E181: Kalin Karakehayov

Richard Hill [00:00:04]:
Hi there. I'm Richard Hill, the host of eCom@One, and welcome to episode 181. Now in this episode, I speak with Kalin Karakehayov, Founder of SEO dot domains. Now I'm sure we've all bought a few domains over the years, but Kalin has literally bought and traded thousands of domains over the last 10 years as the founder of SEO dot domains. Now Caelin and I talk best ways to assess the quality of a domain and its value, ways to negotiate a domain deal so it works for both parties, and then we dive into link building for eCom store owners. And it breaks down 2 strategies that I've never heard before, which is quite rare after a 100 and 80 odd episodes. Very actionable insights. If you enjoy this episode, hit the subscribe or follow button wherever you are listening to this podcast.

Richard Hill [00:00:46]:
You're always the first to know when a new episode is released. Now let's head over to this fantastic episode. How are you doing, Calin? Always good. Hi. Good. Good. Good. Well, thanks for coming on the show.

Richard Hill [00:01:01]:
We look forward to, jumping into a few topics that I think, most people that have sold or bought anything alive to do with ecommerce and and have had some experience with what you specialize in. So I think how it will really resonate with our listeners and the owners of ecommerce stores. So but before we get into it, I think it'd be great if you could just introduce yourself and yourself, to our listeners and how you got into the world of domains and, Internet marketing.

Kalin Karakehayov [00:01:30]:
I'm Calin from Bulgaria. I'm in the SEO industry for about 16 years. In the beginning, I was doing small projects, agency stuff, content sites in Bulgarian. But then I figured out that it's very good to scale up. So I started doing PBN, selling links, then I ran into some trouble with Google about 10 years ago. I got my PBN index. It was quite a new thing back then before Google wasn't really caring about this. So I got candid one of the first, big penalties in the world for PBNs.

Kalin Karakehayov [00:02:05]:
So And then, we had to replenish, so I started researching domains. Domains were easier to get back then, especially in country domain CCTLDs. Yeah. So gradually, it's morphed into a domain company. We started as a startup, got some small seed investment, and we just got more and more domains over the over the way. And now we are the largest provider of SEO value domains, in the world. We have about 200,000 domains in total and more than half our domains with history and links. Wow.

Richard Hill [00:02:41]:
That's a lot of domains, Kellen. 200,000.

Kalin Karakehayov [00:02:44]:
Yes. It is.

Richard Hill [00:02:46]:
Yeah. I guess that will blow most of our listeners' minds, but, you know, that's obviously your business. That's the business you're in. You are buying and selling and trading and and establishing and and and domain. So there's a lot of different things, to to dive into, but, you know, I I'm getting flashbacks of my sort of, you know, first domain names I bought probably maybe 20 years ago, I think. It's somewhere there. And and then you buy one more, then you buy one more. Next thing you know, you got 50, 60, 70.

Richard Hill [00:03:12]:
What you know, I think there's probably, like, 80 or 90 debates at one point. I don't I don't have that many now at all. But, it's difficult to then, let them go, because it this is that you end up re renewing renewing. You think, one day, I will reuse this domain. One day, I'll use this domain. Then maybe you forget to to renew it because your credit card expires or something happens with the the way you've set up the, the domain registry. And then companies like you guys buy a lot of the expired domain names, I guess. Is that is that a big part of what you do?

Kalin Karakehayov [00:03:45]:
Yes. We we don't register domains that are already available, only, expired once. We are drop catching them, bidding sometimes at auction, but trying to drop it because it's more cost effective on a larger scale. We sent about, maybe between, 30 and 15,000,000 queries per day trying to register domains. Wow. Via hundreds of APIs, hundreds of servers around the world trying to, to catch domains. Like, if you're trying to catch a domain in Mexico, you need a server in Mexico very close to the to the registry and all of that. So it's like speed trading Yep.

Kalin Karakehayov [00:04:28]:
Aiming for milliseconds, sometimes even microseconds. Wow. And and and doing it at, at a 100 places at once. So it's quite, technically challenging, but, of course, sometimes the competition is not that big. They are low hanging fruit. Sometimes it will be tough.

Richard Hill [00:04:46]:
So for the listeners then, I'll just ex I'll explain. So domains expire, and Caelin's company has got various tech around the world that is as they expire. I think this is right. As they expire, you're literally buying, buy, buy, buy, buy, or trying to buy. And, obviously, some people beat you to it. And and some countries are more more more established, and there's more players that are focusing on some countries like the obvious, you know, countries. Then in other countries, it's a lot easier, I guess, and and you've got different tech in different countries. But literally, we'd say 100 of thou was it 100 of thousands a day that you're trying? No.

Richard Hill [00:05:21]:
Tens of thousands a day?

