Inet Solutions

How To Quickly & Easily Find Affordable Quality Expired Domains

Sterling King

Whether it’s for your private blog network, a money site, or just for reselling purposes, you always want to find the perfect balance between quality and affordability in an expired domain. We all know that domain auctions tend to get “ugly” especially if the domain is really worth it. They can easily reach several hundred bucks and even more if the battle gets intense.

Today, I will show you how you can quickly and easily find quality expired domains that are at the same time affordable in just 2 simple steps – yep, you will be able to purchase them for the standard domain registration fee which is around $10 for most TLDs, if not less. Let’s do it.

What You’ll Learn

Step #1: Quickly & Easily Finding Expired Domains

This one is a no-brainer. You will simply enter the keywords of your choice (the more you enter the more expired domains Domain Hunter Gatherer will find) and then select that file to be used by the software for the expired domains search. Just for reference, here are the keywords I will use for this case study:

Domain Hunter Gatherer Case Study Keywords

Now, it will take a while before DHG finishes the job because the process of finding expired domains is quite complicated – you can learn what it is and how it works from this expired domains tutorial.

It took about 3 hours in my case and I only had 26 keywords included, so be careful and don’t go with too many keywords or you will be waiting for a week for Domain Hunter Gatherer to finish its job. Here are the results I got at the end of the search:

As you can see, a total of 9,103 available expired domains were found by the software. The best part? They all have the metrics I need for the initial filtering ready and waiting, without the need for a Moz or a Majestic account.

Now, for the initial filtering, I basically look at PR first, then CF and TF, the name of the domain, and then the CF to TF ratio. So first I sort by PR, then by TF, then by CF, etc, and I look at the expired domains that come at the top.

If I like one, I will favorite it (which gives it a star) which basically means that this domain is highlighted for further analysis down the road. Remember, we’ve only seen just a few metrics about it, and not the whole picture. Just because a domain is PR 5 or PR 6 doesn’t necessarily mean that it is a quality expired domain because PR is no longer publicly updated since 2013 and probably never will be again (see more about reliable and unreliable domain metrics here).

Now, once I am done highlighting the expired domains that I like at first glance, it’s time to move up to step 2 in which we will basically look more in-depth at each of them and confirm whether or not we could really make a use out of any of these expired domains.

Step #2: Thoroughly Analyzing The Favourited Expired Domains

Now this is where all the magic happens. Basically what we’ll do is apply all the steps from this tutorial to get all the information we need about each of the favourited expired domains. Only after we go through all the steps listed in the aforementioned tutorial, can we know for sure if we can use the expired domain in any way.

After the initial filtering, I have favourited 31 expired domains, which is not bad at all if you ask me (I haven’t gone through all the 9,103 though). And they are all looking really well at first glance.

Then it’s time for the in-depth research. Now, when I’m bulk checking many expired domains, I would first check their Majestic stats to get to know the domain a little more before committing for further analysis.

If you don’t have a Majestic account and you have favourited many expired domains, you can get some dedicated proxies (I get mine from BuyProxies) and use them to make the checks. If you get something like 10 private proxies, you can make a total of 10 Majestic accounts which is about 5 free checks per account per day.

if you don’t have the time to make the accounts, you get 2 checks per day for free per proxy. You do your own math. Now, let me share with you my findings after the in-depth analysis.

The Golden Nuggets

Now, I found quite a few affordable and quality expired domains that can really be put to good use, but I will show you 3 of them just so you can see for yourself that there are some really good expired domains out there that are available for registration.

Golden Nugget #1

The first domain that I will bring to your attention is www.europ-assistance.ie. The domain has a history since 2001 and the website hosted on it has been in the assistance and insurance niche (a very profitable niche) until it expired in 2013. The Majestic stats of the domain look amazing as well:

By all looks of it, this is a pretty solid PR 4 expired domain. The first backlink from the “Backlinks” table is a PR 5 DoFollow backlink which basically seals the deal. I talk a lot more in-depth about all the Majestic stats and what you need to look for in this tutorial, so I won’t do it again.

I will only show you a few good quality expired domains that you can purchase at the standard domain registration fee. That’s it. Now let’s get to the second affordable and quality expired domain.

