How to Find High-Quality Aged or Expired Domains
How to Find High-Quality Aged or Expired Domains?
This is a very common question from my live Q&A sessions over on my Youtube channel. Whether you want an aged domain for an affiliate project you are about to start or whether you want to utilise an expired domain to try and revive some of the old content to form a PBN or affiliate site the checks are pretty much the same.
I don’t set out to simply build a PBN as such, each and every domain I get, I will turn into a money site of some kind, whether that’s a simple AdSense monetisation method or I build a lead generation or affiliate site. One way or another it has to get real traffic, rankings and to generate some kind of revenue to at least pay for itself. Otherwise what’s the point?
All of the points are explained in the video below.
What tools do I use to find expired domains?
The answer is simple, Spamzilla.IO is my go to tool for the initial checks when looking for an expired domain or an auction domain, my main choice is to use a domain that hasn’t dropped so the auctions work very well for me. But we need to do some initial checks and spamzilla does pull in a whole bunch of third party metrics which will allow me to quickly eliminate some of the domains that are available that day.
I do have a spamzilla tutorial in which you can find all of the available features and see what it looks like, but it really does come highly recommended.
Where do you find good aged domains?
ODYS.cc is my choice for aged domains, not only do I work closely with them, but they really do know the domain game, and finding clean aged domains isn’t actually that easy, they have a lot more rigorous checks than I personally have in place and they have a team of people in place who are searching all day every day to find the very best aged domains on the market.
Over and above all of that they have their own process in place when they get the aged domain, to keep it live on the web, and they even design you a nice new logo as part of the deal.
Auction Domains
Going to an auction can be a free for all and you can lose a fair chunk of money bidding against others when going after a good solid aged domain, but there is always a gem in there and what is appealing to you, might not be in demand from other buyers. GoDaddy auction is a great place to keep an eye on what’s available. I have grabbed a few domains over the years from this particular marketplace.
Quality Checks on Aged and Expired Domains
- Referring domains that go to the domain ( I’m looking for solid links here ) stuff that I cant easily just go and get elsewhere
- Wayback machine checks, what type of website was it previously. Is there some decent content I can grab to use to get up and running quickly?
- Was there previous keyword rankings in the past
- Did the website have traffic when it was ranking
- Has the site been spammed to death
Recovering an expired or aged domain
You want to follow the process that I have here, so many people claim expired or aged domain names don’t work that well, mainly because they don’t try and recover the backlinks, the content, the old URL structure and simply go in and do a domain 301 redirect and expect all the power that was their previously to simply pass over to the new domain. That really isn’t how it works, those old links need to be crawled and indexed and the old URL structure needs to be recreated so that the links pass value and get in Googles index again, before you even consider doing any redirects.
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Craig Campbell
I am a Glasgow based SEO expert who has been doing SEO for 22 years.
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