Kalin Karakehayov [00:05:23]:
Every day about 200,000 domains expire, but most of them are trash. I think we try for about 2,000 or something. No. Less more like 1,000 are the ones. They are more available ones, but there are some that we don't have the capacity to evaluate. So maybe about 5 to 10000 are available ones, but, our capacity to evaluate is limited because there are so many different markets and languages and domain types. Yeah. So I think we try for about a few 100 to catch them, and we catch about a 100, a 150 a day.

Richard Hill [00:05:59]:
Yeah. So about 100 a day. So if you've ever had a domain and forgot to renew it, there's a good chance that Caelin has actually bought it.

Kalin Karakehayov [00:06:08]:
Yeah. It is. It's a decent chance.

Richard Hill [00:06:12]:
So, I find it really fascinating because I think most people listening that are in this space, you know, which is our our listeners, you know, will have bought domains, you know, and, you know, domains obviously can be, what, a dollar, I think is probably, you know, from a dollar to, you know, an insane amount of money depending on the, you know, depending on the domain name. But would you be able to share maybe the best deal that you've ever done on a domain name?

Kalin Karakehayov [00:06:37]:
The best deals are usually traffic domain. So sometimes you buy a domain and it has a lot of traffic. You park it, people click on the ads, and it brings income for 1, 2, 3 years before the traffic dies out. So we have earned 6 figures, from traffic, I think, 3 times, for a domain that we invested, like, 2 figures in, like, $30 and we get a 150 k back. So I don't think that and this is doesn't require any effort to just, scale and block. So it's, yeah. These are the best deals. But once we bought the domain for 20 k and we sold it for a 150 k, it was an SEO domain.

Kalin Karakehayov [00:07:18]:
Some Yeah. Something about templates, d r 90. So, huge huge power. Yeah. But it depends. Sometimes you you pay a lot of money to buy a domain, then no one wants it. It's it's a numbers game. Not everything can sell, of course.

Richard Hill [00:07:34]:
Yeah. That's it. If you're buying a 100 a day ish or you're trying to buy a 100 a day, obviously, the fees, the costs of all of how of, registering, reregistering all those, Complete numbers game, isn't it? Complete numbers day. I remember sorry. Go on, Caitlin.

Kalin Karakehayov [00:07:49]:
Yeah. The the renewal bill for our domain is more than $1,000,000 a year. So this is just the renewals. So that's it it it takes capital to get into this business at scale. Yeah. So you

Richard Hill [00:08:02]:
need a a good, a good more than a handful of good domains to to get your money back. So I think yeah. I remember, in the UK well, it would be worldwide, I think, but in the UK probably 10 years ago, Google Google Local. I think it's called Google Local now, isn't it? Google Maps, Google Local. Sorry. No. It used to be called Google Local. Then they changed

Kalin Karakehayov [00:08:24]:
my business or something.

Richard Hill [00:08:25]:
Sorry. Yeah. Goog it was sorry. It was called Google Local, then they then they changed it to Google Places about 10 years ago. I don't know if you remember Google Places. But now, yeah, it's Google My Business, GMBs and, but the the dotcouk, they Google hadn't bought the dotcoukGoogleplaces, so I bought the domain name, google.places. The googleplaces.couk and, put a website on it. And, obviously, anybody typed in Google Places.

Richard Hill [00:08:52]:
We were, like, number 1 over Google.

Kalin Karakehayov [00:08:55]:
That's nice.

Richard Hill [00:08:56]:
Yeah. For about this was about 10, maybe 10, 11 years ago, and then I got a cease and desist letter from Google. So, we short version is we took the domain down. We took the website down, and then we just left it there, but we didn't sell it, unfortunately. I don't think we we'd ever really thought to sell it at the time, but that was quite quite some time ago. Yeah. So, when we think of Domains then, what what are some of the ways to assess the quality and the value of a domain? You know, if our listeners are thinking about buying domains or buying a domain, What how do you sort of value a domain?

Kalin Karakehayov [00:09:38]:
We look at 3 different features, the quality of the name, the quality of the the links, the history, and if there is any existing traffic. And I don't mean organic traffic because this will die if you change the website. So if you have just the domain and you have some past organic traffic, it's already dying, unless you restore the old website. But, sometimes there is direct and referral traffic. It's mostly about irons streaming website. So this is part of what we do. It's not so relevant to your audience, but I'm still mentioning because a lot of the domain value is in the traffic. Yeah.

Kalin Karakehayov [00:10:16]:
Sometimes, and the name and the the SEO value, the links are, what is more important if you have, any type of website, eCommerce or other. And the perfect will be a match. Something brandable, short, memorable, easy to to dictate over the phone. Like, if you hear a radio ad, like, you cannot mess it up. That's these are the the usual test. And if it if it has good backlinks, high authority, high trust links from big media, governments, organizations, any any website that Google trust, that's good, of course. It will help your SEO, if it's in the same niche even more. And, of course, it's hard to find eCom combination of an of the niche, the name, the links.

