My friend and collegue Alan (no link given to protect the innocent) has recently announced that he is to kill off some of his sites. These sites are hosted on livejournal, when you go to the URL now you get the following message:

Error

Journal has been deleted. If you are thingamybob, you have a period of 30 days to decide to undelete your journal.

As anyone who works in the same space as myself knows, this can spell disaster for anyone hosting on blogger or similar blogging platforms – search engine entrepreneurs often take advantage of deleted accounts by re-registering the deleted account name, which gives them the same subdomain, and hence all the backlinks. As it is a subdomain and not a true domain, Google et al cannot check deletion/change of ownership, so the domain does not lose trust.

Often these entrepreneurs will use the blogger account (subdomain) and backlinks to promote products totally unrelated to the original site, and more often than not these products are not family friendly. How would you feel if a blog that you had written for several years suddenly started selling viagra or penis enlargement equipment?

How do entrepreneurs find these domains? Quite simple really. Just searching in Google or any other engine using a phrase similar to

“requested URL was not found” -BlogThis site:blogspot.com

will return a list of deleted blogspot subdomains that are free to register (note; not all are free, this search needs a little tweaking). The subdomains can be distilled by hand from these results, PR and backlinks checked, and then they can be registered. Of course, smart people automate this process with a little script.

Blogger also allow javascript on blogspot subdomains, so it is a super-simple task to redirect anyone landing on the domain to any other page or affiliate link (think clickbank).

Anyway, this whole long post only came about because I was concerned for my friend and did a little searching to see if LJ re-use their subdomains in the same manner as blogspot. I found this article and which is especially amusing as Alan has some publications due out related to his LJ sites…