Don’t Overuse Expired Domains
Expired domains can be misused. For example, if a website has multiple expired domain-based links to it, and there are few other naturally earned links, it may look odd to Google. It would seem unnatural so the links may not all be trusted. Why? Because the links and the content around the anchor text that point to the expired domain will not always translate perfectly to the new domain.
How To Find Expired Or Expiring Domains With High Traffic
I like the idea behind expired domain marketing, but its a little tricky to explain to people. A lot of people feel like the web is somewhat immutable, that it doesnt change in broad strokes. Marketers know that everything is constantly in flux and that sites can disappear in an instant, but thats not the public perception. Sure, content changes from day to day, but Facebook will always be Facebook and that blog you like will never change or disappear, right?
Well, the reality is that sites come and go every day. Sites that have existed with little purpose or content for over a decade might be dying right now. All it takes is one person to decide they want to stop paying for the hosting and domain name, and the site expires. The content disappears and the domain name returns to public availability. In some cases the domain registrar will park the domain in others, they simply let it go.
The idea behind expired domain marketing is to find the domains that have existed in the past and are expiring soon. This is distinct from registering a domain that has never been registered before, because the domain has a history. One minor Google search ranking factor is domain age, which can be checked fairly easily.
What do you do with the domain, then? Well, there are three options.
So how do you identify domains that have traffic you can use? Its a multi-step process.
Get Expired Domains Fully Automated Watch The Demo Videos
Do you want to know how to find expired domains? Just have a look at the demo videos to see how fast the software can find expired domains for you in seconds. In a matter of minutes you can have hundreds or even thousands of expired domains, ready for you to grab and use for your next SEO project!
Expired Domain Scanner Demonstration
Expired Domain Web Spider Demonstration
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Why Private Blog Network
Im sure, I dont have to be much brief enough on this but, let me still give you an overview of it.
Private Blog Network is a series of natural looking sites under your hood based on expired domains which have preserved quality backlinks, when you leverage them youd rank your site at the top.
Heres what to love about PBN
- Youve full control over your links, anchor texts, placements.
- You get high quality contextual links.
- Relevancy.
- You dont need to expose your keywords to others for contextual links.
And what Google wants Quality & Relevancy.
Where Can I Find Expired Domains A Detailed Study
There are many sites offering domain names for sale, but I prefer to use the expireddomains.net expired domain meta-search engine. It provides an opportunity to experiment with a search filter and shows small statistics on the submitted sites, although it is not always accurate.
Register for free on the expireddomains.net platform. And login with your credentials.
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Applying The Right Seo Filters And Values
To find hidden gems, we need to filter our way through the millions of available expired domains. In order to do so, click on Column manager :
Here are the colomns I would recommend:
Majestic General
| Abbrevation |
|---|
- SRUSK: min 100
- SRUST: min 100
To make this easier, click on Show filter and go to the Majestic tab and enter the following values:
There you have it! We just found 12 domains matching your criteria. Lets have a closer look at the statistics.
You can either filter on TR or on MDP from highest to lowest.
These are excellent domain names to buy. Lets have a closer look to see what kind of backlinks it receives. If you dont have access to any paid tools like SEMRush, Ahrefs or Majestic, just Google the domain.
For example, persingerphotography.com looks interesting. Lets do a Google search to see what pops up and verify it is wasnt a shady or spammy domain in the past.
We can see this domain receives backlinks from Yelp and the guy even owned a facebook fanpage with 544 likes. Seems genuine. If we scroll further down and check the results, we can see the following:
Yellowpages.com and weddingwire.com pop up, the latter having pretty good reviews. If you visit these sites you can see that these websites are real, high quality and the backlinks are not spammy. So yes, this was a genuine domain we can use to our advantage! Lets double check if its still available via Godaddy :
And again, it is!
Faster: Use A Tool To Assist
If youre going to consistently purchase expired or auction domains, you need to use a tool to automate the tedious parts as much as you can.
There are numerous options out there, but my personal tool of choice for this area is DomCop.
Bringing in a tool like DomCop is going to allow you to set minimum thresholds for domains you would actually be interested in.
So, for example, you could run a search only looking for domains that
- Are on .com/.net/.org TLDs
- Have a Moz DA of 20+
- A Majestic TF of 15+
- Have at least 150 LRDs
- Has at least a 5 for Topical Trust Flow in the Recreation category
- Expiring in the next 7 days
This would get you down to a list of 21 sites to review further:
You can now scan a list of a couple dozen instead of thousands.
And because of the filters in place, youre really only checking to see if the sites had been spammed in the past, rather than having to check to see if theyre at all interesting / have any links.
The downside to a tool like DomCop is the monthly cost. If youre only going to pick up a few domains a year, paying $56 a month might not feel worth it.
You can join for a month, do your research, purchase the best stuff you can find, and then cancel until you want to go hunting again.
But, that means youre going to miss out on any gems that happened to expire while you were trying to save a few bucks.
Similar to DomCop is another tool called SpamZilla which also has a large database of domains which are updated daily.
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Domain Age As A Ranking Factor
Most people dont know it, but Google consider the domain age as a ranking factor. The older the domain is, the more reputable it is. Thus, if you have an old expired domain, you have a bigger opportunity to rank high on Google.
Older domains are more trustworthy in the eyes of search engines. And unlike older domains, spammy domains dont last that long. Usually, these spammers jump from one website to another to maintain their security.
