Expired Domains

An expired domain is domain of which the term was not renewed. Therefore, such domain names are again available on the open market, for example through SEDO (German domain host). They usually have domain trust due to their history, backlinks, and Page Rank.

Value of an Expired Domain

The three factors, trust, backlinks, and PageRank are the basis for a monetary valuation of expired domains. Other factors are traffic, name, and the market relevance of the domain. An exact determination of the value of a domain is not possible. Supply and demand in the market determine the selling price.

The backlinks may have grown organically over the years and will be judged by Google correspondingly high, which affects the PageRank.

Areas of application

Expired domains are often used for new projects due to their existing backlink structure. The domain topic and language are usually not changed. It may also get utilized with a 301 redirect on your website or project. In the latter situation, the expired domain will continue to lose value from Google’s perspective. Expired domains also get traded.

Commercialization

The locating, registering, and re-selling of expired domains has developed into its own market. A variety of domain traders who specialize in this business model have already established themselves on the Internet. Furthermore, some individuals try to reserve domains once their term is over through the use of scripts.

Review of expired domains

If you want to reuse an expired domain and have found one through a website such as expireddomains.net, then you should examine the domain in question in detail beforehand because such a fast SEO Booster may prove to be a bad investment.

• Domain popularity and visibility: You can determine how many backlinks the domain in question actually has with popular SEO Software. At the same time, you can verify the anchor text of inbound links. If there are clusters of keyword links or primarily links from article directories or other inferior websites, this expired domain can rapidly become useless or worthless. The same applies to visibility. Has this domain suffered enormous slumps? Were there sudden high leaps? These could be clues to possible penalties levied by Google on this domain.

• Website owner: You can find out to whom the domain is registered through a WHOIS query.

• WayBack machine: You can see the history of an expired domain through a search on WayBack machine. In addition to the content, the analysis also reports on the overall design of the website.

• Server location and markup languages: If you want to use an expired domain for the English search environment, it wouldn’t make much sense to “revive” a website which was originally only available in German or some other language. An indicator for a bad deal would be a rapid or frequent change of server location. This should therefore be checked before acquisition.

• Internal linking structure and deep links: In order to be able to continue using the full link power of expired domains, content with a lot of inbound links should be restored as much as possible. It is also important to analyze the internal link structure and inbound deep links in more detail. Ideally, the old structure gets reconstructed almost identically.

Another important aspect in the reuse of an expired domain is trademark law because in many cases trademarks are mentioned on expired domains. If it now gets revived with the same content, then the new operator must find out whether he may use the mentioned trademarks again.

Relevance to search engine optimization

In the past, expired domains were used by SEOs to establish their own highly sophisticated link network or to open up new and affordable backlink sources. However, Google is now able to identify such structures and regards them negatively. Therefore, such pages can expect a worsening in ranking or even suffer the removal from the Google index in the future.