
Steal Million Dollar Homepage Pixels - bryanrasmussen
https://pixelpirate.club/
======
KabuseCha
Before anyone out there buys one of these domains for SEO-purposes:

I work as a technical-SEO consultant and we had the funny idea of checking all
these domains about a year ago: None of them are worth buying! None of them
has any SEO-potential!

\- the page-rank passed from milliondollarhomepage.com to these domains is
minimal (huge PR divided through tons of links is worthless)

\- domains expired for a long time get some sort of "reset" from Google (we
experimented with this - strong domains last used years ago do not rank faster
than "fresh" domains)

Therefore, in the case of PageRank and SEO-potential: It is better to try to
buy domains of local companies in your area that went out of business. These
are much stronger.

And in general: Buying old domains for backlinks is a waste of time. Getting
high-quality backlinks from legit sites and improving your own domain in
regards to technical optimization and usability is much more effective - and
scalable.

Edit: Improved formatting

~~~
tobr
> It is better to try to buy domains of local companies in your area that went
> out of business. These are much stronger.

In your opinion, is this ethical?

~~~
kabwj
Nothing about SEO is ethical. It’s about appearing on google when you wouldn’t
under natural circumstances.

~~~
Cthulhu_
What Google has done over the years is thwart some of the scummy SEO practices
by penalizing websites that do it; a big part of current-day SEO practices are
to make your website conform to web and content standards. Basically, turn it
into a decent site.

There's still the black market SEO where people hire spambots to send links,
but that's been thwarted / voided by just adding a nofollow to links in user
generated content like comments.

~~~
mcnesium
but then you wouldn't do "search engine optimization", but rather proper web
engineering.

~~~
Jorsiem
SEO has become an ambigous, all encompassing term. "Proper web engineer" is
now a subcategory of SEO.

Also "proper web engineering" doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.

~~~
dredmorbius
PWE -- peewee.

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runnr_az
Whoa. Woke up to my project on the front page of Hackernews.

Obviously, this is kind of a dumb idea... but I tried to create it in the
voice of a guy who really, really thinks the MillionDollarHomepage is most
important thing in the world. Glad people are enjoying it.

~~~
vyrotek
Ha, Congrats :)

Also hello from Tempe as well! Are you still at GoDaddy? I'm a dev lead over
at DriveTime. Always fun to run into folks in AZ here.

~~~
runnr_az
Ahh... right on! I'm in Scottsdale now. To me, it feels like we're starting to
really make things happen in AZ, from a tech perspective. Lots of talented
people are returning here to raise families, get some kind of work / life
balance, etc...

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gkoberger
It took me a minute to figure out what this is doing... basically, it shows
you which expired domains you can buy that bought pixels on the Million Dollar
Homepage.

It doesn't really work all that well (most of the domains are still actually
registered but don't resolve), but it's clever!

~~~
lhoff
The ones I checked were all available.

The real question is, will the pixels be reloaded differently if you buy a
domain and place a different image there.

~~~
soulofmischief
Unfortunately no, the image is static:
[http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/index_files/image-
map.p...](http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/index_files/image-map.png)

~~~
Fnoord
My eyes. Hurt. Thanks for the reminder that the 90s of web browsing wasn't the
panacea which appeared through my rose-tinted, nostalgia-enabling glasses.

~~~
pavel_lishin
Doesn't look significantly worse than a regular website with the adblocker
turned off, tbh. At least the Million Dollar Homepage isn't animated, and
doesn't auto-play sound.

~~~
dredmorbius

        <marquee>
        Both features were used <blink>heavily</blink> at the time.
        </marquee>

~~~
ry_ry
My favourite Easter egg: <marquee> still works in Chrome.

At least I _hope_ it's an Easter egg, and not left in to provide legacy
support ;)

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superasn
Isn't this what the SEO guys do to get their sites ranked? IIRC this trick is
used to steal pagerank from expired domains and rank quickly on Google (though
not sure if it works or not)

~~~
luckylion
It is, and it does.

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om3n
I actually had this idea a few months ago... this repo contains the full list
of extracted domains, as well as a trivial script I used for checking domain
availability.

[https://github.com/om3n07/MillionDollarHomepageDomainTravers...](https://github.com/om3n07/MillionDollarHomepageDomainTraversal)

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wodenokoto
I wonder what kind of traffic the million dollar homepage generates, both
daily now, but also in its timespan.

Regardless of the worth of incoming hits from tmdhp, I think this pixel pirate
club is a funny idea and a blast into the past!

