What do you think of my broken domain focused SEO plan?

Yes its a powerful way to potentially bankrupt your company. I can't blame you too hard because a number of people in black hat SEO are suggesting this crazy scheme of stealing peoples content off the way back machine and then placing their links on expired domains

I am going to forget the ethical argument because it often falls on deaf ears anyway and instead tell you the cold hard truth

PEOPLE WHO HAVE ENGAGED IN THIS HAVE BEEN CONTACTED BY THE PREVIOUS SITE OWNERS WHOSE CONTENT HAS BEEN USED THREATENING LAWSUITS

What exactly are the chances that a local commerce site is not going to know you are not the original owner of that content? Think about it - ZERO. Its a local organization made up of local business who know their town or municiplaity

Now getting these domains and using them is within the bounds of being legal just as long as you don't do what is being advocated by black hat SEOs and being lazy and cheap to just strip people content off the wayback machine.

now some people still say " meh chances of any one noticing are small I'll take my chances". two problems with that response

A) who doesn't sometimes enter in old domain names they had out of curiosity? Most webmasters eventually do

B) this practice is becoming so wide spread it is now opening up a new business thats VERY lucrative to lawyers - scraping the wayback machine and then searching the web for stolen content to sue the people using it illegally. The same technology used to reconstruct old sites can easily be used to find stolen content. Every site with stolen content is a potential lawsuit (and finders fee for the tech that does the work). Doesn't even have to go to court - most webmasters that own anything of value will settle and settle fast because there is little doubt they would lose such a lawsuit.

so theres becoming a lot of money involved in outing sites that steal people content so much so I am considering entering into that new niche myself

Not only that but Google has MORE SCRAPING ABILITY THAN ANYONE ON THE PLANET. Its a simple programming task to scrape the wayback machine, check their own database as a registrar of domains and pinpoint PBNs with stolen content and deindex them to kingdom come

Fantastic foot print to automatically deindex PBNs

theres now becoming as much money in this for reporting stolen content sites off the wayback machine as there is in negative SEO . I see someone ranking above me with that and I can easily zap that competition out of Google for life.

Cease and desist

I'm just wondering why you wouldn't buy the domains and 301-redirect the linked-to pages to similar pages on your own site. Some people say this would cause a loss of link juice but Google has recently, once again, stated that there is no loss of authority in 301-redirects. Google: There is no PageRank dilution when using 301, 302, or 30x redirects anymore

There’s only one problem: finding broken links is a HUGE pain.
That is, unless you know about a little-known wrinkle in Wikipedia’s editing system.
You see, when a Wikipedia editor stumbles on a dead link, they don’t delete the link right away.
Instead, they add a footnote next to the link that says “dead link”:

1. The website reached over 100,000 visitors in 9 months.
2. This was a new domain, registered just a couple months before launch.
3. This was done in a language I do not read nor speak (Japanese).
4. Japanese is a non-roman character language, making it nearly impossible to use most of the popular SEO tools.

All I could think....God that's a ton of work, for a bunch of CRAPPY links.

Seriously, what are you paying your VA? Couldn't you create a compelling piece of content and then pitch it to every blog in your niche?

I'm willing to bet you'd end up with better links, cheaper and without having to worry about legal ramifications and generally doing something that you wouldn't want to tell your friends and spouse about.