GUIDE ON
HOW TO FIND
EXPIRED DOMAINS
MARTINS SULCS
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Contents
Who am I to talk about expired domains? ................................................................................ 4
Which tools are needed to use this guide ................................................................................. 5
First steps .................................................................................................................................. 6
SEMRUSH GUIDE: ...................................................................................................................... 7
AHREFS GUIDE: ........................................................................................................................ 13
Where to check domain availability ........................................................................................ 21
How to check if a domain is worth buying .............................................................................. 28
Closing words .......................................................................................................................... 34
Other SEO related products made by me ........................................................................... 34
RANKDSEO.COM .............................................................................................................. 34
WUNDERLINKS.COM ....................................................................................................... 35
Work with me!..................................................................................................................... 36
Who am I to talk about expired domains?
Several years ago, I launched a service on BHW where I sold the expired domains that
I had found and helped customers find expired domains tailored to their niche and
special needs.
From domains that have specific high-quality backlinks from sites like Forbes,
Entrepreneur, CNN, etc., to premium domains that cost upwards to several thousand
dollars, which are great for starting a new website, because of the authority and
history.
I did this for a year and made some good money, but this service took too much of my
time, so I decided to stop offering these services.
But, thanks to the knowledge I gained, I created my own PBN network consisting of
200+ websites, which transformed into another business.
This knowledge has helped me and my team to find amazing domains for us and our
clients.
Up to this day my team uses this guide to find domains.
And today I’m sharing it with you.
Enjoy!
Which tools are needed to use this guide?
To use this guide, you will need either Semrush or Ahrefs. Choose any of your
preference!
Semrush (Price: $119.95 per month)
Ahrefs (Price: 179 EUR per month)
First steps
Based on your needs, you must first choose a niche, which would be great for your
goals.
For example, you have a website about cars, and you want to build a PBN for it, then
the best sites to use would be “cars niche” related expired domains.
Or maybe, you are looking to start a website about “Cars”, then you would want a
domain that already has history related to cars niche (backlinks, anchors).
Let's take "cars" niche as an example.
1) Go to Google. Search for "car news" or "cars forum" (bmw forum, porsche forum
etc).
Why “news” or “forum”?
Because large news sites and forums have a lot of content, and there could be
thousands of outgoing links. We need to find such sites, for the best chance to find
expired domains.
2) Copy the URL of one of the best search results. In this case I’ll choose motor1.com,
which is a huge news site about cars.
For the next step you’ll need either Semrush or Ahrefs.
Based on which tool you have, head over to the section that is about the tool that you
own:
➔ Go to Semrush section by clicking here.
➔ Go to Ahrefs section by clicking here.
SEMRUSH GUIDE:
Paste the URL on Semrush (the main domain, not the exact link, in case it has
domain.com/category)
Go to “Backlink Analytics”
Click on “Outbound Domains”
Here you can see all the domains that the website has linked to. If it's in the thousands,
you can be damn sure that a bunch of the domains will be inactive and available.
Since the website is about cars, there's a huge chance that the abandoned domains
will be about cars and not about other stuff.
As you can see, this domain has 14348 outgoing links (according to Semrush).
Export and download the list.
Click “Export”, choose “CSV”.
Open the excel.
This is the default view when you open the file:
Highlight the first row and Click on “Filter” under “Data”.
Sort the domains based on your preferences.
I usually sort them by “Domain ascore” and then I uncheck (or delete) all the domains
that have “Domain ascore” 65+, because they're always unavailable.
Also, since you don’t need low quality domains, you should decide what is the
minimum “Domain ascore” suitable for you. I wouldn’t look for less than 10.
Uncheck these as well and click “OK”:
Once they're deleted, you need to copy up to 5000 domains (cells). 5000 is the max
limit because of the next step.
Copy up to 5000 cells.
→Click here to go to the next section
AHREFS GUIDE:
Paste the URL on Ahrefs (the main domain, not the exact link, in case it has
domain.com/category)
Go to "Linked domains"
Here you can see all the domains that the website has linked to. If it's in the thousands,
you can be damn sure that a bunch of the domains will be inactive and available.
Since the website is about cars, there's a huge chance that the abandoned domains
will be about cars and not about other stuff.
As you can see, this domain has 14375 outgoing links (according to Ahrefs).
Export and download the list.
Click “Export”
Choose “Full export”, “For Microsoft Excel” (if you use Excel), “Start export”.
It will prepare the file a few seconds. Then click on the Icon in the upper right corner
and click on the exported file to download it!
Open the excel.