Important: Keep in mind that .ie is an Irish TLD and can only be registered if you meet certain requirements. This is a good place to tell you that it is a good practice for you to check whether or not you can register some of these TLDs (check requirements here) that Domain Hunter Gatherer finds before committing to further analysis.

Golden Nugget #2

The next domain that I liked is soft.net.uk. Throughout the late 90s and up to 2002, it appears that a hosting and mailing company was owning the domain. After 2002, there are no records of it until one brief moment in 2011 as it appears someone was testing something. After that, the domain was dropped and now found by our Domain Hunter Gatherer search. Majestic stats:

Now, the domain is currently PR N/A but, if you are aware of the current PR situation and how Google no longer updates publicly PR, but on the back-end, it is updated constantly, you’d know that PR is not a reliable domain metric at all.

Thus, this is a classic case of an expired domain that actually has a higher PR (in the general sense) than its current public one. Why? Well, it’s because I checked just 5 of its backlinks and there were two PR 4 backlinks, one PR 2, one PR 0, and one PR 5 – all DoFollow.

So, if this domain’s public PR were to be updated by Google, it will probably be a strong PR 4 domain. This just goes to show you that just because a domain has unidentified PR, doesn’t mean that it is not of good quality. That is why I also sort the results in DHG by TF and CF. Just keep in mind that the .net.uk TLD is reserved for ISPs only, so not anyone can register such an extension.

Golden Nugget #3

The last domain I want to bring to your attention is nicer.go.jp. It is a Japanese expired domain, but it really deserves a quick look. Just like with the situation we had above, this expired domain is also, at first glance, an N/A PR. However, once we take a quick look at its Majestic stats, we see that we are dealing with an extremely high quality expired domain:

After simply looking at the first backlink in the “Backlinks” table, I both know what this website was about (educational materials) and I know that it will be of good quality. That first link has a PR of 7 with its domain being PR 8. If the expired domain we are looking at had only this backlink, it jumps straight to PR 5 or even PR 6, again, if we were ever to see another public PR update, which by the looks of it won’t happen ever again.

However, it has a lot more links than that including a few PR 5 and many PR 3. So, I would say that this expired domain will easily be PR 6 on the back-end – not that it matters as PR is no longer a ranking factor, but it is good to mention. Nowadays, what matters is the backlinks themselves and the history of the expired domain and that’s that. This domain in particular was most active around 2005, but after that it wasted away until 2013 when it was completely dropped.

Of course, this expired domain will do you no good unless you will be reviving it to its exact previous purpose – educational content in Japanese. But if you are that person, you are in a lot of luck.

Humongous List Of Affordable Expired Domains

As promised at the beginning of the article, I will share with you a huge list of expired domains that I found using Domain Hunter Gatherer (including Moz and Majestic stats). The 3 expired domains we looked at above are only a fraction of the many affordable and quality expired domains you can find in this list.

I won’t check them all as I don’t currently need expired domains, but you are welcome to delve into all of them and find whatever you need. Here’s the list:

DHG Expired Domains Results

Conclusion

As you guys saw, Domain Hunter Gatherer can dig up some really good expired domains available at very cheap prices. However, if you are looking for a more popular TLD such as .com, .net, and .org, you might want to head over to GoDaddy auctions or expireddomains.net.

Domain Hunter Gatherer finds good quality expired domains from these TLDs on very rare occasions – it is what it is. But, as you saw, you can still find good ones with TLDs such as .co.uk, .ie, and many others that are still just as good – I did find a few .net and .com that were pretty good looking as you will see if you have downloaded the expired domains list above.

I just want to point out here (because there has been some confusion about it) that Google doesn’t give advantage to any TLDs. So, just because you have a .com doesn’t necessarily mean you will rank higher than a .co.uk or a .ie domain – keep that in mind.

In the end, if you are looking to find cheap but still good quality expired domains for your PBN or whatever, Domain Hunter Gatherer is your go-to SEO tool. I can’t tell you how many quality expired domains I have found thanks to it that could have cost me much, much more money had I been looking only on domain auction sites. Good luck with your expired domains hunting.