Buying Expired Domains

[amit91]

Recently i was looking to buy some good quality Expired Domains.

But while performing site and links query on such domains in google, none of the domains are showing any links or pages indexed in Google but the same domains are showing hundreds of links in opensiteexplorer for that domains.

So does Google has started devaluing expired domains or will expired domains recover all their rankings after re registration by us.

[irvingw]

You need to be careful when purchasing a dropped domain that appears to be too good (short name, no hyphens, competitive keyword phrase)

a) take a look at what the site used to be in archive.org (the wayback machine) and take a look at if anything shady was going on

b) if you are buying it as a regular domain and not paying a premium price, set up a dummy site and get it indexed then see if it ranks for it's domain name and also using the site command site:domainname.com. If it's not ranking it's penalized, if it's not getting indexed it's banned.

c) If a site has been hit by Google it's done, at least until someone unwinds the penalty. Just dropping it and picking it up doesn't change the fact that it was penalized, otherwise everyone would be doing that to get out of penalties. So just be aware of that if planning on buying a premium domain so you don't get burnt.

If links are pointing to a expired domain it's like they are 404'ing but once the site goes live again those links are passing PR to that site.

[peterlaurent]

This depends on the domain and the aftermarket process, can be hit and miss, the question should always be is this investment going to get me a return on my time and money. I often ask if I am doing this why is nobody else after this domain and if there is not keyword, cpc and other data to justify a purchase I'll back away. Keyword related expiring domains would be a better bet than just expiring domains with links.

[donford]

Hi Amit,

I have owned a ecommerce domain since 2004 at times due to financial issues I had turned the site off (redirected everything to a maintenance page), for 6 months to even a year and half once. Oddly enough after the year and half time, I turned off the maintenance page and within 24 hours I already had customers buying from me again.

That isn't the same as expired since I always renewed my domain, but I was surprised on how quickly customers returned after such a long time being down. Hope that helps a little.

[somes]

It's not a good practice, so be careful and only pick relevant ones.

Whether or not they loose their ranking depends, but if they aren't indexed anymore, then their rating is probably gone.