Finding the perfect domain for your venture can be like searching for a needle in a haystack. However, with the right strategies, you can find the best expired domains that might just be the missing piece in your online business.
Expired Domain Search
Go to www.expireddomains.net and click on the Deleted Domains tab, and then click on the Show Filter Link.
You may get overwhelmed by the number of filter options available there, but you just need to adjust the ones below.
- contains: Enter your main keyword, which you want to be in the domain name.
- No Hyphens: Check this option to avoid domain names with hyphens (-), which may look spammy.
- English: choose the language as English if you are planning to launch globally; otherwise, choose the language accordingly.
- Only new last 7 days - It's always good to choose domain names that have expired recently. You can adjust this if your results are less than expected, but generally keep it at 7 days.
- Only available domains - make sure to check this to filter out already-sold domains and those that are expired domains.
Next, go to the Majestic tab and make the following changes:
- Citation Flow: - Enter 3 in this field. Citation flow is basically an SEO measurement based on your link on other websites.
- Trust Flow: - Enter 3 in this field. Trust flow is most like the quality of backlinks your site has.
- Indexed Urls: - Make sure to put at least 1 so that we can make sure this site is previously indexed by Google, but to be extra sure, put 2.
- Trust Ratio: - Here also enter 3
Finally, hit the Apply Filter button.
You should have a good amount of filtered-out domain names by now, but if you think the number of domains you have is less, you can decrease the Citation Flow, Trust Flow, and Trust Ratio values. If you get too many results, try to increase those values.
Now go through the domain names that you like and shortlist.
then follow the below steps for each one of your domain names.
Google Site Search
Go to Google and type site:yourdomain.com and hit enter.
It will filter out the result only from the entered domain name, meaning if the domain name was banned or got a manual penalty by Google, it may not show any results, so you have to avoid these domain names.
You should have further filtered the list from this step itself.
Check domain authority.
Next, go to this Free Domain Authority Checker, enter your domain, complete the CAPTCHA, and hit the Check Authority button.
It should give you a bunch of metrics, such as domain authority, page authority, spam score, backlinks, etc., but the ones that are important are
- DA: - (domain authority) is a measurement given by MOZ, and ideally, you should choose the ones that are more than 15 DA.
- PQ: - (Percentage of Quality Backlinks) means how many of those domain backlinks are from high-authority websites; it should be as high as possible.
- SS: - (Spam Score) is a measurement given by MOZ to identify if that domain has lots of backlinks from spammy sites. It should be as low as possible; ideally, it should be under 3%.
Check Backlinks
There are many backlink checking sites available. Ahrefs provides a free backlink checker. Go to https://ahrefs.com/backlink-checker and enter the domains you shortlisted in the steps above one by one.
Note that the DR (domain rating) given by Ahresh should be above 10 if you want a good domain.
Then scroll through the backlinks and note the DR of the pages where the links are, and make sure you don't find any spammy sites in the list. Obviously, the free version only gives you limited results; if you want, you can subscribe to one of their plans.
So based on all the above steps, you now have a few domains that are good enough to purchase and create your site, but make sure the site is used for a niche that is closely related to the intended website that you are going to create.
Check the website archive.
Go to archive.org, and you will find a wayback machine search box. Enter your domain and hit enter.
- Click on the black bars in the timeline; it means the site was live at those times.
- Then click on the highlighted days in the calendar.
- Now you will see the old archived version of that site.
- Go through the site and identify the niche of the old website and see if it matches yours.
That's it. Now you have a domain with a good DA, a backlink profile that matches your niche, so you can create a new website and skip the sandbox period of Google, and most of the time, it will rank for low-competitive keywords right away.