Kalin Karakehayov [00:11:07]:
Yeah. So this this is why marketplace like ours, exist because you can go to like, you can wait, you know, the options and all the expiring fees for months and not find the right one, but maybe we have it already on some of the other marketplaces.

Richard Hill [00:11:21]:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it's quite a few different metrics. And, obviously, ultimately, as a as a buyer, you you'll you'll have you'll have an amount, really, that you wanna pay. But from my experience, quite often, domains you know, I'm not this isn't your business, but when I look at other domains and I look in general quite a lot, they're priced maybe here. And then quite often, there's quite a lot of negotiation is my experience. It's maybe not the same, not everywhere, but ultimately, like

Kalin Karakehayov [00:11:49]:
It's it's very usual for if if you own just good names, the right mathematical strategies to keep the price extremely high and hope for a very committed buyer. And sometimes lower the price or not lower it, but the initial price should be very high. Yeah. And, if you have good names like eCom, 2 2 words, short ones, or whatever, usually, the price you buy and the price, you try to sell, the the buy now price, the the end user price like the domainers call it. Yeah. It's about 20 times different up to 40 times, 50 times, a 100 times. It's not too crazy. So you can buy a domain at an auction for $200, which is in actual reseller price, and then price it at 20,000 Yeah.

Kalin Karakehayov [00:12:36]:
By at the marketplace. It's completely normal. If you're on the buyer side, you should always, like, bargain a lot. Try to negotiate Yeah. Bring the price down.

Richard Hill [00:12:46]:
Yeah. That's, yeah. There's quite a few things there. So, obviously, we've gotta we gotta check the links. Looking at the link quality is is, obviously really important one. Like I say, a lot of good links, obviously, defining what is a good link and, I mean, understanding about the brand piece. Traffic, bit more tricky because a lot of it's gonna disappear. So you're looking at referral and direct more so, not not organic because obviously when the site changes.

Richard Hill [00:13:10]:
But so I've actually seen a domain name that I want to buy, and it is $30,000.

Kalin Karakehayov [00:13:17]:
Yeah. That's that's common. Yep. So I I am gonna

Richard Hill [00:13:21]:
put an offer in, but I'll probably talk to you off camera on that, on that, on that particular domain name. But we're we're launching a new side to the business, which I think when your episode goes live will be launched. And we have the dot io and we have the dot, you know, various other extensions, but we don't have the eCom, and the eCom is available. So if it was 30 k, we it's advertised for 30 k at the moment. So your advice would be to go in at obviously, there's a lot of variables that are unknown, but your advice will be to make an, like a make a cheeky offer to start with maybe? Yes.

Kalin Karakehayov [00:13:59]:
So the most important thing is to, not show that you're that you really need this domain. Otherwise, the the price will stay 30 k. Yeah. Just through some Gmail that cannot be connected to your .io and everything. Yeah. Contact and, like, start with an offer that's high enough to show that you're serious, Something like, a1000 or something. Yeah. Otherwise, you might just get, like, ignored, blocked, or whatever.

Kalin Karakehayov [00:14:32]:
Yeah. But but start very low and always say that you have other options and, like, really and don't respond really fast. Try to just take it easy in the in the negotiation. And, sir, the the the one rule about the the negotiation is that the site that gets afraid loses in the end. And and the moment you get afraid, the other site can smell it. So if you're like Yeah. If you are afraid that you might miss the domain, the other side can smell it and just keep the the price up. Well but also the it will be quite a good deal probably regardless of the end price for the domain owner because they invested not a lot and they will get a lot more than the reseller price.

Kalin Karakehayov [00:15:20]:
So if you say I I have other options and stuff like this, you may instill fear in the other side that they would Yeah. Lose the Yeah. What they can already earn if you buy something else. So yeah.

Richard Hill [00:15:32]:
It's Yeah.

Kalin Karakehayov [00:15:33]:
It's like

Richard Hill [00:15:33]:
a traditional traditional negotiation, but there is there is potentially so much margin there, maybe, not always, but, obviously, if somebody's paid a 100, $200 for a domain name and they're putting out a $30 or $20, the margin is crazy, isn't it? Yes. But it but it might not be, they might have paid a few grand. So but when yeah. When I bought, eCom eCom name, that was I I bought that as a you know, from a broker, which is my main brand. And I and I I made a mistake really because when I I showed interest in it and we agreed a price, and I think it was, like, $3 we agreed, something like that. Maybe 2 and a half, 3,000 about 5 and a half years ago. $3. And then I thought about it quite a while, and I didn't go back to him for quite a while.

Richard Hill [00:16:22]:
I left it for probably, like, 6, 8 weeks. And then I went back to him and said, right. Yeah. I'll have it. But he then said, oh, no. I want 5 gram for it now. Yeah. My mistake.

