Expired or expiring domains

[BritishARMY]

Hi all,

I've never done this and I want to get into it; buying expired or expiring domains that have traffic/backlinks and then parking them. I've seen people claim to make good money from doing this and I would like a crack at it myself.

I have no idea where to start though. I doubt anybody will be willing to give away their secrets, but a nudge in the right direction would be nice! I know how to check the backlinks of a domain/check if it might be getting traffic, however I have no idea where to look for expired or expiring domains or if there are any useful tools.

Now, it seems to do this the domain has to be a keyword that gets many searches or hits and has traffic coming to it already. My only idea would be to find some keywords that get traffic on search engines, try and find expired domains by searching with a domain registrar and if it's not taken then check for backlinks/traffic.

Am I on the right track or have I derailed? Any help would be appreciated!

Tom.

[hooperman]

You should have a look around this forum, as there have been a few discussions involving expired domains. I posted this one yesterday, but if I was buying that domain, I'd build a site on it. The 4k visitors/month wouldn't make much money if you parked it.

As luck would have it, I wrote something about parking expired domains here (it's a kind of survey of what people did after they bought an expired domain - most parked them). I'm currently parking 4 domains myself, but I only make a trickle of money. Unless you get a domain with masses of traffic, or one that people are likely to type directly into their address bar, or have a massive portfolio, I doubt you'll make much money.

[BritishARMY]

Thanks for those links. I think I would go with what you'd do, develop it. I have my eye on a domain that should be expiring today (expired on the 30th of May and of course you have to wait a while). This domain has some links to it and is 7 years old. The keyword doesn't get tonnes of traffic, but it's alright. Pool.com is a good site I've found that has a big list of expiring domains.

[hooperman]

I've only glanced at Domain Samurai, but that tool will search for aged and expired domains related to keywords you supply.

[BritishARMY]

I took a quick look and it's not great but I guess it could be helpful

I was thinking about targeting misspellings of popular domains, could it be any good? There's no way to tell if they get traffic... apart from on Google's Keyword Tool you can check if people type misspellings into Google, which may give an indication that people also type these into the browser... of course it may be way off as it's only a possible idea.

Some guy claims he is earning $100 per day from 20 domains, whether he is lying or not I don't know.

[tke71709]

The big problem is that you are coming onboard late in the game.

Not that long ago the big domainers would register everything under the sun, taste it for a week, and then if it wasn't making a profit they would just let them drop and not have to pay any registration fees. As you can imagine this made testing domains out very profitable and scalable to almost infinity at no real cost to the domainer.

I regged a typo of sorts years ago as a test (wwwtorontobluejays.com) to see if people forgot to type in the . between www and torontobluejays, this is a site that gets a lot of traffic and in the summer. I was lucky to see 30-40 visits a month for about $2 at the peak of the baseball season.

[BritishARMY]

The big problem is that you are coming onboard late in the game.

Not that long ago the big domainers would register everything under the sun, taste it for a week, and then if it wasn't making a profit they would just let them drop and not have to pay any registration fees. As you can imagine this made testing domains out very profitable and scalable to almost infinity at no real cost to the domainer.

I regged a typo of sorts years ago as a test (wwwtorontobluejays.com) to see if people forgot to type in the . between www and torontobluejays, this is a site that gets a lot of traffic and in the summer. I was lucky to see 30-40 visits a month for about $2 at the peak of the baseball season.

I was reading about that on Wikipedia, domain tasting. Hmm I'll keep looking, might find something somewhere.

[ScottJ]

I mainly deal in UK domains so don't really know much about the .com drops, however the same principles apply if you catch/buy it - if it's a good one then putting up the old site could be a good route for you.

Before I book/buy/catch the name I quite often try and see if the old hosting account is still live, just because the name is suspended doesn't mean the hosting is, you can google the name & often get lucky with finding the host ip address (don't think I can post links yet so won't drop an example), if you update your windows hosts txt file you can add the ip [space] domainname - then if you type the domain into your browser you get directed to the old host and can see a full live website even if the domain is suspended, which rocks. It would then be naughty but you could easily take a copy of the site to use or for site structure or for the main info with a new design. If the site is there it can add value to bidding/chasing a name so good to have that info before the drop. There was a finance site that was dropping from a dissolved company and I ripped the old site as the hosting was live but missed out on the drop, however having that made me pursue it and buy it from the catcher for £300 - putting the old site back up (modified) it was soon ranking in the top 30 for 'loans'

In the past I have bought the rights/copies of sites from old owners and put them back up on the dropped name, also from dissolved companies I have ripped the old content and used it to put a version of the site up, not sure if there is a time scale but if you get the old site up reasonably quickly you not only get your toolbar pagerank you can also get all the old rankings & traffic, one I caught in May went from 300 visitors the first day to 2620 yesterday with all it's old rankings back in place so I'd really consider more than parking it as you could be leaving a lot of money on the table.

[hooperman]

Before I book/buy/catch the name I quite often try and see if the old hosting account is still live, just because the name is suspended doesn't mean the hosting is, you can google the name & often get lucky with finding the host ip address (don't think I can post links yet so won't drop an example), if you update your windows hosts txt file you can add the ip [space] domainname - then if you type the domain into your browser you get directed to the old host and can see a full live website even if the domain is suspended, which rocks.

What?! Does that work? It must work, otherwise you wouldn't have posted it. There must be some tools out there like domaintools that would give you the ip of the hosting. Nice tip.

[ScottJ]

Yep, if you take a name like kitchen-space.co.uk - it is suspended, doesn't resolve and it expires tomorrow.
A site like http://webmastercoffee.com/site/www.kitchen-space.co.uk tells me the ip is 217.68.23.141 so if I update my hosts file with;
217.68.23.141 www.kitchen-space.co.uk

Now when I type in the domain into my browser I can see the site live and functioning: http://bit.ly/9nFuMW
If I used a tool like HTTrack it could rip a copy, obviously you need to be aware that site/content is copyrighted so it's up to you how you use this information.