How to Use Expired Domains For SEO

by Venchito Tampon Jr | Last Updated on November 6, 2023

Expired domains for SEO is one of the underrated techniques to acquire the strongest backlinks to your website. 

It is a game-changing SEO strategy that landed me 29 DR60+ backlinks, including top news sites and niche publications like:

• NBC News
• Washingtonian
• Eater
• Daily Coffee News

In this guide, I’ll show you how to choose and vet expired domains and use them to improve your SEO performance. 

Why Are Expired Domains Worth It? 

Expired domains, in themselves, don’t have any value. What makes expired domains valuable for SEOs is the number of potent backlinks pointing to them (while the domain is still active). 

By redirecting an expired domain to your website, you pass link equity to it, making the expired domain a powerful tool for gaining backlinks you wouldn’t get simply through manual outreach. 

Quick Notes When Buying Expired Domains

Here are some of the things to remember when buying expired domains:

Buying expired domains is not a scalable strategy.

You can’t purchase and redirect expired domains for all SEO clients. It requires laborious manual work to determine whether a domain is worth acquiring based on its strong link profile. 

Best to use this strategy for your own websites. 

If you’re doing it for your niche sites, eCommerce, or agency, you have the luxury of testing the strategy. That said, if things break down, it’ll hurt, but not so much compared to if it’s a client’s SEO campaign you’ve tested on.

If you’re doing it for SEO clients, be transparent before executing the strategy. 

Takes a lot of manual work.

You can’t shortcut the strategy by picking any expired domain that would benefit your site. Even if you have a budget to do so, 

Reserve your resources, both time and money, on an expired domain that’s worth purchasing. 

How to Use Expired Domains For SEO? 

1. Find Relevant Domains at DropCatch.

While there are many other marketplaces for expired domains like Spamzilla, I use DropCatch for two reasons: less competition and lower bidding. This means I can choose and buy an expired domain at a lower cost than other marketplaces. 

DropCatch works straightforwardly. When expired domains enter the DropCacth platform and have more than one backorder, they go into the public auction. The person with the highest bid at the end of the auction wins the domain.

Simply register and log in to DropCatch. Complete the details and wait for 2-3 days before you’ll be verified. You won’t be able to bid without a verified account. 

Given I’d like to bid for a chosen domain, I reached out to their support team and asked for faster verification. 

They accepted my request within a few hours.

Once you’re verified, you can now choose the dropped domain you want to bid on.

2. Qualify Expired Domains.

Click the Auctions tab, and you’ll see a list of current domain auctions.

I’d like to filter domains that are: 

• Dropped
• .com 
• Max of $150 (depends on your budget)
• Relevant to my site
• Branded domains
• From legit businesses

You’ll have to do a manual check for the last two criteria. 

I want to enter a topic or keyword in the search bar to see if there are any relevant domains. 

In my example, I searched for anything related to “cafe” or “coffee” and manually checked all these domains. That’s where I found RakoCoffee.

Check The Content History Of The Website

I used Archive.org to see what the business site looked like when it was still active.

RakoCoffee is a coffee roaster and had multiple coffee shops, all of which were closed in November 2022 (unannounced to the public). Their website is an online shop where they sell coffee equipment and supplies, so we can say it’s a legitimate business. 

The legitimacy of the businesses also helps you assess how they acquired their backlinks- either through brand recognition or being an authority in the niche – which, in turn, enables you to see how trustworthy those links are.

It is essential to look at the reasons why the domain expired. In this case, the business went out of business, so it would be safe to purchase the expired domain and redirect it to my website.

“A sign outside of Courthouse coffee shop Rāko says the espresso machine is out of order, but a reader sent these photos suggesting that the business owes money to Arlington County”.

3. Buy An Expired Domain Based On Its Potential Value. 

This part is what you should be spending most of your minutes on, as you want to see if it’s worth buying the expired domain. 

Enter the domain in Ahrefs – Backlinks Profile – Backlinks.

First, I’d like to see how many links are dofollow and from websites with a Domain Rating of 40 and above. 

Filter the links by Dofollow and DR40.

Manually check the links to see how they obtained it, as well as the type of links and anchor texts used.

The more natural the link buliding, the better these links are. They were not driven by any manual outreach (e.g., guest posting) but as a by-product of word-of-mouth marketing and brand recognition.

They’ve got high-caliber links from: 

NBC Select (DR 91)

Washingtonian (DR 83)

Eater (DR 90)

Daily Coffee News (DR 75)

These links alone are worth more than $1,000. Digging deeper at the site’s link profile, it has 29 DR60+ backlinks.

A single DR60 link would cost manual outreach or content contribution of around $250 per link (conservative computation). These 29 links alone are worth $7,250. 

This is a rough estimation, but what you want to see here is how valuable those links would be if you were to obtain them yourself.

I’ve purchased the expired domain for $69.

Here’s what it looks like when you win the auction and purchase the domain. 

4. Redirect The Expired Domain To Your Website

The best way to redirect expired domains is to find suitable and similar pages for your site initially.

First, see what pages they got some quality links. These are priority pages you should successfully redirect to a similar (alternative) page on your website. 

In my given example, their about/story pages are what a few top publications are mostly linked to.

Given we have an about or story page at Blend N Sips, it became the destination page of our redirect. We could add a disclosure on the page where we bought the domain as a sign of courtesy.

If you can’t find relevant, suitable pages on your site, you can create an entirely new page that fits the old version of the expired domain. 

So, what’s the impact of this expired domain link acquisition strategy?

I bought the expired domain on September 29, redirected the site on September 30, and helped improve the search performance of our online store. 

Takeaways

That’s all I have for today. I showed you one way to purchase an expired domain for SEO from an underrated marketplace. Test it for yourself and see if it has a positive impact on your site.