discuss A business brand with tons of PR, but 0 backlinks, or a business?

[DomainBFF]

I caught a .com domain name today that was registered in other extensions and appeared to have enough active use cases to justify the acquisition.

Surprisingly I won the name uncontested which is shocking for .coms reg'd in multiple TLDs (by some strange mystery I also caught a few more of these with 0 other bidders which is a whole different topic, but weird...)

For the sake of helping me understand what's going on, the name in question is:

.com

If you do a quick google of the brand you will see multiple different use cases, but even more interesting there are tons of PR/Descriptions/This vs That links from unique domains and they appear to all be from within the past few months or newer.

The strange part though is every single one of them either links to a random page not related to the name, or wikipedia, or anything except for an actual platform or company by this name. I have never seen this in my domain career, and what a waste of potential backlinks for this..hypothetical?..fake?..business.

https://www.bsuperb.com/getting-started-with-raterpoint-a-step-by-step-tutorial/
https://www.sltcreative.com/raterpoint
https://www.optincontacts.com/raterpoint/
https://venuecincinnati.com/raterpoint-the-future-of-trusted-online-reviews/
https://www.wispwillow.com/business/raterpoint-ultimate-performance-evaluation-tool/
https://travlthewestway.com/raterpoint/
https://trajdash.usc.edu/raterpoint

I thought this was quite interesting and wondered if anyone else has encountered something like this or has any explanation for this.

Cheers

 

[Eric Lyon]

I'll, take a shot at this one...

I see this quite often, actually, while doing professional appraisals and deep-diving into each assets history. On the surface, looking at all the links you provided, it appears there are multiple references that might be referring to .com you snagged, but really, they are referring to a service mark (SM), specifically to Salt Creative (TM) service RaterPoint (SM).

While it may seem odd that most the articles just talk about the service, without linking to it, it's actually become common for people to cut back on their outbound linkage to try and better their page positioning in SERP's. Generally, you want way more links coming in than going out.

Many of the pages look like they already have a ton of outbound links due to advertising. Most are PPC driven with in-line ad links. Which they want you to click, so they make money. By removing (or not including) the RaterPoint link, it encourages people to click one of the in-line links in the content (They tricked me to do it too).

With the above in mind, let's take a closer look at your domain asset to see if we can figure out why you got it with no competition.

Ranking Data:
DA = 41
PA = 23
MT = 2
Spam score = 11%
Backlinks = 69
Referring domains = 31
Do-Follow = 69%

RaterPoint is taken in 6 different domain extensions
RaterPoint is a taken username on 5 different social platforms
RaterPoint and Rater Point are not part of any internationally known brand names

A quick review of those 69 backlinks reveals that the majority (If not all) are from BlackHat SEO/SEM campaigns with links from directories, rating sites, link lists, blogs, forum signatures, etc... Very low quality and used to try and manipulate ranking data and SERPs positioning. Such tactics can also lead to penalties and supplemental indexing.

A good acquisitions team will question the Blackhat campaigning and potentially devalue your asset in negotions for the 11% spam score, which isn't too bad, but the angle is that a new start-up may need to clean it up prior to launching a trusted and authoritative brand on the asset.

Helpful information about spam scores:

• This guide from MOZ can help walk you through some stuff regarding spam scores: https://moz.com/help/link-explorer/link-building/spam-score
• This one provides a checklist to reduce high spam scores: https://www.copernica.com/en/documentation/some-tips-to-lower-your-email-spam-score
• This one will help with email blacklists: https://uptime.com/blog/domain-blac...:text=If your site is on,to ask to be removed.

Way Back Machine

• Your asset resolved for the first time in 2010 as Godaddy parked page.
• In 2013 your asset redirected to epharmasolutions.com/raterpoint and continued to do so until 2021
• In 2024 your asset resolved as a Tech review blog and showed evidence of heavy campaigning for traffic (This is probably where all the BlackHat campaigning started)

Note: All the dates on the articles you shared coincides with the 2024 tech blog as being when the campaigning started and resulted in the 11% spam score.

In short: It looks like all the websites you referenced are owned by the same person that also owned your domain asset. All of them except the real TM/SM site SaltCreative.com have the same Godaddy privacy and NameServers set to NameCheap Hosting.

A clear indicator of a BlackHat pump and dump blog.

They clearly leveraged the SaltCreative SM of RaterPoint to manipulate search engines in all their blogs referencing it to drive traffic to click on their in-line PPC ads. It's an unfortunate situation that probably effected the SM brand and potentially lead to them getting rid of the domain.

It's funny how we can piece the puzzle together if we look in all right places. I wouldn't be surprized if that blog ring of BlackHatters is violating other peoples TM/SM's to manipulate the SERP's into bringing them click traffic.

At any rate, here are some of the tools/sources I used to uncover the above evidence:
SEO Stats + Spam Checker
BackLink Checker 1
Backlink Checker 2
Website Checker 1
Website Checker 2
Taken Domain Extension Checker
Whois Checker
Social Account Checker
Global Corporate Brand Checker
Development History Checker
Domain sales History Checker 1
Domain sales History Checker 2
Niche Keyword Competition Checker
Upcoming Niche Trends Checker
U.S. States Consumer Spending Checker
Global Economy Checker
DNS Security Tools
DNS Zone Files

Note: You may want to make sure to disassociate yourself from any of the history that domain has, so be sure if you put it on a landing page somewhere, that the page is fully customizable to avoid any automated referencing that could lead the previous owners actions onto you.

NamePros landers are fully customizable. I use those as my first choice these days to customize all the content.

 

[Picklemeko]

I’d look at real‑world demand and type‑in potential. PR history can spark interest, but without backlinks the value hinges on how easily a buyer can build something meaningful on it.