Lately, to help in linkbuilding for clients and myself, I've taken to buying a few strategic domain names that still have PR (Google PageRank). Some have sites attached, some don't. The previous owners either didn't renew their registration in most cases, or just wanted to sell. The reason for buying is for link building, to help promote existing sites. This isn't just a technique for high-budget websites. If you have a small presence on the web, you might consider purchasing a few keyword domains and utilize them for traffic and link building.

While I'm not at the stage where I'm automating my domaining efforts yet, I am starting to at least accumulate tools and even build a few. One such is an RSS Radar in Yahoo Pipes. It'll mashup RSS feeds from a number of forums and name-drop sites and filter to a couple of criteria. Then I'd use the same Pipe with different parameters. Since Pipes generates a different RSS URL for each combo of parameter values, I can then create separate feed subscriptions for each.

Thus, if I'm looking for PR5 domains on a given day, I check the appropriate subscription in my FeedDemon "domains + sites" folder. Each time I have a new criteria that I'll be interested in long-term, I create another subscription, suitably named.

Now, I apologize for discussing this and not actually having a Yahoo Pipe for you to look at. However, as soon as the RSS Domain Radar is complete, I'll not only drop a link but I'll have a video screencast here showing you how I built it.

[Raj Dash is a freelance writer and editor. Current projects include Tubetorial, Performancing, Search Engine Journal and Bootstrapper. You can read more about domain names and domaining at nameSonar.]