Expired domains with search engine traffic, backlinks and indexed content can be a great way to build your own private blog network or make extra money selling links on sites like Fiverr and SEOClerks. Whatever your reasoning is for wanting expired domains that have some backlink juice, finding them can be a difficult task for many. The good news is, finding domains that were previously developed isn’t as hard as you may think. With the help of a few unique FREE tools you’ll be able to search, analyze and hopefully catch some expired domains with good metrics on them. Let’s get started!
Finding Expired SEO Domains
To begin finding expired domains with good SEO metrics we need to signup and/or login to ExpiredDomains.net. Visit this page to signup and this page to login. Once you’re logged in you’ll want to click the “Pending Delete” tab at the top in order to view expired domains with SEO metrics that will become available for new registration in the upcoming days. Once those domains load you’ll want to click the red Show Filter link towards the top. From here, we can start setting specific metrics to filter through names and only get those which should have some decent SEO metrics. Try using the settings below to see what kinds of domains come up.
ExpiredDomains’ common filters
Under The Common Tab
Located the “Common SEO” area and find Backlinks. Set the minimum to 10 and leave the maximum empty. All expired domains with good SEO metrics should have at least a few backlinks. So, we set this to filter out all domains with zero incoming links.
Under The Additional Tab
Located the “Original gTLDs” area, along with ccTLDs and New gTLDs. This is where you can specify certain extensions that you want included in the search results. Obviously, the more extensions you’re willing to go after, the more results you will see. Some webmasters are open to good domains in any extension, while others may want to limit to only the most popular. In this example I’ll use COM/NET/ORG/BIZ/INFO/EU.
Under The Adwords & SEO Tab
Locate the “Majestic Million” area and check the Majestic Global Rank box. Then, locate the “SEMRush Google.com” area and check the SEMRush Rank box. Then, click the Apply Filter button to activate these filters.
Before applying the filters above there were about 3,396,728 pending delete domains in the database. After applying these changes that was reduced down to just 122. Now, after going through and doing more testing with the tools below, we’ll be able to slim those results down even further!
Analyzing Expired SEO Domains
After you’ve trimmed down your results on ExpiredDomains it’s important to look at the domains some more and get a better idea as to whether the traffic they are getting is real or fake. For instance, was the domain ever really developed? What was on it? Thankfully, there are a few tools we can use to find that information out! Once you’ve got a list of domains from ExpiredDomains.net you should look them up individually in the tools below to learn a little bit more about them.
Wayback Machine – This tool lets you look back on a domain to see if any website was previously developed on it. Put the domain in and do a search. Then, go back one, two, three, and even four years to see what type of content was on it. Does it appear to have been a real website? Keep in mind, not all images will load. You should be paying more attention to the actual content on it. This is one good way to determine if a domain was actually developed or not. If it was, then you want to make sure the content looks real/legitimate and not spammy.
Majestic – Majestic is one of the best SEO domain tools out there. Lookup individual domains on this site to see what their majestic scores are. Look at the backlinks to see if they are coming from legitimate sources or are nothing but spam. While the Wayback Machine can be great for seeing if a domain was actually developed, Majestic can be great for seeing if the SEO metrics behind the domain are real or just spammy.
SimilarWeb – SimilarWeb is similar to Alexa. It ranks domain names on a global scale depending how much traffic the name is estimated to be getting. Look your domains up here to see where they rank, where the traffic is coming from (sources and countries), plus some other useful information. Basically, Wayback Machine tells you if it was an actual website, Majestic tells you if the SEO metrics are real or spam, and SimilarWeb gives you more information about the traffic and where it’s coming from. If a domain passes all of these tests then it’s likely a great choice for buying and utilizing!
Catching Expired SEO Domains
Once you’ve found the domain(s) you want to register it’s important to think about how many other people may be wanting to go after the exact same domain. If the domains you’re interested in have really good SEO scores then most likely there will be lots of competition when it drops. For the highest chances of success it’s best you submit a backorder request for the domain(s) on sites like AutoBackorder.com or DropCatch.com. If you think there will be less competition going after a particular name then you can save money in the long by attempting to catch these domains yourself using software like DesktopCatcher.
Profiting from Expired SEO Domains
Now that you’ve search for some names, analyzed them, and hopefully caught some, you can begin to make profit from them. This can actually be done in several different ways. One reason people catch expired SEO domains is to build a private blog network (PBN). Blog networks are used to generate quality links to a main project you have going. For example, lets say you own SlotMachines.com and that’s your main company website. In the PBN world this would be called your Money site. You could go out and buy expired SEO domains to that are relevant to slot machines (or gambling in general) and build small websites on them which link back to your main SlotMachines.com website. This would create quality incoming links to your website from other sites you run and best of all, those other sites already have good SEO scores and juice to pass along to your main “money” site. Another method for profiting off these domains is to simply develop them. Put up unique websites with quality content and you’ll get search engine traffic coming in much faster as compared to starting a new site with no SEO score at all. Finally, you can profit from these sites by putting up small websites and selling links to other webmasters. I mentioned two great marketplaces at the top of this article which you can sell links on!