Richard Hill [00:16:33]:
I should've just obviously been quick, not showed too much interest. Maybe I did bit bit too much interest in it. So I I went to buy it and he, I think, he charged me like another 1500 or $2,000 more than what we'd actually agreed, like, 6 weeks before. And I tried to negotiate it back. He's like, no. I'm not doing it. I'm not doing it. And I probably should have said I'm gonna walk away, and then he may have come back.

Richard Hill [00:16:55]:
But

Kalin Karakehayov [00:16:57]:
No. You never know. Yeah.

Richard Hill [00:16:59]:
Yeah. There's fun and games. Yeah. I quite I quite enjoy that. But yeah. So, obviously, you've seen a lot of different, extensions come and go, and then, obviously, they're they're coming out all the time, it seems. You know, I was looking at, some of the dot PR extensions recently, and, you know, a lot of different firms now seem to be taking on the dot IOs. And, you know, what are what are some of the newer extensions you're seeing that are quite, you know, worth looking at? I mean, I know it's gonna vary depending on on the client, but are there any specific extensions that you'd recommend looking at?

Kalin Karakehayov [00:17:34]:
We like dot.ios. We have several 1,000 dot.ios in our company. Yeah. For the names, like, if anything sound sound start to be, we just buy it. Like, and then we we buy them for, like, $50 and we list them for 5 to 10000 and just hope for the best. It works more or less like the the the return of investment is positive. I like those. I also they are very well recognized.

Kalin Karakehayov [00:18:02]:
Yeah. Yeah. It's a very clean TOD because it's, like, $40 per year. No no spam. No like, everyone trusted dot io. Like, they trusted eCom.

Richard Hill [00:18:13]:
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Kalin Karakehayov [00:18:29]:
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Kalin Karakehayov [00:19:22]:
They're run by a private company. And they can set any prices they want. The eCom price is, capped by decisions of congress. So Oh, right. Okay. So VeriSign managed to to lift the the price cap. So it it was 8, it was, $8 now in a few steps becoming $10 for the dotcom. Yeah.

Kalin Karakehayov [00:19:45]:
But still, it's it's tiny. Well, it's if you have our amount of domains, it's not so tiny, but for any, for any usual user, it's tiny.

Richard Hill [00:19:54]:
For a handful. Yeah. So dotios. So any others?

Kalin Karakehayov [00:19:58]:
Dotai is a very nice TLD. I think you if you kept something, doing anything with AI, it's very nice to see the dotai. But it it's expensive and there's a single person managing the the TLD because it's Anguilla Island. So I I think that there's some chance of a technical failure at some point. But it's a single person who does everything like billing, support, tech, everything. Oh. For for a very, like, big

Richard Hill [00:20:28]:
and growing COD. Running wow. That's, that's potentially a big big opportunity, but a little bit of a risk at the same time if that person has some challenges, problems. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah. I never even knew I didn't know a a I a dot ai was an option.

Kalin Karakehayov [00:20:44]:
Yeah. That's gonna be popular. Very pop popular now and, good names in dotai now cost, as much as good names in dotio. So the the aftermarket for dotai is crazy at the moment. But, there's still not so many active websites because, all of the domains go for the aftermarket. There's no block catching there, just options. But this is the the the latest trends, is, is dotai now in the in the domain space. That part of trying to do, dotai jump on the AI type.

Richard Hill [00:21:17]:
Yeah. No. Good. I I yeah. We've got a handful of aiadot ios, but not AIs. Yeah. That's, that's good. So, we'll move on from domains in a minute, but I'm just trying to think.

Richard Hill [00:21:30]:
Now from an SEO perspective, you know, I know going back maybe 10 years ago, you'd buy the eCom, you know, the the keyword keyword.com. You know? And then you you could put some potentially quite simple content on a page that it would rank, you know, back in the days, back in the good old days. It's not quite that easy now, but is is there any sort of advantages of having or what advantages are there of having sort of the eCom or the country domains, that you, are trying to sell or generate leads in? Is there any advantages now?

Kalin Karakehayov [00:22:04]:
I think if you have a a really beautiful domain, a eCom, the advantages are not so much in the SEO, but any ads that you Yeah. That you place will be a bit more effective. So, you know, that it will bring more trust. Especially, people see something like a 4 letter eCom or or a keyword or even goodstokeyword.com. They know they now know instinctively that, it's expensive. So you are a big business. You invest in a good domain. All all of this is already in their head.

Kalin Karakehayov [00:22:36]:
So Yeah. It's a more relevant role. Yes. It's about it's about brand. About SEO, I mean, if you have a a big website like eCommerce ranking your homepage for some exact matches, usually not your top priority. You want to rank the the pages that converts the the products. Yeah. Yeah.

Kalin Karakehayov [00:22:57]:
So, not such of a big impact on SEO. If you care about an exact match domain but you're trying to rank some subpage, it doesn't really matter that much.