This is the default view when you open the file:
Highlight the first row and click on “Filter” under “Data”.
Sort the domains based on your preferences.
I usually sort them by DR (Domain rating) and then I uncheck (or delete) all the
domains that have DR 65+, because they're always unavailable.
Also, since you don’t need low quality domains, you should decide what is the
minimum DR suitable for you. I wouldn’t look for less than DR10.
Uncheck these as well and click “OK”:
Once they're deleted, you need to sort the list by referring domains by largest.
Based on your preferences, you should determine what is the minimum referring
domains that you want. I suggest at least 40 (if they’re from quality sites).
Other will choose 100+. If you need premium domains, you should choose 1000+.
Copy all the domains from the top that goes up to 20+ referring domains. If there are
a lot of them, then you can copy up to 5000 domains (limit because of the next step).
Copy up to 5000 cells.
Where to check domain availability
1) Go to https://www.namecheap.com/
Click on “Beast Mode”
Paste all the 5000 domains here and click “Generate”
Without waiting for the list to load, click on “Export”
It will show that it is preparing the report:
It will take about 1-3 minutes to load the file and a Download window will pop-up.
Save the file.
When you’ll open the file, this is what you’ll see:
Highlight the first row and press “Filter”
Press on the “down arrow” and uncheck “aftermarket” & “taken”. We want to see
only available domains.
This is what you’ll see:
This time most of the domains are “Premium” domains. Only 3 domains are nonpremium.
If you’re looking for premium domains, then you can investigate all these further.
If you’re on a tight budget and looking for “gems” then you should look into these 3
non-premium domains. If they won’t do, then repeat the step where you copy-paste
the next 5000 domains from the excel into Namecheap.
By looking at the example above:
•
•
•
.gov domains are not available to the public, but only government
organizations
The .cat TLD is intended to serve the needs of the Catalan Linguistic and
Cultural Community on the Internet. This was not available for purchase.
.ru domain was unavailable
Let’s try again with the next 5000 domains:
This time I see 6 cheap domains worth checking out. Five Italian domains and one
.com.
How to check if a domain is worth buying
Usually, I check domain availability at Namecheap or GoDaddy as they support most
of the general TLD’s. But there are some country-specific TLD’s that need to be
Googled on where to register them and check for availability.
Many European TLD’s can be checked at eurodns.com.
Let’s start by checking if the .com domain is available, and if it’s in a good state to buy.
1) Head over to namecheap.com and paste the domain name:
The next window will show if the domain is available.
In this case, this domain is available for registration. The price is $8.98/yr.
Head over to Archive.org and check the domain history.
Start by checking the latest "live pages".
Live pages are the “Blue” dots in the Calendar. “Green” dots are redirects so no point
in checking the green ones.
In this case I clicked on year 2018, clicked on the “Blue circle” on August 7 and clicked
the link.
See if there was a live page recently and what it was about. If the domain has been
anything else, but the original purpose, then it's a big red flag.
In this case we can see how the website looked on August 7, 2018. The website was
about motorcycles.
So far so good. No signs of “porn, spam, pharma, casino, etc.”.
Now let’s check the domain on Ahrefs (similarly you can check it on SEMRush).
As we see in the image below, the site is not spammed. It has 24 referring domains
and 52 backlinks. The historic Referring domains profile also looks good, without any
“spam spikes”.
Then check the anchors!
Check if there is any spam (unrelated niches, Viagra, porn, foreign languages).
If there are foreign languages, translate them with Google Translate to see if they are
related to your niche, or if they're just pure spam.
This website has a clean Anchor profile. All anchors seem related and natural.
Now check the "Referring domains" and what anchors are coming in.
Here you can see all the referring domains, their stats (DR) and how many backlinks
link to this domain.
To see if these links are article links, comment links or any other kind, you can expand
each referring domain and see from where within the site the link comes from.
You can see on which page the link is placed, in what context, and to which URL it links
to. You can even click the link and go to the page to see how the page looks and if it’
s related to the website.
If you can't see any bad links (spam) here at first, then the site is good to buy.
That's about it. If everything passes, you can buy the domain.
Closing words
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Work with me!
If you want to collaborate with me in any way – partnership, order domains, build PBN
websites or receive consultation about SEO then please feel free to contact me!
If you think you have an interesting product or method, but you don’t know how to
launch the product successfully without a partner then be sure to email me with a
subject “Partnership” to my email martins@rankdseo.com!
Write about your idea of partnership and I’ll see if we can work something out.
I’ll answer to each email I’ll receive!
Let’s make some money together!
Best regards,
Martins Sulcs