Did you know that you can buy an expired domain? The short answer is yes! A domain can be expired when the owner does not pay their renewal fees, and it will remain available for thirty days until it has been renewed. If the owner failed to renew the domain at the set time, then the domain will be up for grabs for anyone that are interested. You can buy premium expired domains from sites like SERPchampion domains easily. But before you purchase them, you need to know a few things beforehand. Let’s check them one by one in the list below:
Check for Spams
It is not uncommon that expired domains are littered with spam, so you need to check for them before purchasing. One of the good things that you can benefit from buying an expired domain is you get their previous ranking power in terms of search engine optimization. So, if a domain ranks high, your site can get an automatic boost.
But what if the domain is used for spam purposes? You need to review the domain carefully to check for several spam indicators like:
- Pornographic content
- Hacked content
- Duplicate content
- Non-English language
- Irrelevant keywords & Keywords stuffing
Naturally, if you found the domain to have one of these traits, then chances are, they were used for spamming purposes before, so I strongly advise you not to make that purchase.
Check for Trust and Citation Flows
Before buying a domain, you need to analyze its existing backlinks to help validate its quality. Trust flow is a measure based on the domain’s trustworthiness and quality using the number of clicks that a page receives from a trusted site. For example, you have an article from an authority site like The New York Times; then your domain will probably have a high trust flow score.
At the same time, citation flow refers to the site’s popularity rather than its quality. For example, porn sites are very popular, and they are frequented by many, but not all of the contents have good quality. If you found the domain to have similar traits, then their citation flow score would be pretty high. Trust flow is the key here. You would want a higher trust flow domain than a citation flow score, which means the domain possesses quality content and is not used for spam.
Check for Trademarks
Making sure that the domain you intend to purchase does not have trademarks on them is of the utmost importance. Domain names that have trademarks like Google or Facebook will land you a one-way ticket to infringement lawsuits which will be very damaging and costly. Make sure that the domain is clean from any trademark using a trademark search engine and other similar services before making a purchase.
The Takeaway
If you want to build a long-term and trustworthy website, you should look for a domain name that has a nice ring to it and is marketable. Always remember to check for their SEO rank so you can capitalize on your purchase. Hopefully, this post has provided you with everything that you need to start buying expired domains!