Each week, over one million domain names are not renewed by their holders. Among these, some have significant intrinsic value. These may be “brandable” names with strong brand potential, Exact-Match Domains and SEO Domains.
Brandable domains often use the .com extension and are short, catchy, and easy to remember.
The value of expired domain names can also come from their history: if the domain hosted an active site, the residual traffic can be substantial and may interest players in the same sector. Finally, domains generally retain most of the links pointing to them, which attracts SEO professionals for link-building strategies.
The grace period is the best times to obtain expired domain names, since the major registrars auction the domains that have not been renewed by their customers in exclusive sales channels called prerelease. These are much less competitive than the ones in pending delete.
Expired domain names that still receive a significant number of visitors or with many incoming links are valuable assets for SEOs. Domain investors are also major buyers of expired domains.
Acquiring expired domain names with a high pagerank is a constat concern for SEOs, as they can be used to create sites with high potential for Google, or to create links to their clients’ sites.
The sale of sponsored articles with backlinks is a historically lucrative business, and performs best with expired domain names.
Selling products and services online, whether via an ecommerce site or as an affiliate, is a potentially lucrative activity that works well with expired domain names too.
Generic domain names, i.e. those that designate a thing or a word in the dictionary, and catchy "brandable" names are the two most sought-after types of domain names on the secondary market. Expired domains are the best source to purchase such domains at advantageous prices.
For a large-scale project, a domain name should preferably be in .COM or in the national extension. Some ccTLDs such as .DE, .NL, .CH, .PL and .CZ are locally preferred than .COM, while others such as .FR, .BE and .CA are just as popular locally as .COM.
Expired domain names are the best way of acquiring premium domain names. Buyers benefit from a situation with a relatively small number of competitors. In some cases, they can even reach agreements during auctions, ie. on Snapnames/Namejet and other platforms where usernames are visible.
Although far from the golden ages of the 2000-2010 decade, parking pages, i.e. pages filled with advertising links, still generate revenues.
As an alternative to parking, holders of expired domain names with residual traffic can set up pages redirecting visitors to affiliation sites.
Services such as Mailbox Park pay domain name holders for adding a simple MX field to the DNS records.
The most common method used by SEOs to detect expired domain names is to scrape directories of quality sites to identify domain names that no longer respond, using ScreamingFrog or Xenu.
The extracted lists are then submitted to tools for mass checking the availability of domain names, such as those from Namecheap or Eurodns, which reveal which domain names are available for registration. The chances of finding valuable domain names that are available are slim, as this has been carried out on a massive scale for over twenty years. In any case, these will only be very old domains or in exotic extensions, as namecatchers have been registering all the valuable domain names in .COM, .NET, .ORG and other popular extensions for many years, as soon as they become available.
As all domain names could expire, i.e. not being renewed by their holder, one of the solutions for recovering expired domain names is to compile lists of desirable domain names and periodically test their status, either manually or automatically.
Some corporate registrars and other companies offer a service to monitor the status and use of domain names, based on lists provided by the customer or generated automatically according to given criteria. Solutions are also available for recovering expired domain names.
These inexpensive services are useful, whether to avoid issues with a trademark, or to take advantage of business opportunities by recovering a domain name with potential or traffic in your sector.
As with the creation of lists, it is also possible to monitor domain names yourself, using free or paid tools.
Domainrecover.net offers a free monitoring service for a wide range of extensions. Godaddy also offers this service, but only for legacy TLDs. For larger volumes, monitoring can be carried out using softwares such as WatchMyDomains from the Indian company DomainPunch.
In addition to your own lists, you can also use namecatchers' lists, which are free and can be filtered.
All namecatchers offer more or less complete lists of domain names they can recover. These lists can generally be ordered and filtered according to different criteria: keywords, language, date, extension, price, SEO metrics, etc.
The same information can be found with specialized tools, with the advantage that the lists are homogeneous and centralised in a single address. The indispensable free service ExpiredDomains allows you to search exhaustive databases of domain names that have expired or are for sale, using around a hundred criteria.
Not all expired domain names filtered using these tools are worthy of registration, far from it. The domain names selected should be analysed to ensure they meet the conditions for registration, which vary according to the objectives of each buyer.
