Domain Investing Secrets from an SEO OG

I started doing websites for a while as an agency thing doing for clients but discovered only within one year that plans are so annoying you're one of the few companies in FCO that have got VC funding we have huge domain database uh we're going to offer service reverse quiz reverse DNS Security Services stuff like this investor were like we don't understand [ __ ] about this what makes a really good domain name traffic has been for some part

of our journey about 50% of Revenue do you know what has changed in the domain industry for the last for 20 years not a whole lot of [Music] things hey guys and welcome back to the channel and welcome back to another episode where I'll be interviewing SEO entrepreneurs and experts from around the world in today's episode we've got an OG in the SEO scene he currently employs over 120 people he runs one of Bulgaria's biggest startups

he has an awesome domain name wink wink and he has recently been selling pbns and links please welcome to the channel Colin kov ladies and gentlemen K yeah close I know yeah thanks for giving me I appreciate you coming on and sorry if I butchered your name there slightly I I tried to uh tried to preempt it there but it it totally butchered it when it came out um do you want to give people a bit

of a background into who you are and how you got started in Su and domaining yeah it was uh 2008 uh I started doing websites for a while as an agency thing doing for clients but uh discovered only within one year that clients are so annoying so I was searching for ways that uh I can I can learn more for for Less effort Theo was really easy back then 20089 so yeah I work with clients and

some content projects in Bulgarian and then uh started hiring people scaling and in uh 201 14 I think 134 I had the same experience you had I got personally targeted by Google got every everything I own the index like pbn normal website everything like everything that was on my quiz was gone damn yeah it seems to be a more common theme now that more people are Google's got an enemy as a hit list they're going after

and they definitely seem to be fulfilling it so you're one of the few companies in FCO that have got VC funding I know there's a few others like you have like market news out of Romania and you got white press out of Poland and things but how did you go about acquiring that investment in the first place when I got banned by Google uh I started for searching for ways to get more cheaper and better domains

for the pbn because I had more than a thousand pbn the index so I started building uh databases of all domains that exist so we can uh so I could um monitor expired domains catch them this was easy back then and there were less public list so especially in the cctlds uh the need to have a database was was very important and was a huge competitive Advantage uh that when my co-founder method joined the team he's

a very good developer and uh yeah so we built this database started to monitor domains but uh we were going to offer some uh Enterprise service like domain tools because we have the second largest domain database and then we uh we went to to a it's a VC fund but it's more like seed preed because it was a very small amount of money only 50 50,000 EUR but still for us it seemed like a ton because

in Bulgaria everything is cheap so and we were a very small team and we went to the investors and we pitched three times for first two first two times they were just training pitches and uh we were like okay we have huge domain database uh we're going to offer service reverse who reverse DNS Security Services stuff like this investors were like we don't understand [ __ ] about this so first presentation was seos need domains and we can

find them and catch them and resell them and this is like some Market they were like okay let's at least we see how this leads to to the money you know how you can grow based on something more than dreams so yeah we were a bit surprised but we got uh 50,000 Euro for 12% then a year later we had burn for the money didn't had much progress he figuring what what we are doing but since

uh the money comes from uh from Jer Jeremy the European investment fund so it's not their money and they have some that they have to spend so it's better for them to to double down then give up so they gave us 100,000 more for another 10% and uh the next year we started catching domains in many TS reselling uh finding uh uh buyers actually uh our first uh big uh buyer was uh Jason Jason kpu's M

mat partner I was like I was just starting to learn who is who it was I think 2016 and got an order for 300 or something and uh I was chatting with this Jason guy on Skype didn't know who he was and and then I sent an invoice and says uh the inv said M digity I was like just made a big break 100% yeah J Jason's crazy when it comes to operational management and scaling and

things and stuff I think he I think he's probably the next person actually you've just kind of given me an insight there into who I should probably invite next on the show so I'll definitely try and get Jason involved um when all all the way back then were they just mostly using that for pbn domains and come of the whole digity links yeah I'm not sure if it went into digity links because there was cctlds uh