Richard Hill [00:23:07]:
No. No. No. I thought I yeah. That was pretty much what I thought, but I thought I'd hear it from the expert. So let's move on to link building. So link building in ecommerce, you know, I think it's, quite a niche more of a niche within the the link building community. Obviously, trying to get links from quality sites and building, you know, a a strong ecommerce site.

Richard Hill [00:23:33]:
You've got a you've got a on an eCom store, you've got this, obviously, home page like any website, but then you've got these categories, subcategories. You've got a few brochure pages, but ultimately you've got a lot of categories, subcategory, and then lots and lots of sub products. Sorry. Product pages. So, you know, what are some of the, things you would recommend to ecommerce stores trying to build links to those pages?

Kalin Karakehayov [00:23:58]:
Well, first of all, identify, what products are ranking, converting, and selling and target those. Yep. Don't just do, like, blanket links. Not just in eCommerce SEO, but in any SEO, I would recommend only linking to pages that already rank somewhere. Like, maybe top 100, but somewhere. Because if it's not anywhere, Google doesn't like the the consent or the the match between the the consent in the website and the user intent. There's something is off. Like, if you're if you're not in top 100 and you start linking it, may not appear at all.

Kalin Karakehayov [00:24:36]:
But if it's already in the top 100 and you start linking it, it starts going up. So products that already ranked somewhere that sell that can work well, you can you can link those and this is like the the the targeted the pinpoint effort. But also just, link your eCommerce link categories. Not trying to rank it, but just to pass link juice and trust to the website and it will help every single product, a little bit. Yeah. It's definitely worth it. Also, when you have such a large website with so much content, making a 3 zero one redirect to the homepage of a powerful domain with some relevancy can definitely help in getting more juice to these products that are 3, 4, 5 clicks away from the from the homepage and desperately need some juice, so that Google knows that these pages are worth something. Yep.

Kalin Karakehayov [00:25:33]:
Yeah. And yeah. So, like, heavy links to the homepage, redirects to the homepage. Few years ago, we had a a client who get, an e eCommerce. It was, in a few countries, I think, in a few different countries. It it had subcategories by by country. Yeah. And it had Hong Kong as the category.

Kalin Karakehayov [00:26:00]:
Like, it had just /.hk. And and this guy came in to us and just said how many Hong Kong domains you had, like, dot h k, and we said 35. He said, okay. I'm buying them all. You know, like, oh, okay. Okay. So yeah. Here's payment transferring the domains.

Kalin Karakehayov [00:26:20]:
And, like, half an hour later, all 35 domains were redirected to his website slash hk. Like, 35 301 redirects. No preparation, like, super, it was a big website, quite established, but it it it was quite, blunt force.

Richard Hill [00:26:38]:
Wow. That sounds so accurate.

Kalin Karakehayov [00:26:40]:
Oh, this this guy is gonna just kill his website. But but no. Actually, it worked quite well. Mhmm. It it was a few years ago, so maybe things have changed. But sometimes, like, even the most stupid and prepared blunt effort leads to a lot of, good result. Yeah. And, and it's very rare that the redirect can hurt the website because then it will start just start making redirect to the competition.

Richard Hill [00:27:08]:
Yeah.

Kalin Karakehayov [00:27:09]:
So, redirects are really although they hit and miss, it may help. It may not help. Really a good option still in many cases in terms of, link building when you want to really pass a lot of juice. Because if if you have one page and you're trying to rank it, and you make a big redirecting, you're messing up your anchor text distribution and everything because the redirect comes with, hundreds of new anchors that have nothing to do with your with your content. It may have niche relevance, but it's not gonna be the same thing. Like, it's it's gonna be a huge coincidence, huge win if you can find something with exactly the same, like, anchors and and keywords. It's very rarely the case. So it's gonna be relevant but not not that much.

Kalin Karakehayov [00:27:51]:
But if you can make a a a redirect and pass the juice to other pages where the anchors no longer matter. Like, if you can redirect to the home page, then it's helping. And also another another thing that I think will be very good good to use for, for link building for eCommerce is, links from feeds. I can make an RSS feeds with all the new, products in your eCommerce. Also maybe, category based. And then you find them all as relevant website like a blog and import this, feed with the links, as a blog roll like as a as links in the sidebar. And that pushes back. Yeah.

Kalin Karakehayov [00:28:34]:
Yeah. And so every new, products that you that you publish will then have instantly a link. It will get index. Then it will get a small push and the new products are ones that you want to place your focus for because they may still not be on other website. Competition may be less, you know, the moment you publish it is the eComOne where you research and get got the right price and everything. So it's the best moment to rank, like, immediately after you publish the product. So helping the new product and then those things, of course, disappear, but the product is less relevant when they disappear. So Right.

