As an online marketer and someone who is always on the lookout for expired domains, I thought I would share a few tips to find domains from a search engine marketing perspective.
Granted, there are a lot of domains that drop every day; and there are a lot of domain names that are put in the expired domain name auctions. You could just find a list of domains (several registrars and other sites publish them) and look through them, picking out good generic domains. That’s one way to do it. There are, though, other ways to find domain names that may have traffic or value.
One way is to look at the list of domains on Godaddy’s expired domain name auction, tdnam.com, and find the date that appears on tomorrow’s domains. Currently, on their landing pages or “parking pages” there is a date. For example, if you use this search in Google you will find domains:
“Notice: This domain name expired on 12/14/07″
This particular search phrase will search Google (or Yahoo! or MSN.com) and generally put most of those domains against each other: the better ones tend to filter to the top of that search result. And, you know that domain name is currently in the Google search engine so it might have more value than a domain name that currently isn’t in the Google search engine.
Another search that you could perform is similar, like this.
“Notice: This domain name expired on 12/14/07″ keyword
By replacing the word ‘keyword’ with your particular keyword, you would then find domain names that are still in the Google search engine and that appear to have previously been “about” a certain topic (your keyword). So, if you’re looking for an old travel domain then you would search for “Notice: This domain name expired on 12/14/07″ travel, putting quotes before the word Notice and after the 07.
The next step would be, obviously, to pick out a few names. In this case, we’re not really worried too much about the actual domain name (unless, of course, it could have included a trademark). Pick out a few domain names and test them to see if those domain names has backlinks. You would want to purchase a domain name that appears to have backlinks because, well, there are links to that domain and people tend to click links (this would bring traffic to the site if you were to purchase that domain name) and backlinks are essential to a good search engine ranking.
To check backlinks of any domain, it’s important to go to Yahoo! because Yahoo! is the only search engine right now that gives an accurate look at the number of links a domain has.
Search Yahoo! using the following phrase:
linkdomain:domain.com -site:domain.com
Using a linkdomain search will show you all of the links to a domain name, including links to the site’s internal pages as well as subdomains. Not everyone links to a site’s home page, so a linkdomain search is important. Furthermore, disqualifying the same domain (by adding the -site: to the search) will allow you to disregard or disqualify all the internal links on the site. So, a sample search would be like this:
linkdomain:billhartzer.com -site:billhartzer.com
Generally speaking, the more links to a site the better. And, more importantly, the more links from several different sites to that site is key. I’ve seen cases where one domain name had 10,000 links–one link from one domain name and 9999 links from another domain name that used to be a message board. So, that’s not as good as 1,000 links from 1,000 different web sites.
By using a combination of the actual text on the expired domain’s landing pages, keywords that are important to you, as well as checking the links to a domain name, you’ll in a better position to find the real domain names–and the traffic that you’re after.
Source: Bill Hartzer writing for DomainNes.com – January 17th, 2008
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