dity links was maybe maybe some side projects but there yeah everything went into pbn yeah I thought so okay cool so apart from obviously the the cost being very affordable what makes a really good domain name according to Ken uh it can be three things or a combination good name links and traffic some domains don't have uh don't have links but have traffic and it doesn't come from organic like we all used to but it's coming

from director referral mostly pirate streaming this this have played a big role in our in our success because um when we catch when we invest into catching infrastructure in scripts and developers and accreditations we need to to catch uh all of the good domains to to make the return on investments and SEO domains is one thing the names are very competitive because all the domainers try to catch them but traffic is a bit in the middle

some domains know traffic well others don't most don't actually so traffic has been for some parts of our journey about 50% of Revenue which is quite uh unex it played an unexpectedly big part SEO domains uh are now the the biggest part then comes traffic and then comes names wow okay that makes it it makes a lot of sense actually I do know a lot of domain sellers that always say look if you're holding domain names

put a landing page on it and get some Revenue generating off of it right if you're just going to hold on to domain names and not let them make you money then you're wasting money right um so in terms of uh domain name relevancy obviously in English it matters quite a lot and Google's gotten better at uh understanding NLP and all these ml algorithms and things kind of contextually under understanding semantic relevancy um does relevancy match

at domain level as much outside of English I think in some other languages that Google will understand well maybe top 10 other languages it will have some significance but the more weird language is and especially if in some weird alphabet like Thai or Japanese or Chinese then Google won't understand the thing I think about relevancy um because uh it's quite hard it's another word to to crack it there I think for the for the algorithms and

the Machine learning and everything yeah 100% it's a lot of like correlation based stuff rather than actually being semantically relevant and stuff um so do when a domain when domains drop and and kind of get reset in terms of their age does that affect their efficacy in Google obviously over time we've had this massive debate between expire domains versus age domains in my I have a very clear opinion on this um do does does domain age

and that kind of expiration affects the efficacy in Google I think it depends on how big the pools are of uh of uh the expired ones and the non- drop ones and how are they used and I don't think it's that something uh something Google put there manually but rather the machine learning learn to use the quiz data in some ways that probably the the Google Engineers didn't even think it it could be useful because not

only the drop date I know case studies that affected but also if the domain was name right where the drop catch domains go the drop once it it was a bad signal According to some people and this is definitely not something I think a Google engineer will put in the algorithm like literally look for this regist so I think the machine learning was just finding uh new data points but I think that maybe for some time

there was a lot of usage of drop domains for something like like nowadays for example Indonesian uh I gaming Casino guys they go through go auctions and take hundreds of domains per day and they all turn to Turn and Burn Indonesian money site so if something that large scale is going on is going to uh put like a bump in the grph and the distributions and then maybe the algorithm will do some countermeasure but if it's

uh done in moderation uh I don't think that it will play an important role I think if there was any role it will get smaller over time as more and more normal domains of normal people drop and get used because there's no good domains available so I don't think that Google will have a different algorithm for a domain with five links that drops naturally and get re-registered naturally and the 500 link domain that drops and gets

re-registered by SEO for money site so I think it's all about the the pool size the distributions uh there's definitely something there uh the ccts that we do they uh they don't have a easy creation date in who or it's harder for Google to pull so I think they're completely safe uh so if you get like a d domain and use it in Germany you definitely say that it's going to be treated as a non- drop

domain uh but for the Doom maybe some effect still not sure yeah so so a lot of domainers have said that they prefer to rely on Google's cast than Google then Google's who is right in terms of their ability to kind of look into the site's history do you put much into Google uh looking at its old cach Pages at the in terms of its updated variations in terms of you know if you have got a

domain and it had a website on it a year ago and you put a pbn on it is that going to be effective because Google's cash still has that site from a year ago in the cash what I know is that for a very big money site especially this ambitious AI project uh like the con houseal and stuff it's very important if you want to index a lot of pages to have uh the domain that previously

