Expired Domains – Yes or No?
Posted by KristiAug 26
There seems to be a little debate brewing in the internet marketing community about expired domains. Some internet marketers believe that expired domains are an awesome way to get a leg up on the competition whereas others think that expired domains are not worth it. So, what is my take on this matter? Well, I believe that they can work if you “know how to work them”. The secret when purchasing an expired domain is to make sure that the previous domain owner didn’t spam the domain (when they had it), that it has some PR and/or some existing back links on them. In contrast, do not purchase expired domains that have no PR and ones that were dropped or blocked by Google at one time or another. If you do, you are most likely wasting your time.
One great site for checking out whether a site has been dropped is www.domaintools.com. This site basically allows you to easily see if the domain has been dropped and if so, how many times it has been dropped. In addition, you should also make sure that the PR is real and not fake as some unscrupulous sellers will simply redirect a higher PR to another one so that you think you’re getting a higher PR domain when in actuality, it has lower PR. One great tool for checking this is www.prchecker.info.
Instead, find a good one with backlinks and go for it. Then, you can build a site or put a WordPress blog on the expired domain. If you do it right, you may be able to avoid the dreaded Google sandbox and can start getting traffic to your new site. After all, Google trusts legitimate aged domains that pass the above tests. Now, how cool is that?
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Twitter: colbee59
on September 2nd, 2010 7:33 am
Great information. Domaintools.com is probably the best way of locating the sites that are worth picking up and it is then up to you to do some research and decide whether the site is worth the cost. You will often find that expired domains seem to be overpriced at first glance. Once you do a little research you will find that you are actually paying for some of the work that the previous owner has done in building backlinks, etc. If you weigh up the time and cost of creating backlinks you will discover that these sites are often well worth the extra few dollars. The only trap, as Kristi points out, is that you need to find out why the site was dropped by its previous owner. If it was dropped because Google had an issue with it, then you should steer clear and look for a better opportunity. Sometimes you can work past the problem that caused Google to punish the site but it will generally take more than a little effort to do so. Unless the domain name is exactly what you were looking for it may be best to put your time and effort into something that will produce results faster. Remember to always look closely, generally sites are not left to expire for no reason.
colinbrennan recently posted..Characteristics of a Successful Advertisement
You are very right Colin – I have heard horror stories of some newbie internet marketers purchasing domain names and then finding out that they were dropped after the fact as such one of them even got her Google Adsense account deleted so I strongly encourage everyone to do their homework before purchasing an expired domain name.