How to Buy the Expired Domain Names

The skill required to buy expired domain names is patience. abhishekghosh.com is my name’s exact match domain. Several Abhishek Ghosh used it, and at the end, the person who parked made contact via this website’s email with a price tag of something more than $1000. I just ignored it, and when the COVID-19 pandemic started, it got expired and I grabbed it at the usual price. I knew that except for some other Abhishek Ghosh, none can peacefully run it as a live site.

This is not my first experience with expired domains. I have a few expired domains with DA around 20. I never paid more than $100 for any of them. I do not have any DA 50+ expired domain but from my 11 years of experience, I can tell you a few important points before going to the main topic (which you should remember) :

1. Always register your domain (or transfer) to the registrars who are reliable and do not run auctions. If you have a lot of domains, it is normal to miss the renewal of a few unused.
2. The craze to grab is often more than realizing the plan.
3. Always select the domains which are discontinued out of maintenance-related issues.
4. Do not expect high earning blogs to get sold as expired domains on regular basis. Such happens rarely.
5. Whenever you purchase an expired domain (which is not spammy), expect the DA (earlier it was PR) to become half of the original value after you create content. If the metrics remain the same then it is your luck.
6. Always look for high DA and a spam score within 2%.
7. There are always dot com websites that get expired and are not on the list of common tools.

Suppose you found a good old expired DA 56 domain that used to sell/distribute app or software.  If you expect that filling up the website with content will immediately give you a lot of sponsors who are willing to pay higher, you may be proved wrong. If you can maintain, update content then the domain will give you a better result than a fresh new domain – this is what you should expect. In other words – you are getting some backlinks with the domain which may help you. You can not buy the metrics of an expired domain.

Should I Ever Purchase an Expired Domain?

An expired domain does invite other troubles too. There may old litigations, non-payment, copyright infringement to name a few. Calculating all the risks, expired domains of below “types” are best for our purposes:

• Personal website, like the example I have given at the beginning. Do not purchase domain of some other’s name.
• Blog site, you’ll not get DA 35+ sites without a low spam score.
• App distribution site,  you’ll get some good expired domains.
• Journal websites

I have seen that the expired domains of some app distribution websites and journal websites reflect a high DA but the metrics calculated by SEMRush is often lower. Check domain with Google banned checker and make sure it is not banned. Despite these risks, you probably should try buying a few expired domains.

How to Buy the Expired Domain Names

Always choose the domain of the same niche you know, since changing the niche may end getting listed in the spam website category. Check for:

• Age, older is better. You can not guess anything unless a domain/website remains online for 5 years or more.
• Compare Moz score and Authority Score by SEMRush.
• Check the quality of backlinks. Avoid domains with huge number of Chinese backlinks.
• Check the website on Way Back Machine.
• Check whether AdSense has banned the domain
• Check whether Google search, Bing search has banned the domain
• Check all possible bad metrics you know. A domain can be used to send spammy emails with a legitimate-looking frontend.

I know there are a lot of tools to automate the process to buy expired domains. But I will tell you the easy, cost-effective way and tools to do a bit of research. These two services are great:

There is Domain Hunter Gatherer to automate many things. But it costs something which is not cost-effective to purchase 1-2 domains. Test your selected domains with these tools:

Always remember that domains of serious websites rarely get expired since there are multiple steps to protect the owner and the whole internet will try to make a profit from you. Of course, buying a good expired domain will return the investment, but it is our work to warn you of the risks. So, initially, you should invest time.