Why Buy an Expired Domain Name?

Why buy an expired domain name? The answer is simple and good online marketing. Any webmaster will tell you that one of the biggest parts of a successful website is plenty of traffic. Unfortunately, building traffic to a new website is both time-consuming and expensive. Why is this so? How can buying an expired domain name help? Let’s find out.

To increase traffic through search engines, a webmaster has to spend a lot of time building new links and acquiring top-notch content. This takes time and – to a certain extent – money. If the webmaster is trying to build online traffic using a pay-per-click program, he or she will have to buy the keywords, and high-performance keywords can cost thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. To avoid either option, some webmasters elect to buy expired domain names.

Imagine you want to start a website about dog grooming. There is a site called groom-my-dog.net that has expired. In other words, any traffic directed to groom-my-dog.net is routed to a “Page Not Found” error message. Even though the address works, there is no longer a site there.

It is much like a physical address; the owner might close the shop, move to another area, or sell the business. That does not mean the storefront is destroyed – the building and street are still available. Former customers might wander by and walk in, so the new owner could benefit in terms of community awareness. That works online as well. Instead of letting a good site go to waste, savvy webmasters will buy that expired domain name.

Where can you buy expired domain names? There are both regular sales of expired domains and auctions that deal in them. Since expired domain names range in price from under $100 to over $1 million, the trick is finding out if the name is worth buying. The first step is to access the Google page rank. Download Google’s toolbar and type in the expired domain name you want to buy.

If the page rank indicator on the toolbar turns gray, there is a problem; that name has been banned by Google. Avoid it. If no gray appears, look at the page rank number – if it is between six and ten, you should strongly consider buying that expired domain name.

Another way to research expired domain names is using Alexa.com. The Alexa site rating shows how much web traffic a site has drawn and other important demographical information. If a website has no Alexa rating, it hasn’t drawn enough traffic to warrant one.

Before you buy an expired domain name – even if it has passed both Google and Alexa page rank – pull up your favorite search engine and type this command into the box:

Link: (site URL)

If there are a lot of links shown, that site probably has quite a bit of traffic already coming in from legitimate sources.

As a quick way to build presence, links, and traffic, it really is worth it to buy an expired domain name.