lowest cost of entry for people looking to buy domains, so it is perhaps not surprising that they seem to be getting snapped up and burnt way faster than any of the others. There are (as at the time of writing) 1,579 .XYZ domains in the top million, and a quick eyeball suggests that 99% of those are junk. Take this one, for example:
In the chart above, you may notice it says “No links discovered in the last 5 years.” This is referring to data in the Historic index… but this domain is so new, it isn’t yet IN the Historic index. So the data we have is currently all from the Fresh index.
With links from 1,100 other referring domains, including 320 Educations and 270 Governmental back-links you might think it’s worth something right? Look at the Trust Flow score here:
And if you understand our Link Profile charts, the story of a site going south becomes even more transparent:
Just in case anyone feels we have somehow “outed” this guy, have a look at the posts on the forum. There’s nobody real there at all, just Levitra and Viagra links.
Observation 2: .cheap Domains are as You Might Expect
Although there are only 34 .CHEAP domains in the top 1 million so far, it is already apparent that people are hoarding domains – primarily parked for future plans that will probably never materialize:
Observation 3: Patterns are Emerging
For a lot of these domains, the only appearance in the million is in the format mydomain.domain, alldomain.domain, or domain.domain
If you examine all instances owhere a TLD is also in the domain name for the new TLDs, the vast majority of them all seem to be from the same link farm.
How Polluted is the Majestic Million?
So far, we counted 2,243 new TLDs in the Majestic Million. Assuming 90% of these are either Spam or Holding pages, this still only represents 2 in every 1,000 domains in the Majestic Million. So less that 0.05%. On top of that, even the strongest .xyz domain is in at 41,560 – so way down the list. That’s Propecia.xyz by the way, for any paranoid Baldies out there. So the list is far from polluted. However, it does demonstrate once again just how helpful it is to understand the dynamics and workings of both Trust Flow and it’s partner metric Citation Flow. If Citation Flow gets out of hand, then Trust Flow is no help to your site at all.
What are the Takeaways here?
Perhaps in 2015 we will take another shot at the Majestic Million list and integrate Trust Flow into its algorithm. But for now, be aware that if you are buying any of the new TLDs, others are buying them faster and spamming them quicker than you will ever keep up with. That’s not to say don’t buy… but I would not buy second hand in the aftermarket without a VERY good look at the backlink history.
- How Important will Backlinks be in 2023? - February 20, 2023
- What is in a Link? - October 25, 2022
- An Interview with… Ash Nallawalla - August 23, 2022
Domainers? surely you spammers and cybersquatters?
As far as I’m aware domainers are a legitimate part of domain name secondary market.
December 8, 2014 at 5:51 pmI would agree with Marks comment. It is not domainers that is the problem here, it is the spammers that snap up cheap domains for churn and burn campaigns.
December 9, 2014 at 9:18 amRe: point 1. It is "somewhat" possible the site has been caught up by a novice webmaster who installed a forum, went back to his other job, spammers found it and have been building the links…
December 9, 2014 at 11:46 amNone of this is surprising. It’s sad how inelegant many of these spammers are.
December 9, 2014 at 12:32 pmThanks for the comments
I don’t paint all Domainers with the same brush, Mark and Nick – I know where a big chunk of Majestic’s customers come from! 🙂
But a Cybersquatter is simply low form of domaining, just like link spammers is a low form of SEO (and I am an SEO by background, with more than one domain myself). I think it is worth showing the data as we see it. To Stephen’s point – that’s very possible. I was considering publishing the whole list – and from there there point stands… The vast majority of these domains are not being bought with the intention of over developing real sites of brands.
December 9, 2014 at 1:16 pm"Cybersquatter" has to do with buying a domain name that contains a trademark and the primary reason for buying the domain is to capitalize on the trademark. See the "Anti-Cybersquatter protection Act." Not sure what you are getting at with this article. It is well known that a big domainer bought a bunch of the "xyz" domains for speculation and many other domainers have ridiculed him given all the tld’s that are being released. Most of the new TLD’s are being run by domainers. "Donuts" is running several of them and that company name stands for "Domain Nuts" so it could be said that entire tld’s are being warehoused.
December 12, 2014 at 11:31 pm