Finding Suspended Websites & Link Opportunities With Google
If you’re reading this months Hobo linkbuilding tips, you’ll see that I laid down a strategy for getting good backlinks. I thought it was worth a post specifically on finding suspended accounts with Google. I really don’t want to cause other sites trouble, so most of my tips you’ve got to use your brain a bit.
Here’s an example:
Basically, you find suspended accounts using Google which are related to your site, find out who links to them, and contact the linking sites informing them they link to a dead /suspended account, and ask them to link to yours instead.
Example – here’s the first one that popped into my head: Toys & ” “suspended account” – bingo – number 1 listing is a site with about 35 links (see here http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=toys+”account+suspended”) from other sites using yahoo site explorer. Repeat ad nauseum till you find decent link opportunities – it’s not just “suspended accounts” you look for either 
Using this stratgy you’re cleaning up the web, geting backlinks and helping webmasters remove deadlinks on their site. OK, so you’re screwing the suspended website a little, but it’s suspended for a reason, and has been that way for some time or Google wouldn’t have it in it’s index.
This works especially well for How-To Content and Tutorials etc and helps you build the trust and authority of your site.
It’s a dog eat dog world out there lol
Written by Shaun Anderson
Nice post. I was planning a similar one but to do with buying the domains rather than having links changed.
I think it would be a better use of resources to buy the domain outright (from an anonymous domain if needed to shield your real interest in that niche).
If you have a useful site I guess this could work. I’d rather just buy the domain and put an un-useful affiliate site back up on it! That way I get 100% of the links, rather than trying to get an amazing site put together but only getting 10 or 20% of the links at best.
Howdy Phil – Buying the domain outright is of course an option, but in the case I refer to, it wasn’t an option. This is how I got round it.
This is a great strategy and one that I have used often. As a link builder, I find a lot of broken links as I’m cruising around the web. Taking the time to let people know about their links is something I feel is worthwhile (like a public service). But I don’t always ask for a link and I feel it’s important to know when to ask for a link, and when not to. If I’m trying to build a relationship with someone, I’ll just tell them about the broken link. Sometimes when I do that, I’ve found they’ll inquire about linking to our site without me even prompting it. Those are the best, and usually the most generous links in terms of position and PR. And sometimes, people just ignore me. But you get used to that.
Hello Ralph
It’s better than sending out crappy linkbuilding emails of no use to anyone – I can’t even count the amount of $hi! link requests I ignored today…
99% of the link request emails I get are terrible.
Almost all of them are requesting for borderline spam sites, or commercial sites with no linkworthy content at all. I can’t see why anyone would email a site and ask them to link an ecommerce site product page, without offering money or something in return.
I own probably close to 500 websites and the number of contact messages like that which go in the trashcan must be well into the dozens per day.
Nice tip Shaun, I have been looking at some of the terms for industries we work with and there are some with decent potential.
I noticed a lot that use the term account suspended are done with H-Sphere so I started getting more positive results using searches such as toys “account suspended” “H-Sphere” or just toys suspended “H-Sphere”
Please bare with a link building newbie. I just need to clarify something.
I thought I’d take a look at the example of Google search you gave, and then changed it to another topic for one of my sites. The “description section” says the page is suspended but if you click on the link the normal site is still in place. I was wondering what constitutes a suspended account and who decides it’s suspended. Looking at the site in question there are no suggestions that the person is no longer trading. So I guess my question is do we take Googles word as gospel?
Thanks for your help and a great series this month of link building tips.
Pippa
@Pippa
I think what you are describing is a page that was previously suspended and now for whatever reason it is now live.
Google can sometimes throw some false positives if it has recently crawled a page but then the content of the page has changed.
In Shauns example rehabtoys is suspended and when you click on the link the page is clearly suspended. These are the types are pages you are looking for (well as long as their back link profile is also good)
@James
cheers for clearing that one up. Trust me to find the false positive first
Thanks for piping in James with a clear response – hope thing’s are well with you
Thanks for your answers to my question on your previous post and this “toy” example is very useful to me! After your first answer I tried searching for my keyword + “account suspended†but I just got a lot of results relating to Twitter, Ebay and Youtube accounts. From this post and your example I see that the “Account suspended” words are first in the description – will this always be the case? Also is it worth searching through pages and pages of Twitter, Ebay type results to find what we are after or is that a waste of time? Presumably we will get more results with a high level keyword search rather than long tails?
Thanks for this more detailed post.
Cheers, Chloe
PS Out of interest why do some people’s names link to their websites and others not?
Names become links after a number of comments on the Hobo blog, to avoid spammers, not real people like yourself, who I am trying to attract to the blog. So feel free to add comments to any upcoming posts, and after a number of coments (I don’t confirm how many I am afraid) your name becomes a search engine friendly link.
This was a wp plugin we hacked inhouse in light of how Google treats blogs with Nofollow.
This post was just an example – an illustration to show how you can drill Google and look for less obvious link opportunities. There’s some easier ways I will be publishing shortly – keep visiting lol
Thanks for the reply. I thought it might be something like that. I will definitely keep visiting and look forward to the ‘easier ways’!
Cheers, Chloe
This is a great article and an interesting idea for finding link opportunities.
I would have never have thought about this as a link building opportunity.
Thanks as well James for the H-Sphere tip, I now have a list of emails to send