Google Updates Search Engine Algorithm, Will Impact Domain Name Market

A few days ago, Google published an article on its Search Blog platform titled "Cleaning Up Garbage Information and Low-Quality Content in Search Engines." The main points of the article are:

Today, we are announcing significant changes aimed at improving the quality and utility of search results:

- Improved Quality Ranking: We are enhancing our core ranking algorithms to ensure that we display the most useful information on the web and reduce non-original content in search results.

- New and Improved Spam Policies: We are updating our spam policies to exclude the lowest-quality content from search, such as expired websites repurposed by new owners as spam repositories and obituary spam.

This change is likely to have a significant impact on the domain market.

Every year, millions of dollars are spent in auctions to purchase expired and soon-to-expire domain names. Domain registrants let their domains expire, and when these domains are sold through auctions or drop-catching platforms, people— including domain investors—bid on them.

Some domain buyers seek expired domains for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes. They may attempt to build a website on expired domains to leverage the traffic from inbound links, or they may choose to redirect the domain to another website to gain the SEO juice from these expired domains.

Google's intention seems to be to penalize domains if they are specifically set up for SEO purposes or redirected to another existing website. However, I am curious about what would happen if the domain is subsequently purchased by another user for legitimate business purposes.

While this seems a bit unclear at the moment, my speculation is that Google does not want people to buy domains solely for SEO purposes, and they will penalize those who do so. If this scenario starts to happen and the value of SEO-type domains diminishes, I suspect it will damage the expired auction market. I have encountered random domain auctions multiple times where bids were very high because of the SEO value rather than the inherent value of the domain. The value of such domains may decrease.