Buying Expired Domains

In this extremely short guide, we will teach you about the process we use to value expired domains and the important metrics you need to know before buying them.

Is this guide for me?

This guide is specifically for buying expired domains for SEO purposes.

If you are a domainer, you will not care about the same metrics as an SEO and so would not find this guide useful. However, if you are an SEO who is looking at buying expired domains for link building, then you've come to the right place.

Why do SEOs buy expired domains?

Link building sucks!

You build amazing content and then send out a thousand outreach emails to every webmaster who should be as excited as you about your content. But then you get no replies. Crickets! - well, even more, depressing is no crickets - nothing - zilch. Link building sucks!

Now, every single day there are many thousands of websites that shut down. Maybe the company went bankrupt, maybe the blogger got bored or maybe someone simply forgot to renew their domain registration. Now from these many thousands of expired domains, there will be some domains that were natural link magnets, or their owners actually did the hard work of outreach and link building to get valuable links. SEOs will buy such expired domains so that they can either redirect these backlinks to their own websites, or create new websites on these domains to link to their money-sites.

All the value in an expired domain is in the total value of the backlinks it has. It does not matter what the domain name actually is as long as it has good backlinks from sites in the same niche as the SEO!

What metrics should I look at?

Link building sucks!

SEOs use metrics from top backlink providers like Moz and Majestic to evaluate whether an expired domain is worth purchasing. The most important and popular metric among these is the Moz Domain Authority, while an upcoming metric is the Majestic Trust Flow. Apart from these SEOs also look at the number of unique referring domains and subnets that the expired domains have links from. Below are the minimum requirements for each of these metrics.

  • Moz Domain Authority > 30
  • Majestic Trust Flow > 15
  • Referring Domains (Moz & Majestic) > 50

Apart from the metrics above, it is vitally important that the expired domain have backlinks from the same niche that you are in. An SEO who is trying to build links for a website in the finance niche will look for expired domains that are from the same finance niche. An expired domain from the Health niche will be useless for him to use, even if the domain has amazing backlinks.

Hope this helps you get started on your expired domain hunt!