Qualifying expired domain names enables us to find out their potential. The analysis differs depending on whether the domain names are needed for SEO or for domaining.
To choose expired domain names, SEOs use a variety of indicators, commonly referred to as "SEO metrics". These are generally used to carry out an initial filter, after which a more in-depth analysis is required, focusing mostly on the quality of incoming links and the domain name’s history.
One of the criteria most commonly used by SEOs is Trust Flow, developed by the UK company MajesticSEO. This indicator measures the authority of a page, ranging from 0 to just over 100. The Domain Authority (DA) of the North American service MOZ is a similar indicator.
Although its relevance is limited and it can be manipulated, Trust Flow has been one of the market benchmarks in Europe for many years.
Citation Flow (CF) measures the frequency with which a page is cited, i.e. its popularity.
Also offered by MajesticSEO, the number of Referring Domains (RD) is another widely used indicator, but needs to be analyzed as not all links are worth the same, far from it. The higher the number of quality RDs, the more potential a domain name has for SEO. In practice, the vast majority of expired domain names with thousands of RDs come from spam links, and therefore have no value. One solution to avoid wasting time analysing a large number of spammy domain names is to set a maximum limit for RDs (see Figure below).
Ideally, domain names should have a large number of natural links from leading sites in their fields. On the other hand, forum comments, directory links, or worse, spam links, have zero or negative value.
Detecting these features cannot be fully automated with SEO metrics and requires the meticulous use of tools such as WebArchive for content or MajesticSEO for link analysis.
Since quality expired domain names are rare and demand is strong, market prices are much higher than registering a new domain name.
The number of inbound links, obtained using the "Referring Domains" indicator from MajesticSEO, has the advantage of simplicity. Many buyers use it to set their maximum price during an auction, and there is a certain correlation between the number of quality Referring Domains (RD, indicator from MajesticSEO) and the final purchase price, with a valuation of around €3 to €10 per RD.
For a more accurate estimate, other factors need to be taken into account:
• The more RDs a domain name has, the higher the value per RD.
• The higher the Trust Flow, the higher the domain name value.
• Domain names in English, German or French are highly sought-after, as opposed to those in secondary European or non-European languages.
• Competitive themes (housing, automotive, health, etc.) are highly sought-after too.
• Generic domain names have generally more value and those protected by a trademark in force or subject to legal risks are devalued.
Filtering EMD and brandable domain names is different from filtering expired domain names for SEO purposes, as there is no numerical indicator directly correlated with the value of a domain name.
The TLD is the first important filter. Only .COM and a few geographical extensions have real market value.
The saturation of extensions (REG column in ExpiredDomains) can be used to filter long lists. A domain name in .COM or a ccTLD that has already been registered in many other extensions is more likely to be resold.
While it is easy to obtain lists of expired domain names, selecting the ones that are relevant is time-consuming and fairly complex. Fortunately, some sites like ExpiredDomains.net offer filters by language, number of inbound links, age, and other SEO metrics that match common needs.
An alternative solution is to draw up a list of desired domain names, and place a backorder for these domains with the main companies specializing in registering expired domains.
Moreover, of the domains selected, only a small portion can ultimately be acquired, as the recovery process is complex and opaque for the uninitiated.
If combing through lists of expiring domain names is tedious, it is advisable to create a list.
The most common way to register expired domain names is to crawl the web or use services such as ExpiredDomains.net. This helps identify domains that were previously registered and have an SEO-relevant history but are now available for registration.
Although this method has been used for many years by hundreds of thousands of people, it remains effective for domains with country-code or more unusual extensions (ccTLDs). By contrast, it delivers poor results for the most popular generic extensions (COM, NET, ORG) because for years virtually any domain with even minimal potential has been systematically captured by companies known as namecatchers.
Recovering expired domain names requires time, expertise, and the right tools. For these reasons, some SEO professionals and site publishers prefer to buy expired domains on sales platforms. Prices are generally higher, but the process is simple and convenient, especially when domains are listed with a buy-now price.
Germany’s Sedo and the U.S. platform Afternic each offer catalogs with millions of domains for sale. Anyone can buy and sell expired domains there, in various languages, but these are not separated from other domain names.
Specialized sites such as SEO.domains list only expired domains for SEO or make them easy to identify.