How to Find Expired Domains with Quality Backlinks
It’s been said a lot, but it bears repeating – starting a website can be challenging. It doesn’t matter whether you’re launching a dropshipping website or starting a gaming website, there’ll be plenty of things for you to do. You’ll have to pick a hosting provider, choose a WordPress theme, write the content for the website – and that’s even before the launch. As soon as your website goes online, it’ll become a droplet in a sea of other websites, and your work on making it rise to the top – and close to the first page of search results – starts.
There are some shortcuts you can take to get there faster, though. Finding a high-quality expired domain is one of them. If you’re not sure how an expired domain might help you, how to get one, and how to make sure that it has quality backlinks, for example, you’re exactly where you need to be.
In this article, we’ll try to explain:
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To explain what expired domains are, we should brush up on our knowledge about domain names. When you want to get a domain name for a website, you have to buy one from a registrar – a business that’ll register it in your name with the bodies that control domain names. In many cases, the hosting provider you choose will act as a registrar, too, so you can conveniently register your domain while choosing the hosting package.
The important thing to note here is that you’re registering the domain for a limited time. You cannot outright buy a domain name. Registering a domain name is more like renting it, so as long as you’re paying the rent – renewing the registration – you can expect the domain to be up. When you stop, your domain will expire after a while, making it eligible for re-registration on a whole different website.
Along with the domain name, the potential buyer will inherit all, or some, of the domain’s “karma.” If the website carrying the domain name had a penalty with a search engine – the penalty could carry over. However, the SEO juice might carry over, too, which is one of the major reasons why people are buying expired domains.
One of the best things about buying an expired domain is that you can use it in several ways. You might not be able to use it multiple ways at the same time, but you’ll have plenty of flexibility with the use of an expired domain to be able to extract some value from it even if you already have a website with a domain name. Here are a couple of the popular uses for expired domains.
Name Your New Website
Why think up a new name for your website when you can use an existing one? With an existing domain name, you can get some backlinks, some traffic, some domain authority, and other desirable SEO signals and traits.
You also get bans and penalties, which is why you have to be extra careful when researching expired domains you want to use for your new website. Also, you should find an expired domain before putting your website online, otherwise, you’ll have to move your website to a new domain later on.
Set up Redirects to an Existing Website
If you don’t want to take on the risks of using an expired domain for your website, you can still use good domain names to your benefit. An expired domain that still attracts some traffic can be used to redirect that traffic to your website.
All you need to do is set up 301 redirects on the expired domain and the people trying to visit it will land on your website. For this to work, however, you should make sure that your website shares the audience with the one that had the expired domain.
Create a Microsite
Microsites are a smaller version of your website you can create for specific marketing purposes. They can host landing pages, lead-capturing forms, or any other asset you build for a specific marketing goal. Using an expired domain for a microsite, you can impart to it all the benefits and authority of an established website.
Add It to a Website Network
Website networks are groups of websites, usually blogs, you build and use to post backlinks to your main website. You’ll need to have the capacity to create the content for them, but if you choose high-quality expired domains, you won’t have to spend as much time building the authority for the websites in your network.
Of course, you can always buy a good, expired domain and resell it at a profit. Whatever your reason for buying one might be, you’ll have to know where you can get an expired domain and how to make sure that you’re buying a good one.
Because they can be useful to online businesses in so many ways, it shouldn’t surprise there’s a strong demand for expired domains. Thanks to the demand, you can find a lot of marketplaces, brokers, auction houses, and other types of service providers that can help you look for expired domains. Here are a couple that stand out.
GoDaddy
GoDaddy is a very popular web host and registrar that can help you when looking for expired domains in a couple of ways. First, you can use its domain search to see whether a domain name you came up with is already taken. If it is, you can acquire the services of GoDaddy’s domain broker to help you acquire the domain.
It might also happen that the domain you’re looking for has been put up for sale. In that case, you might be able to bid on it – GoDaddy Auctions is a great marketplace where you can acquire existing domain names.
If you’re willing to wait until a domain name expires and then grab it, GoDaddy offers backordering and monitoring services, too. With backordering GoDaddy will try to acquire a domain once it expires. With monitoring, you can receive a notification when the domain changes the registrar, status, expiration date, and nameservers.
Flippa
If you’re in the market for expired domains but wouldn’t mind taking a gander at what existing websites or even apps might be up for purchase, Flippa is a great choice for you. It’s an online marketplace where you can buy anything from an Amazon FBA store to an iOS app. When it comes to domains, you’ll be able to search their age, price range, extension, and even length.
SpamZilla
SpamZilla is a cloud service built specifically for expired and auction domains. The service takes in eligible domains from various sources and checks them for spam, historic data, and backlinks, helping you make sure that you’re registering a quality website. You can use SpamZilla’s Backlinks Miner to check over a hundred backlinks on every domain. On top of that, you can use filters to look up metrics for service providers such as Ahrefs, SEMrush, and Moz.
Expired Domains.net
Expired Domains.net is a search engine for expired and deleted domains. It aggregates data from several marketplaces, including GoDaddy, Flippa, DropCatch, and Sedo, and lets you search the domains on sale from one central location.
You’ve found an expired or auction domain that’ll be perfect for your website, redirects, or a backlinks-building blog? Great! Your next step would be to check the quality and the real value of the domain.
In some cases, if you’re using SpamZilla for example, the very marketplace or service you’re using might provide you with all the information you need. If that’s not the case, you should make sure that you do your research and determine the quality of the domain based on the following parameters:
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Backlinks – this is where most of the value of an expired domain will come from, so make sure to avoid expired domains with backlinks that would do more harm than good.
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Age – expired domains that have been around for a while will be more valuable because they’ve had more time to build authority and good SEO signals.
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Traffic – it doesn’t hurt to have a domain name that comes with some traffic, especially if you plan to use it to set up redirects to your website.
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Bans – you don’t want to use a domain that’s been banned by Google or any other search engine.
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Quality Rankings – certain SEO companies have proprietary metrics you can use to gauge the quality of an expired domain.
To check these parameters, you’ll need specialized tools. Ahrefs has a couple of very useful – and free – SEO tools, including the Backlink Checker and the website “authority” checker. You can use Google’s Transparency Report to check the Safe Browsing site status of the domain. The Wayback Machine can help you find any past content that was available under the domain name. Moz has a very popular Domain Authority metric you can use to check the quality of the domain. If you have any favorite SEO tools of your own, they might be able to help, too.
Let’s Wrap It Up!
Among the many ways you can try to give your website a leg up on the competition, or just to make sure that it hits the ground running when you launch it, using expired domains is one the oldest. It’s a tried and tested method that’s incredibly popular among professionals.
If you decide to buy an expired domain for your website, you won’t lack in places where you can search and purchase them. Keep in mind, however, that expired domains have a history, and it might be a good or a bad one. That’s why it’s important to research any expired domain before buying it.
