Like clockwork, I receive an email or phone call every few months from either a prospecting or existing customer questioning me about the value of buying and forwarding expired domains to their website.

Most of the time, those that are inquiring about such SEO magic usually have run across some forum thread, or an outdated article claiming to have achieved increased rankings or page one ranking across major search engines.

Obviously, just because one reads this type of SEO nonsense on the Internet, without a thorough and deeper investigation, does not make it search safe, nor the gospel truth.

I know, if this is you, I’m putting a damper on your newly found silver-bullet SEO.

However, there are pros and cons to consider when buying and forwarding expired domains as a part or the sum of your SEO strategy and effort.

Gray Thursday, Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday, and holiday shopping is fast closing in on us as we near the end of 2014. And if that’s not enough to ask and prepare for, Google has begun the holiday season kicking off the last Penguin 3.0 update.

It’s been a while since we last posted about mad Pandas and Penguins being unleashed throughout the web. Well, that all changed and continues to change as of October 17th with the rollout of Penguin 3.0.

The latest rollout is not complete as of yet. Therefore, it will be a few weeks before any of us really truly know the damage caused by this update.

Sometimes you can do more harm trying to sell a domain during a news frenzy, than any other time.

I make this statement based on perusing various domaining news bytes and coming across an article entitled, “‘Ebola.com’ can be yours for $150,000”.

The article, written by CNBC’s Jeff Daniels, focuses on Jon Schultz, the owner of premium domain Ebola.com, and his interest to sell the domain name after purchasing it for an undisclosed amount in 2008.

I recently read a Clickz.com article that I thought was quite interesting entitled “The Home Page Is Dead and Microsites Are the Future – What That Means for New gTLDs”.

It’s a very intriguing article based on the premise that website home pages are dying by the wayside due to more companies using microsites in the future to shorten the sales conversion process.

The author, Jennifer Wolfe, briefly discusses her experience of trying to book a hotel using Marriott.com.

In short, she was unable to to find the hotel that she walked past daily because the home page did not have an effective way to search for hotels and was organized in an ineffective manner.

So what did Wolfe do when met with an antiquated home page?

I’ve written several posts about finding and buying domains, how to lease domains, why domains cost so much, and the new domain name extensions versus .com domains, to name a few.

No matter what I’ve written about in the past, present, or future, there will always be domain buyers, whether end-user customers or domain investors, who send in a lowball offer or counter with an offer that’s not worth the time to entertain.

Although I choose to respond, I’ve noticed domain buyers that are business owners, those who use their business address to inquire about the price of a domain, tend to undervalue domain pricing when attempting to purchase a domain I own. Most of these business owners are offended when they inquire about a domain, and I respond with 5 or 6-figure values.  Most say, “No thanks, I’ll register a different domain name.”

I’m met with terse comments and responses that I wouldn’t dare mention or even say to the face of a person that I so desperately want to buy something. Let’s say that most comments are in the neighborhood of “you’ve lost your mind” or “you’re the scum of capitalism.”

I don’t mind the comments. After all, to some extent, everyone is entitled to their opinion in expressing the first amendment.

Regardless of the inquiry and responses that follow, I make every effort to break down and explain my domain pricing strategy in great detail for each business owner to understand as it relates to their respective industry. Here’s why…

It never fails that I receive a domain inquiry in regards to buying a domain name I own, or questioning whether the domain name is for sale and how much.

Most of the time, such domain inquiries are nothing more than tire kickers that have no intent to buy.

Such tire kickers inquire only to either curse me to the hills and back, try to threaten me with legal action with no leg to stand on, or they try to explain to me why I’m asking too much for the desired domain.

No matter their negative response, such inquirers end up right back where they started: not owning the domain!

Most of the unsuccessful buyers settle for a hand-registered domain that is nothing more than a cheap knockoff of the domain they really desire.

However, there are those few occasions where someone will lowball me for a domain and respond to my counter with a substantially higher amount than their initial offering.

I tend to sell 90% of those types of domain inquiries.

All in all, like everything else in life, you can’t judge a book by its cover when initially fielding domain inquiries.

The other day, I was productively working and completing tasks when I took a moment to reconcile my email inbox.

While scanning through my email, I made notice of a message entitled, “Status Alert: Potential risk to server.”

This piqued my interest seeing the message was from GoDaddy and knowing I use a few of their services (i.e., domain management, email, web hosting, SSL, etc.).