Kalin Karakehayov [00:29:11]:
It's a perfect way to to balance the the the big flow of product with some links that are dynamic. Now I think, we have done this with some Bulgarian e eCommerce. We have sold them such feeds and the results have been decent. I I think this is something you can do. It's very natural because all of the old age blocks had put still kept this, RSS feeds in in the sidebar. It's something that Google was completely okay with back then. It's very natural. Yeah.

Kalin Karakehayov [00:29:39]:
So yeah. Why not why not in instead of buying a link and then changing it and then then the product in 3 or 6 months is no longer actual, you get RSS doing the the work for you.

Richard Hill [00:29:52]:
It's changing as you as you as you add more products to the feed. Yes. Yes. That what's in view on the RSS reader, I guess, is is changing based on the different products that are going on

Kalin Karakehayov [00:30:01]:
the website. Like, 10 last products or 10 last products from this category.

Richard Hill [00:30:06]:
That's brilliant. That is brilliant, Caelin. I'll I've not actually heard that before. I have not heard that before. That's absolute genius and so simple. Yeah.

Kalin Karakehayov [00:30:14]:
Yeah. And not a lot of people are doing it. I don't know why maybe they have forgotten the car that exists because it's such an old old technology that, Yeah. That almost no one uses, but it's very useful.

Richard Hill [00:30:26]:
Yeah. I guess, you know, we used to have our assess feeds. We're here. We used to pull them from, you know, like search engine land and Twitter and to to to monitor the the news and things to do with the industry. But I've never thought of doing it. So you're taking your product feed from your store. Obviously, more than likely, obviously, you've gotta find these stores or these blogs that are willing to do that. That's the trickier bit, of course.

Richard Hill [00:30:52]:
And then

Kalin Karakehayov [00:30:53]:
obviously, quite some your own blogs. They can be your own blogs. Like, you can do this on your PBMs or whatever.

Richard Hill [00:31:00]:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So PBMs then, what's what's what's your advice to eCom stores around PBNs nowadays?

Kalin Karakehayov [00:31:12]:
Well, I I think, PBNs have gotten a bit, less popular in the last, let's say, 10 years. But it's not because they have stopped working or have any problems. It's because that it has become much easier to build other links. The, there are link marketplace, there are guest box market places. There are a lot of guest post resellers. It's very easy now nowadays to buy a guest post. It's very easy to buy niche edits. It's it's very it's very easy to do basically all kinds of link building if you have the money.

Kalin Karakehayov [00:31:43]:
Like, if you don't have the money, it's hard. But if you have the money, you can spend them in various ways. Most of them are, pretty effective, like, get post initiated. But but PBMs, give you another level of, control because if something happens, you need to change your link or in the worst case, if you get some penalty, you need to remove a link. Then PBN give you a level of control where it gets posted would be impossible to have because in the guest post that you bought 4 years ago, no no one's gonna bother change or remove your link. Got my one time payment and it's over. So, so PDN, give you more control and they give you more good use because it's called page links from the PBN. And, actually, PBN links got a got a boost in the last, 2 or 3 years.

Kalin Karakehayov [00:32:34]:
Not because they become better, but because the the creation and maintenance cost fell. Why? 1st, because you can say I content now, so content is cheaper for PBM. Sure. Like, AI content is absolutely good enough for PBNs. Right? You know, trying to rank them just past the the link juice. They don't need to have traffic for the eCommerce links from the PBS to pass the juice. Like, it's it's a complete myth that you need to to have traffic for a link to be worth it. There are many websites of that don't get any traffic like going to a 15 years old research website that is some, subdomain at some university that only 5 scientists in the world visit, and it won't get any traffic.

Kalin Karakehayov [00:33:13]:
But the links are super high authority. Oh, wow. It's science and, and education and stuff like this. So it's definitely if a link has traffic, it may be worth a bit more, but if if it doesn't have traffic, it's still it's still worth what it's worth. So, PBNs, you don't need to rank them. You don't need to really do any big effort on them. Just AI content and good hiding and good domains, of course, so you can pass more link juice. So, and it's getting easier with the PBN because after GDPR, who is disappeared.

Kalin Karakehayov [00:33:45]:
Before one of the most annoying thing was that who is needed to be different because Google was checking checking this and handing band. This is how my PBM was got, banned 10 years ago to the same quiz, on our website. So, you need different quiz, but now quiz is not visible anymore because it's it's hidden. So this this one became easier. You need different hosting, but now you have Cloudflare hosting a very sizable part of the Internet. So you just can do different CloudFlare accounts and the same cost Yeah. Be fine. It's fine.

Richard Hill [00:34:16]:
Yeah.

Kalin Karakehayov [00:34:18]:
And and, content is now, like orders of magnitude cheaper. And so everything became easier for PBN. It should be the golden age of PBN. So maybe it will be just people still haven't, been accustomed to having free consent Yeah. In any language. Free consent in any language like we did before. We write beautifully in any language. So

Richard Hill [00:34:39]:
Yeah. Yeah. I know. We're, we're a big believer in it. Absolutely. Yeah. So eCom store's listing in now. You know, there's a there's quite a lot of tips there.