~~~
Fnoord
I guess what this is, is up to everyone themselves. For some, this is an art
project while to others its a scam.

------
Liron
A million dollar homepage isn't cool. You know what's cool?

A billion dollar homepage by the same founder [1]

[1] [https://calm.com](https://calm.com)

~~~
runnr_az
Yeah... gotta give that guy props. To launch his career with something so
ridiculous and bold as the MillionDollarHomepage would have been enough. Love
it that he kept going!

~~~
superasn
This guy knows how to do PR and advertising properly to generate massive
amounts of buzz.

There was this article about the MDH where he outlined the exact PR strategy
including hiring one of the best PR consultant at the time (sadly I can't find
it because I'm on a phone). Point being, the site wasn't an accidental success
like a lot of people think it was.

Sure it wasn't 100% guaranteed to be successful as nothing is, but the launch
and PR was done like an engineering project. No wonder he is doing it over and
over.

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dsl
It is checking DNS resolution, not actual availability.

Here is a list of all the domains that are available (as of when this post had
2 comments): [https://pastebin.com/SXWzgxnH](https://pastebin.com/SXWzgxnH)

~~~
PinguTS
Actually, on the site there are 2 status information: availability AND does it
resolve.

So, it is not just checking DNS resolution.

~~~
dsl
Well seeing as my checks against the registries yielded different results,
whatever it is doing is not checking actual availability.

------
newman8r
I've registered entire defunct image hosts (back from the 2000s) - with
thousands of existing old image links. Need to do something interesting with
those when I get the time.

~~~
fheld
anything in mind?

~~~
YUMad
Serve goatse for all links

~~~
virusduck
Classic

------
bhartzer
If you're looking for SEO value... there's a fairly easy way to check a list
of domains. Use the Majestic.com 'bulk backlink checker', and sort by Trust
Flow. You'll want to find domains that have a higher TF than CF.

Also keep in mind that many of these domains might not have SEO value, but
they may actually have email value (they're still getting emails) which can be
monetized.

~~~
lifeformed
How would you monetize the emails?

------
helpmepropose
Interesting and fun project! Also kind of surprised to see this on HN as I
recently launched a vaguely similar project (1$ = 1 pixel in a website image),
but raising money for charity and designed around a marriage proposal instead
of mere advertising.

------
jtbayly
I’m more interested in the domain name being displayed as several skull and
crossbones icons in iOS.

I didn’t know icons could be used in a url.

~~~
playpause
Yes, you can use most Unicode in a domain name these days, by using Punycode,
but not all browsers support it. In this case, "xn--h4haaaa.ws" displays as
"️️️️️<5x skull-and-crossbones emoji>.ws" in certain browsers, including iOS
Safari.

This site is using a bit of clientside JS [1] to automatically redirect the
user from "xn--h4haaaa.ws" to "pixelpirate.club" and vice versa, depending on
if your browser supports "Emoji domains" [2].

[1]
[https://github.com/jonroig/emojiurlifier](https://github.com/jonroig/emojiurlifier)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji_domain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji_domain)

~~~
jtbayly
Thanks. I suspected the redirect I saw might be related to that since the
domain name above obviously wasn’t the same thing I was seeing.

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soulofmischief
Thanks for sharing, OP. Just sniped one, it'll make the perfect birthday gift.

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agurk
If anyone was wondering about if people would actually pick these up when this
page first hit the front page with no comments, there were 209 domains
available. Now ~12 hours later there are 74.

I nearly got when when I first saw them, and there was more availability, but
couldn't think of any use for one so held off. I really should have logged all
of the domains, and seen if anyone puts anything interesting up on them.

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leowoo91
Pirate? Who will guarantee domains will stay the same?

