Expired domains are considered to be a gold mine for ranking. And it can put you in a fast lane where you can rank your websites in a pretty fast way. SO here’s how you can buy expired domains. Stay tuned.
But first, let me just talk about what exactly an expired domain is. So you can get a better idea about the whole topic.
Sounds great? So let’s just head into the topic without wasting much of the time:
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What Exactly an Expired Domain is?
Expired domains are like any other domain names. The thing with them is that they were registered previously by individuals, businesses, organizations, or anyone. However, they have not renewed the domain back. And there can be quite a lot of reasons why they did not do so. However, once the domain is not registered back. They become available for us to register them back on our domain.
And the reason why most of the SEO experts choose to register a domain is that the expired domain often holds some value. For example, it can have backlinks from authority websites, the name of the domain name is valuable, or there can be some other reasons.
However, to give you a better idea about it, let me just talk about the top benefits of buying an expired domain. So here we go:
Why Buy Expired Domains?
Helps You To Target The Right Traffic:
One of the biggest advantages of expired domains is that it helps you to target the right traffic. By using an expired domain, you will be able to capitalize on existing traffic. There are quite a lot of old domains available which already have the traffic that you are looking for. All you have to do is revive them.
Also, as you are already aware of the fact that online business needs the traffic to get success. Hence, if you are not attracting visitors to your website. You will not be able to generate any revenue. And buying a new domain makes you start from scratch. Also, when it comes to getting the traffic, you will need to work hard and spend a month.
Plus to make your new website receive traffic, you will need to perform various kind of tasks. Like you need to create great content, optimize your website for the right keywords, do a guest post, and give time to your website. But an expired domain can do this job pretty fast.
Google Considers Domain Age When It Comes to Ranking:
Domain age matters a lot whenever it comes to ranking a website. And there are basically two reasons behind this.
First of all, Google thinks that an older domain will provide much more valuable information compared to the new website. And the other thing is that spammy websites do not last long. As spammers keep switching their domain names. Although this is not the case that happens every time.
But the moral of the story is that the older domains carry much more value compared to the new ones. Even older domains are superior in quality. As a result, it will be an easy ride for you to rank your websites.
Established Backlink Profile:
If you purchase an expired domain which was previously owned by someone. Then there is a high chance that the domain already has an established backlink profile with authority links. And you can reuse those authority backlinks to rank the website again.
For any SEO expert, link building is the hardest job that anyone can get into. It takes a lot of time to find to analyze and approach good blogs or websites and build links. Then there is a process of content creation as well as a bunch of other things. And if you are going to scratch from the bottom, then this will take a lot of time for you too.
But with an expired domain, you are simply cutting down the process. Even on the other hand, Google confirmed that backlinks are one of the main ranking factors. And buying an expired domain simply minimizes your workload on link building. You can use the previous domain owners efforts, which would be easier, compared to starting from scratch.
Established PageRank:
Page Rank or PR is also one of the main Google’s systems of ranking web pages. The higher PA, a website, has the higher chance you have of your website ranked in the SERPs. And According to Google, the Page rank is based on different factors that include the number of quality links.
Also gaining a high PR takes a lot of time. But with an expired domain, you will already get an established page rank. As a result, you will not have to wait for your domain to get old and gain a good PageRank and this also the most critical thing to remember when you gonna go and buy expired domains.
Drawbacks of Expired Domains
We cannot deny the fact that expired domains are pretty great for rankings. But do you know the fact that some expired domains even kill your website? Not all the expired domains that you find are great. There are expired domains which can harm you. Hence, you need to be extra careful while picking up an expired domain.
And here are some of the points which you need to look for while buying an expired domain:
Associated Penalties
There are quite a lot of domains which has a poor history. And whenever Google sees such domains, they simply backlist or deindexes them. Usually, those kind domains get deindexed because of
- Putting up duplicate content.
- Keyword stuffing.
- Overusing anchor text.
- Manipulating rankings using black hat SEO methods.
- The website used to be a porn website.
- The website was hacked.
- The website has received tons of malicious backlinks or spam backlinks.
And there can be quite a lot of reasons. Plus, the expired domains with bad traffic do not usually have quality traffic. And there are quite a lot of people who think that it has a lot of backlinks and it might be a good domain.
But if you dig a bit deeper and check the link profile, you will get to know more about the domain. So the end of the story is what whenever you are picking up an expired domain for SEO. Make sure it does not have a bad history.
Of course, it will take a lot of time of yours. But the results would be worth too.
Bidding Wars
When you are in search of an attractive domain name, you will find other people trying to get the same domain too. And this is what increases the price of the domain. Even sometimes the price of the domain goes higher than the actual worth of the domain name. But if you really want the domain name,
you have no other option than paying for it.