Richard Hill [00:34:48]:
I would suggest you rewind, like, the last 15 minutes, especially the RSS piece. But if you're thinking of, obviously building your own network, obviously, there'll be there's a lot of domains on, Caelin's site, seo.domains seodot domains. Yeah. Lots of options there, which we'll talk about at at the end as well. But what would you say what would you say is maybe what I mean, you've already given us one really good tip there with the RSS. If you was to give us one more, like, maybe quite unknown I don't like to use the word trick, but maybe trick tip around backlinks and and, building really, really good backlinks to niche eCom stores. What would that one other thing be?

Kalin Karakehayov [00:35:31]:
We have a special strategy for, 301 ready recs. Yeah. It's not even, it's not invented by us. I learned it from, Robert Mitchell, the the very good good Polish SEO. Yeah. It works the following way. So, usually what you do when you do a 3 zero one redirect, if you want to create some, very good relevance. So you create a subpage and you say, we acquired this website and their domain.

Kalin Karakehayov [00:36:03]:
So now we're redirecting it to us because it's the same in this in this way. You redirect to this subpage created, especially for the redirect. And then from there, you put internal links to your most important pages to pass the juice. And, this is the most popular technique for redirect. Right? For redirect right now, it's called the acquisition technique. It's what's recommended in in the course system eCommerce by Matt Diggity and other, very knowledgeable people. And it works a lot of a lot of the time. There there there are however 2 things that I don't like with this this technique, which is first, it's very rarely out of the SEO world, the SEO actions, that a domain gets redirected to a subpage.

Kalin Karakehayov [00:36:50]:
But it's not really very natural. It's it's a bit of a, it's a bit of a give off that an Azure did this. Yeah. Yeah. This is not something that is, yet somehow actioned on by Google, so it's fine. But it may be a problem in the future. Like, there may be some update where already read to sub pages get scrutinized like in this natural. And the other so this is some, a future thing made.

Kalin Karakehayov [00:37:20]:
But the other thing is that for this technique to work, all the tests have shown that you need relevance. You need very good relevancy. Yeah. The problem is that if you're in a very, in a niche where there are not any good domain or everything that's good is is very, expensive. Because let's say if if you do something like, travel, there has a lot of good travel domain. If you do food, there's a lot of good restaurant domain. But if you do if you do CBD, like, it's gonna be much harder to find a good CBD domain because it's a new thing. It's very very, a lot of money, not a lot of CBD websites really going, but they're all bought up by competition or something, not a lot expiring domain.

Kalin Karakehayov [00:38:03]:
If you're doing something like gambling, not a lot of good gambling domain. And it really depends, on the industry. Sometimes it may be easy to find good relevant domain, but sometimes it may be extremely hard. So getting good relevancy may be a problem. So how how does Robert's method, solve this? It's a it's a completely different, approach. What he suggest is you take the home page of your, money site, the eCom store, let's say. And you just make an HTML version of it and you put it on the domain that you're gonna redirect. Just the eComOne page.

Kalin Karakehayov [00:38:42]:
So you make a copy of the home page and you put it on the domain that you're gonna redirect the powerful domain regardless of its, relevance. You don't care what was there before. You just put the home page. Then you put the canonical because they are now the same from this, copied home page of the domain that you're gonna redirect to your home page of the money sites. Just page to page canonical on just this one page and then you wait and look at in the Google search console is Google recognizing this canonical. So are the links to the powerful domain that you plan to redirect appear in the search console of the of your eCom of Your Money site. And if they do, then this is a hint that Google will be fine with the redirect. And then you redirect, but you redirect just this page to just this page.

Kalin Karakehayov [00:39:33]:
Because you you redirect just com page to com page and leave every other subpage in the domain just 404. You you just do a simple h t access redirect page to page, not domain to domain. Like, the the worst idea ever in the redirect is to get old page on the old domain and redirect them to the eComOne page of the new domain. So all to one is the worst way. Yeah. At Google case filters for it. But if you think about it, did Google make the filters for, for every every page to the eComOne page? Or did they do a filter for just too many redirects? Because we all know that if we do every page to the home page, you get no effect, and Google has a filter for this. But maybe because they just did if you do too many redirects and the website is not the same, then just devalue.

Kalin Karakehayov [00:40:27]:
Because maybe it will be easier to quote this way in the algorithm. And all of those people who try to make the website as close as possible and redirect this pages, this page to this page, and that page to that page from the sub pages and create mirror pages wherever possible. They're doing a lot of effort, but maybe it's counterproductive because then you can hit the too many redirect filter. Yeah. But if you do just homepage to homepage, it's just like redirecting a single page. Doesn't look like an SEO data because you're leaving every Yeah. Other subpage to 404. And, if you choose initially a domain that has the majority of links to the home page, this is quite harder than it seems because it's between no media, no blogs, you know, no website with articles because but events, like, big organizations that get cited like for the organization, homepage.