had a lot of pages index it may no longer have them in the index maybe only uh had 100,000 Pages now it may have 100 but it very quick to go for uh to 100,000 again because it somehow has the the big craw budget still uh still there so this is something that definitely is important if you're uh doing something big but I think for pbn or 301s it's it's irrelevant whether whether the domain was dropped

or has something index it's only for money sites where it's more relevant the transition from what was there before to what is there now and so how do you think domains are going to be affected by AI right so some people think that AI is going to remove the TLD system from the world and that we're going to have some weird scraping system which I don't see coming to fruition at all I still think that you're

going to need the TLD system even in terms of like a prioritization system where that the MLS and Argos can kind of prioritize source domains how do you think AI is going to affect domaining going forward uh I'm going to answer with a question do you know what has changed in the domain industry for the last 20 years not a whole lot of things nothing like nothing at all is the most stable thing in the internet

actually uh domains have been registered transferred drop and all of this is uh standardized uh and yeah nothing is really changing some country may do some small changes with their TLD but uh the system is uh built to be uh to perform in the only way that it can possibly exist and perform big changes are impossible because there are so many like stacked players there as a registry and the regist there are thousands of Icon register

if you make a change for the Doom 4,000 different independent company must apply the change and some of them have resellers so the resellers to have to implement the change it's just impossible so um also ion the the organization that runs domains is a it's like a big politically involved uh NGO and it's a multi-stakeholder model this means that uh private companies have a say and uh small businesses have a say and the government has a

say and like NSA and FBI have has a say so nothing gets done there because everyone has a say like everyone can be to everything and just put everything into like Philly busty to to to end this discussion so it's it's the most one of the most I think slow moving organizations on the planet so the system is slow moving and the organization behind it is slow moving so it's just nothing is happening and I don't

think that AI has anything to do with the doain Swit at the real estate of of the internet yeah it's great news for you when things don't move so fast right because it means certainly we don't want anything to happen with domains exactly and now for a quick message from sponsor search intelligence if you're looking for digital PR campaigns what you're about to see should impress you high tier backlinks in Publications such as Daily Post MSN

buring a mail and many more let me show you how we've done it the campaign was pretty simple we looked at the number of Instagram followers for each contestant in the dancing on ice show that aired in January we sorted the contestants by the most popular ones now we've had the most influential dancing on ice contestant then we've also used an Instagram earnings calculator to calculate how much every contestant could make from one post on Instagram

based on the number of their followers and engagement rate then we put these findings in a nice press release and an email and we found the relevant journalist with a tool called Rox Hill where we looked at journalists who covered the show in the past 30 days and sent the findings and the press relas to these journalist and then the links started Landing like this and this and this and many more I hope this inspires and

shows you that you can build links with simple and basic campaigns more recently you've been selling uh links and pbns have you seen there been more of an efficacy and more Effectiveness around those around links and around pbns since AI is going to come into Google Subs uh yeah I I I don't think there there's going to be any difference the only difference is will be in terms of like economy and money flows because now content

is cheaper so you can spend more on links more on domains this is I think a good thing for us because we don't do anything with consent so a larger portion of budget will go to to our company uh it's hard to see this play uh in reality because everyone is so badly hurt by by this helpful content update that uh like we don't have any website so we don't feel the pain directly but people are

just licking their am and they don't come and byy domains and Link so uh indirectly it's hitting up too um so so I I think that uh our back links uh generally work they are mostly homepage link so what we have is a high quality BBN which means website restored from the archive with every page they possibly got on the archive from every day so 100 to thousands of pages per website um unfortunately Google doesn't reward

this website with a lot of organic traffic because their own page is terrible no keyword optimization like no decent titles headings they're not mob friendly yeah they're just very very old so websites from 15 years ago um I think the biggest problem is that they're not mobile friendly and that uh whoever person get there was like oh I went into a time machine and just closes the website so uh so the all the like user metrics

will probably also be terrible and yeah Google with some exceptions Google won't rank you know they index perfectly the links give value but they're not ranked and and I think this also dis the myth that you need to uh to have a website with traffic for the link to to move the needle because uh our websites most of them don't have any traffic but uh all of the buyers are super happy so definitely the links work

