How To Find High-Quality Expired Domains

Finding expired domains is a great way to give your website a quick SEO boost. The main benefit of buying an expired domain is getting backlinks, which increases trust with Google.

I bought an expired domain last month, and I’m going to share the exact steps I took to find a good one.

There are lots of expired domain marketplaces, but most of the domains are hundreds or thousands of dollars.

The one I bought was $12.95.

For this example, we’re going to use ExpiredDomains.net. This site is free to browse, but you’ll need to create an account to see the full list of expired domains.

Currently, there are millions of expired domains on this site, so you’ll need to add a few filters.

The first filter I add is the “deleted .com” domains.

You can look at other TLDs, but .coms are usually the best quality.

I also set the filter to the last 12–24 hours.

The best domains will be bought within a few hours, so there’s no point in looking at domains that have been listed 7+ days ago.

The next filter you want to add is the keywords you want in your domain.

This helps you find domains related to your niche. I also filter out domains with numbers in them, because most of them are spammy. You want to find domains with backlinks that are related to your niche.

For example, if you have a fitness website, you want backlinks from other websites in the fitness industry.

We’ll add words like “health” “run” “gym” “fit” “lift” and “fitness”.

The last filter I add is Majestic trust flow. This is a 1–100 scale that measures the quality of links that point to a website. A website with a higher Trust Flow will usually have good-quality links.

All of the filters gave me a list of 14 domains that were all added within the past 24 hours.

From here, you can adjust the filters like the keywords, or date added. But, I’ve found these filters work well, and filter out most of the low-quality domains. If you’re not getting enough (or any) results, you might need to check back tomorrow.

There are still a few more checks before you go and buy these domains.

First, I want to check with my hosting provider to see if the domain is still for sale. According to SimilarWeb, ExpiredDomains.net gets a million visitors every month.

That means you’re competing with ~33,000 people for domains that expired in the past 24 hours.

You also want to look at the BP column. This is the number of backlinks from unique domains. More is better, but I’ve found this isn’t 100% accurate.

The first domain I checked is available.

The next thing I want to check is the backlink profile. The purpose of buying this domain is for the backlinks it has, so I need to make sure they’re good.

10 quality backlinks are more valuable than 100 spam backlinks.

Ahrefs has a free backlink checker you can use for this.

All of the backlinks are do-follow which is good, but it looks like most of them are spammy, and it looks like swadhealth was a beauty or skincare product. That’s not what I’m looking for, so move on to the next one.

When looking at the backlinks, a few simple questions to ask are:

• Would I want this website linking to my site?
• Would I link to this website?
• Would I want my friends and family to visit this site?
• What type of person built the website linking to the expired domain?
• Why would they link to the expired domain? Is it a guest post? Are they referencing a statistic or product? Is it a directory link?

In this search, I didn’t find any good examples of expired domains with a good backlink profile.

That’s normal.

You can spend a lot more money on an expired domain that’s been vetted. Or you can spend time digging through these results, hoping to find a diamond in the rough.

It took me ~3 hours over two days to find a good expired domain to buy. For me, that’s better than spending $1,000+ on odys.global.

What to do with your new, old domain

Once you’ve found and purchased a good expired domain, you have a few different options.

Your first option is to 301 redirect the expired domain to your current website. This will transfer the backlinks, trust, and authority of the expired domain to your URL.

Your second option is to restore the website to what it used to be, and use it for your business or blog. This can give you a head start, especially if the old website had the same purpose as your restored version. It’s usually less effective to switch the purpose of the website. If the expired domain used to be a brick & mortar business website, I wouldn’t use the domain as a blog, and vice-versa.

Your third option is to flip the domain or rebuild the website to flip it. You can buy the domain for a few dollars, and sell it for $100 or more — even if you don’t monetize the site. People will pay more for the domain if it has valuable backlinks.

If you want to read more about SEO tips and strategies that work, check out this list of 85+ articles I’ve published:

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