Kalin Karakehayov [00:41:24]:
There there are maybe 30, 40% of domains that get 60 or more links to the homepage. The events and the organizations are a very good, target for this. Also, if you manage to get a government website or or something like this. And then you do this page to page redirect and you pour a lot of juice via this redirect, but you bypass all the filters. It and it doesn't matter if it's relevant because when you redirect, it's the same website. So it's relevant. So it's like a trick to to to full Google Adex.

Richard Hill [00:41:56]:
I get it. I I get it.

Kalin Karakehayov [00:41:57]:
Yeah. Completely, relevant. And, so far, this is still working. We have done such redirect for a few of our website. Yeah. More relevant, just power, yet the strongest Yeah. Domain domain that you can. So the

Richard Hill [00:42:11]:
same is one of

Kalin Karakehayov [00:42:12]:
the way and it works.

Richard Hill [00:42:13]:
Yeah. So it's not a relevant site, but when you then copy the home page over, it eCommerce relevant.

Kalin Karakehayov [00:42:19]:
Yes.

Richard Hill [00:42:21]:
Yeah. Yeah. And then when yeah. That's that's clever. That's clever.

Kalin Karakehayov [00:42:25]:
Yeah. Yeah.

Richard Hill [00:42:27]:
Yeah. That's good. That's good. I'm gonna have that's gonna keep me up tonight. I think I'm gonna be thinking about that. Yeah. That's brilliant. Well, thank you so much, for coming on the show.

Richard Hill [00:42:37]:
I always like to end, with a book recommendation. Do you

Kalin Karakehayov [00:42:40]:
have a book

Richard Hill [00:42:41]:
that you'd recommend to our listeners, Kalin?

Kalin Karakehayov [00:42:45]:
I don't really read books a lot. Yeah. Yeah. But I can recommend a book I, I read a very, long time ago in my teenage years, like, 20 years ago. The Mysterious Psilent by, Jules Verne. Yeah. Yeah. It's a it's a book where a group of 6 people crash on a on a remote island and they have to rebuild civilization from scratch.

Kalin Karakehayov [00:43:15]:
And this is a book that, although it's, like not so dramatic at least at the beginning, it's always get me very emotional because it shows how much you can build if you just move in the right direction. And if there are people with different skills in your team and everyone can do something, everyone knows something, and they started on the island with, like, 0 resources. They they had trouble with in basic things like starting a fire. And in the end, they basically rebuild civilization on on the island. So, with, with almost nothing. So it's, it's always a great lesson for me how much you can achieve if you just be motivated and push in one direction. Yeah.

Richard Hill [00:43:58]:
So that should, resonate with a lot of our listeners that are running businesses.

Kalin Karakehayov [00:44:02]:
Yeah. It's very similar to building an online business.

Richard Hill [00:44:05]:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We yeah. We've got, to bootstrap something with nothing maybe. Just, you know, the courage to keep going at at at, you know, and to start something is usually the first hurdle, isn't it? Once you start it and then, oh, figuring some stuff out, Obviously, making some mistakes along the way, but ultimately just keep pushing forward, and you manage to light the fire.

Kalin Karakehayov [00:44:28]:
Yeah. And be adaptive. Be very adaptive to to the environment.

Richard Hill [00:44:32]:
Yeah. Well, thank you, Calum, for coming on. Now for those who wanna find out more about you, more about the business, what's the best way to do that?

Kalin Karakehayov [00:44:40]:
Well, SEO domains has our domains. We also have a very high quality TBN with websites restored, from the archive where we sell links. This is still in better but it's, you can already buy the links. So there's no official marketplace but the links are there. So you can buy them just as clear eCom contact form of SEO domains if you need links. Yeah. If you need advice about, domains for redirect or, any other usage of domains, we help. We have a live chat and you can always contact us to, you know, to ask advice about which domain is usable for your project.

Kalin Karakehayov [00:45:17]:
Yeah. And, my name is Unique. So if you just write Kalinka Rakeshoyoff in any social network like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, you can find me everywhere. So it's, very easy to keep up with my stuff if you're interested.

Richard Hill [00:45:32]:
Yeah. Well, thank you so much. I'm gonna be watching, your talk in about 3 weeks' time in, Vietnam, so I'm looking forward to that as well.

Kalin Karakehayov [00:45:40]:
Thanks for having me. Lovely. Thanks for coming on

Richard Hill [00:45:43]:
the show. I'll see you, in a few weeks' time. Cheers. See you soon. If you enjoyed this episode, hit the subscribe or follow button wherever you are listening to this podcast. You're always the first to know when a new episode is released. Have a fantastic day, and I'll see you on the next one.