What Are Expired Domains?
Expired domains are website domains that have not been renewed by their owners. Every domain needs to be registered and renewed periodically to remain active. If the owner fails to renew a domain by its expiration date, it becomes available for anyone else to register.
More specifically, the domain name lifecycle is as follows:
- Someone registers a domain name and pays for it.
- The domain expired after one year or two and requires renewal.
- The domain becomes available for renewal by its owner for 40 days after the expiration date.
- After 40 days without renewal, the domain enters the Redemption Grace Period where it becomes available again for 30 days before it is released back into the general pool of domains to be available for anyone to register.
- If still no action taken on the domain it enters the Pending deletion period for 5 days
- Then finally it becomes available for hand registration again.
What Are the Usecases of Expired Domains For SEO?
Expired domains are as old as the internet and they have been used heavely for different SEO purposes since then until Google decided to put an end to that age of shady and spammy SEO tactics that focused on manipulating Google Algorithms system. Below are different ways Expired Domains work for SEO:
Building An Authoritative Website Without Re-inventing the Wheels
One of the main use-cases for expired domains is to build a new business upon it.
Imagine you decided to start a business today and want to use SEO as one of your main marketing channels. As a new website, you have to put a lot of investment into SEO upfront and wait for enough period of time before you could expect to see any SEO results, and if you are in a competitive niche/ market then the time and investment would double or triple depending on your case.
But what if you could find a domain name that has been running for 2 or more years, has been doing SEO, has healthy backlinks, and has authority and trustworthiness from Google, then you use this domainn to build your website upon it? That’s how the expired domain magic works.
It’s a catalyst for your SEO results.
Does This Strategy Still Work Today?
Yes, it does with some considerations like:
- The similarity and relevance between your niche and the niche of the old website that was on that expired domain.
- The relevance and contextuality of the anchor texts on the linking pages to the expired domain pages.
- The differences in the layout/design of your new website and the layout/design of the old website
All the above are important factors to consider before making up your mind.
Is This Strategy Effective for Seo?
Yes, it’s a very powerful strategy that could shortcut your SEO results and bring you fast results, especially in competitive niches (but only when done right).
Private Blog Networks (PBNs)
PBNs are one of the most famous use cases for expired domains for SEO. PBNs means to have a lot of websites owned and managed by the same person who links between all of those different domains creating a network of linking websites. From there, he can link any website he wants to rank and make use of the authority and link juice in all of these websites in his PBN.
PBN is considered a black hat tactic that has been used since the Golden age of SEO spamming, but it now evolved a lot to cope with the new evolutions of Google algorithms.
Do PBNs Still Work Today?
It depends, sometimes they work and sometimes not!
Although Google or the white hat SEO community would tell you otherwise, PBNs still work today BUT in some cases and some niches only. So it depends!
Are Pbns Effective for Seo?
Again it depends! When PBNs work they are very beneficial and would leverage your SEO efforts, but when they don’t work they would ruin your business and get your website penalized.
301 Redirects
301 redirects as the name suggests means to find an expired domain with a healthy backlink profile and authentic backlinks then redirect it to your current website to make use of the link juice (link equity) it has.
Do 301 Redirects Work?
Yes, they do!
Although Google advocates and speakers would say otherwise, 301 redirects for expired domains is still a proven and solid SEO strategy that works very effectively both in the long and short term.
Are 301 Domain Redirects Effective for SEO?
Yes, 301 domain redirects are very effective but with some considerations like the historical data of your website. If your website with no historical data, then maybe a 301 domain redirect is not the right thing for you at this point.
Where Can You Get an Expired Domain?
Expired domains are available at different expired domain names auctions, that’s where those domains are showing when in their various periods after getting expired -as we have discussed at the beginning of the articles.
There are plenty of domain auctions for getting expired domains like:
- SpamZilla
- ExpiredDomains (dot) net
- Seo (dot) Domains
- GoDaddy Auctions
- DomCop (dot) com
To name a few.
Now, we have seen the expired domain types and their usage for SEO, still the devil’s in the details of implementation.
And here comes the question; How to evaluate an expired domain and make sure it’s safe and effective before using it?
Things to Check Before Buying an Expired Domain
Relevancy
How relevant is the expired domain niche to your niche? The closer the better.
An ideal expired domain would have the same purpose, the same market, and the same language as your domain.
Domain Traffic
Traffic is one of the easy and fast ways to differentiate an authentic website from a spammy one for a simple reason, if a website was getting good traffic from Google before it expired that means it was ranking and if it was ranking, it means it is a “Google-friendly” website -if that’s a term.
Nevertheless, you shouldn’t dismiss an expired domain because it doesn’t have traffic, maybe it used to have traffic in the past or maybe it has pages with good backlinks that could be beneficial to you even if they are not getting traffic.
Think about .org backlinks which are considered among the strongest types of backlinks but still mostly are not targeted towards popular pages.
Backlinks Quality
In backlinks, the quality is much more important than the quantity. Actually, most of the heavy lifting in expired domain analysis is in checking the quality of the backlinks.
But what exactly to look for to determine the quality of an expired domain?
- Do follow vs no follow: if a domain is getting 1000 backlinks but 95% of them are no-follow then you should look only at those 5% because that’s what matters for link juice.
- Number of referring domains compared to backlinks: Generally speaking you shouldn’t expect those two numbers to be the same or even near each other. But the more unique referring domains the better.
- Traffic amount the linking domain is getting: As we said before, traffic is one of the easy filters for detecting good backlinks.
- Anchor texts optimization: are the anchor texts of the backlinks over-optimized? Or do they look natural?
- Types of anchor texts: are the anchor texts of the backlinks contextual, naked backlinks, or backlinks from the sidebar or footer?
- The purpose of a backlink: An authentic backlink is an “editorial” -as Google prefers to express it. This means you should look at the context of the backlink, does it look like an authentic backlink that was built because the linking site finds a value in that page? Or is it paid one? (Note: paid backlinks are not always bad, it just depends on the industry)
Notice that checking the quality of a backlink is not always a straightforward task, but a skill that you develop as you get your hands dirty analyzing websites over and over. However, the above factors are the fundamentals that would help you get started.
Backlinks Quantity
The number of backlinks that the expired domain has is another determinator of a good expired domain, although it’s not an absolute metric because the quality is more important. Still, the number of backlinks and the number of referring domains is an important factor to check.
Imagine you found an expired domain that is getting a backlink from 2 authoritative websites with do-follow links, would it be more valuable or another expired domain that is getting 8 backlinks? The more the better of course (given that the quality is good)
Possible Google Penalties
To be honest, this one is hard to detect if you are not an SEO!
Even, some professional SEOs with long years of experience in the industry have revealed wrong decisions they have made about some expired domains they thought were authentic, then after paying and building some projects on them, they found out they are penalized and thus all their money spent is lost.
Although there is no checklist, a tool, or a straightforward method to check for a potential Google penalty unless you are the owner of the domain, there are some strategies that could help you to get started and you can develop your “Penalities Detecting Muscles” from there.
Some questions to ask include:
- What was the traffic trend in the last period? Is there any sudden drop? What are the reasons for the drop?
- Is there a suspicious creation or deletion of pages in bulk on the site? What are those pages about?
- Is there a negative correlation between traffic and backlinks? Which means one of them is going up where the other is going down?
Final Word
Expired domains have many uses for SEO, some of them are risky and some are not, and it all depends on the industry, the niche, and the status of the website that will benefit from the expired domain. Also vetting and analyzing an expired domain in a detailed way before buying it or using it for your business is a crucial step that makes all the difference in the success of expired domain strategy for SEO.