Bidders can place a bid on a domain name before a few hours or days of the auction. Even some bidders make a bid at the last moment only which makes it even more hard to grab a domain name. However, friendly advice would be to understand the real value for a domain name. Instead of paying more than the actual worth the domain name.
Tough Competition
If a domain name belongs to a competitive niche. Then it would be a nice idea to check your competition before picking up the domain name. If the niche is way too competitive. You better consider going with another domain name.
Also, you better pick up a domain name that focuses on low competition keywords. Less competitive keywords are easier to rank. As a result, you will be able to increase your revenue in no time.
Important Factors to Check Before Buying Expired Domains
As not, all the domains that you find are worthy of your investment. Hence, you need to be careful with your choices. And to make it easy for you I am going to talk about some of the important factors to check before you buy an expired domain. So here we go:
Domain History
One of the most important things is the domain history. To find out what an expired domain used to look like in the past, you can use this tool called internet archive. It is a free and amazing cookie storing service that mainly helps you to trace down an expired domain’s history.
Plus, using it extremely easy. All you have to do is enter the domain name, and it will show you a timeline of the domain name. Simply click on the tool, and it will show you a screenshot of the domain from your choose year.
This way, you will be able to check what kind of content the website used to publish. If it was a porn website or not. Or the website been used for spam purposes.
Domain Authority and Page Authority
The next thing that you need to look for is the domain authority and page authority. Moz has developed metrics which can help you to access your website’s performance. But the question is what domain authority and page authority stands for?
Well, domain authority score helps you understand how likely your domain is going to rank on the search result. On the other hand, page authority helps you to understand how likely a web page is going to rank. And both of these ranks are scored between 1 to 100.
Also, Moz analyses these factors based on different factors. Such as content quality, number and quality backlinks and more. And there are quite a lot of websites which can help you with your DA and PA score.
Backlink Profile
Next is that backlink profile. You can use Ahrefs to figure out expired domain’s complete backlink profile. By using this tool, you will be able to know where the links are coming, which anchors are being used. As well as here are a few other things that you need to check out:
- IP addresses of the links your domain has.
- The growth of your backlinks over time.
- Do-follow and no-follow links.
- Site issues.
- Inbound and outbound links.
Make sure to check every aspect of an expired domain before you choose to pick a domain.
Organic Traffic
Next, the thing you need to look for is organic traffic. You can easily identify any problems in the traffic of an expired domain using Google Analytics. Google Analytics will help you to see whether the expired domain is getting real traffic or bot traffic.
Also, if you get to see any sudden spike in the traffic. Then there is a high chance that it happened because of some event when the search for a specific keyword was high. But if you cannot spot any of such things, then it can be considered as a sign of bot traffic.
However, to help you understand here are some of the points that you can look for:
- Bot traffic does not have a referral. Instead, it will show up as direct traffic only.
- Bots will always show up as a new visitor.
- There will be a high bounce rate like near to 100%.
- The average page views would be 1 per season only.
Page Speed
The last thing that you need to look for is page speed. Page speed matters a lot, and it impacts user experience and SEO. When a website load faster, the visitors will be able to do a faster transaction, or you can serve data to them in a fast way.
Even according to Google, they consider website loading speed as one of their main ranking factors. And there are quite a lot of things that can affect page speed. Such as excessive use of plugins, ads, content management system, images. To figure out a website’s loading speed, you can use the Google PageSpeed Insights tool to get all the data.
How to Buy Expired Domain?
Now the most important question is how to buy an expired domain name?
Well, the process for registering an expired domain is different from registering a new domain. Because most of the times the domains which are not renewed by the existing owners, they end up being on auction.
Different domain registrars are parented with auction partners. For example, GoDaddy is one of the most popular action partners. But not all the domains end up being available on Godaddy auction & also you need GoDaddy auction membership in order to work with it. Hence to figure this out, you will need to perform a WHOIS lookup. It will help you to understand the registrar first. So you can identify the auction partner.
Also, when an expired domain is available for auction, you have to participate in the bidding. And to win auction the best idea would be to bid a few minutes before the end of the auction. You do not want a domain name, which is way too expensive. Unless it is a really powerful domain name.
Even there are quite a lot of domains which do not go to the auction. So in order to buy such domains, you can check out back ordering service. The back ordering service will help you to register a domain name as soon as it is available for public registration.
Bottom Line:
We hope this article has given you a proper idea about expired domains and why they are valuable. So now it is your call to go ahead and look for expired domain names and see if you can find any domain or not. Also if you do a quick search for buy expired domains you’ll get a lot of vendors selling the same.
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