Adding useful content to these old domains can greatly impact your sites ranking. However, you should not discount other factors that can affect your ranking. Below is an example of an old expired domain from ExpiredDomains.net, a well-known web directory where you can buy expired domains.
Upon looking at the list, the domain farrix.com is one of the oldest on the list. But when you look at the backlink profile of the domain, most of the backlinks to the website came from Chinese websites.
If your niche has nothing to do with Chinese readers, then you wont gain any benefits from buying this expiring domain. Doing this will only hurt your SEO if Google notices it. Make sure to consider other factors when choosing expiring domains.
How To Find Expired Domains With Backlinks
Purchasing a high-quality expired domain is an easy way to capitalize on a website’s pre-existing SEO metrics, web traffic, and backlinks. However, not all expired domains are created equal.
Some could ramp up your website’s SEO instantly, while others could hurt your digital reputation or even link back to spammy, illegal websites.
Determining which expired domains are legitimate, reputable, and worth the money may feel challenging, so we’ve created this guide to help you out.
Read ahead to learn more about expired domains with quality backlinks, why you should purchase them, and how SpamZilla can simplify your search process.
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Audit The Domain To Identify Key Features
Once youve figured out how you want to pick domains, you have to do some research to figure out if those domains have the traffic and other statistics you want out of them.
As I mentioned, using these paid tools can help, but you can also do some manual research as well. Here are the things you want to check.
How To Renew And Use Expired Domains
When you have purchased an expired domain, there are different ways to get the most value out of it.
Heres a list of options to choose from:
Usually, a whole domain gets redirected. This includes all underlying pages. Lets say you have purchased a dog related website. Heres what Option 1: Redirect complete expired domain to your homepage looks like:
Although this passes some link equity on to your domain, it isnt optimal because not all pages are a good match for your homepage. The key takeaway here is to make use of the topical relevance, backlinks and anchor-texts of the expired pages. In other words, make optimal use of the history of the domain.
This is where Option 2: Redirect expired pages individually to your corresponding live pages 1:1 comes into play. In the case of the dog related website, it could look like this:
The other three options are quite different from the first two. Here you choose to resurrect the expired domain. Now you may ask yourself, how would I do this? Lets look at the example of drink101.com. Here we could see the domain was currently in auction and still live. A lot of pages still rank and receive traffic from those rankings.
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Can The Domains Be Used For Sites You Don’t Control
Yes, you can redirect domains that have expired to a website you don’t control. The difference is that with a site you control you can point individual pages to other individual pages on your site because you control the server. But if you point a domain at a page or a website you do not control, all of the links from the old domain will point to only one page on the site.
Option Of Private Blog Network
You also choose to discover expired domains to construct a blog that connects back to an adapted site. If you do this on various occasions with various sites, you can have a private organization of destinations in a single explicit specialty.
Continue to post quality substance on each site and keep checking the exhibition of your organization of connections. Your private blog organization can assist you with developing approaching connections and increment your positioning on Google.
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Quickly Find The Best Domains From 200000+ That Expire Everyday
Let our cloud based software do the heavy lifting for you.
Spend seconds instead of hours
What DomCop does for you, is show you a list of all these domains along with important metrics for every domain. These metrics, along with our powerful filtering and sorting capabilities, will help reduce the size of the daily list from 200,000+ to just a handful of the very best domains. What would take you hours, will now literally take you seconds to do.
Access 90+ top industry metrics
You can easily find domains using the best metrics available from Moz, Majestic, SEMRush, SEMrush, Domain Scope and Social Networks. We buy only the best, the latest, and, the most comprehensive industry wide metrics so you have the maximum amount of information to make a decision. No other tool gives you access to 90+ metrics.
DomCop supports extensive metrics from Majestic, Moz, Estibot, Alexa, SEMrush, and DomainScope. The most popular metrics are Aherfs DR and Referring Domains, Majestic Trust Flow and Topical Category, Moz Domain Authority and Page Authority, Estibot domain value and SEMrush traffic data.
Avoid the pitfall of ending up with a useless domain
With Domcop you get access to domains imported from domain auctions, public drop lists and our private drop lists. You can rest easy because we check whether the domains have been banned by google and whether they show up in google search, so you never end up with a useless domain.
Vetting An Expired Domain
Thats where vetting the domain comes in. You want to make sure that the domain youre considering buying is not going to harm you when you use it, and that it has some residual value that you can leverage to make your own site better. Here are some things to check and look out for.
In general, as you can see, its a list of factors that affect SEO but arent predicated on the content of the site that exists or used to exist on the domain. Thats because you dont care about the site itself, all you care about is the incoming traffic, incoming links, and potential existing community. Those are the valuable resources you can use, or the harmful poison you want to avoid, depending on their quality.
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A Few More Tips Before You Purchase An Expired Domain
You can also follow the above procedure when you purchase an auction domain. You will find many times that purchasing such a domain would be a complete waste of your money, because it has thousands of backlinks, however most of them are from spam websites with Chinese anchor texts.
Also stay away from expired domains that have hundreds of links all pointing to the home page and nothing to other pages such domains are over-optimized and will be penalized unless you plan to do massive link building to the individual pages, too.
I have also used this method for uncovering foreign language expired domains with beautiful backlink structure. I found two Hungarian domains, the first one would translate to seduction.net, the other one would be giftisland.com.
I must add that such foreign language domains require considerably fewer backlinks to rank high, and you can even get away with lower quality, such as link directory links and they will still rank well and get traffic. The reason is the lower level of competition in foreign languages.