yeah 100% we build links off of you know d9s and stuff all the time off of Niche edits and those pages don't have traffic but the site has 100 million visitors right and those links work significantly better than you know dr10 that maybe that page itself has got 10,000 visits a month from Google but the dr90 is so much more effective that it's it's piling on significantly more even with the traffic here right um so in

terms of building these pbns because you've got such a large pbn Network how do you go about diversifying it um you must build a lot of different hosting Solutions a lot of different themes cms's what you said you rebuild a lot of stuff there so that probably removes a lot of the leg work around rebuilding websites and stuff um but how do you go about especially diversifying those pbns when you're building uh so uh there's uh

several points to diversifying uh if you use WordPress to making classical pbn you need different WordPress themes and not having the same plugins Etc on the same website we don't use WordPress we uh restore with arival to static HTML uh this makes uh placing the links later a little bit more annoying but then you can use uh uh cheaper hosting or your own server uh you can just uh put qual Clare different qual Clare accounts you

can make as many of them as you want they're free uh on top and you can have uh basically just a few servers or a few shared costing and a lot of qual play I think qual play now cost it cost such a big portion of the internet that it's safe to have 80% qual player maybe 20% something else so just leaving the the hosting DNS um The Whiz is now gone after gdpr so that's not

a concern even keeping the domain on the same register if there are not like all thousands of domains in the same register in this case I would prefer using like five or 10 registers but if you have 50 domains on the same register I think it doesn't matter uh Google uses for qu is the API of domain tools which which doesn't really have uh the this this function to pull all all of the domains on the

same register with the same easy query as pulling all of the domains on the same quiz I don't think that's a big concern so you always register your pbn domains on a private person real person because you might get checked with sending uh real person real address because you might get ask ID card and utility bill uh but uh and then it will always be private if it's a company it depends on the register some regar

say how it's the company so gdpr doesn't matter so they will show the the owner and once the owner is out it's a problem because Google can see this via the domain TOS API uh all of the domains on the same company reverse ownership so then then you in danger uh but yeah different uh different website different who different name servers and I think you are safe even if the IP the IPS below the the cloud

flare are more or less groups like not not completely the same but not completely different I think it's fine I told also think that the SEO hosting business is is is is just selling snake because having all of your websites on on different IP is not how the most of the internet works most of the the websites are on shared hosting website Builders they are on the same IPS I don't know if it's still the same

but when I last checked all of the websites on Shopify were on one IP like millions of websites so so yeah the internet is not really natural to to have everything on a SE on a second I so this servers is actually people selling you a fingerprint I don't think that it will ever become a problem but just saying that it's not something worth paying for at all yeah 100% so save your money basically is what

you're saying and spend your time Elsewhere on on things that actually matter more more importantly so I really appreciate you coming on is there anywhere where people can find you online uh well they they can find the domains and Links at SEO domains and uh they can just search my name my name is unique there I'm the only person in the world with this name so I'm super easily find just search Kink kak on Facebook we

also have a nice Facebook group with the new SEO group with some nice discussions but yeah I'm on I'm mostly on Facebook uh and uh I'm very easily contactable there so yeah if you have any questions or need any help with domains you also know people in most of the domain register so we have domains in gr niches shut down for abuse that's my chance to really help you in a meaningful way like contact some people

I know and maybe get the domains unblocked it's a big big problem in some grain ises I cannot promise for every register because I don't know people everywhere and of course the people I know may refuse to help but still uh it's possible to help in these cases wow okay so yeah you're the first point of call whenever I hear somebody getting their domain blacklisted um and also I think we share the same thing in commonw

it helps a lot in SEO when you have a unique name and nobody else on the planet has your name right I have definitely a good thing yeah 100% um I appreciate you coming on I'll put a link in the description to all of the stuff that you mentioned and your I'll link to your Twitter and Linkedin and stuff as well I appreciate you coming in once more I'll see you guys in next episode Peace thanks

for caring me bye