How I Find Expired Domains with Backlink Goldmines (and When They’re Worth It)

Can an Expired Domain Help You Rank Faster on Google?

Introduction

Can an expired domain actually help you rank faster on Google than starting fresh? The short answer is yes. But if this is your first time building a directory or learning SEO, this probably isn't the move. The reason I'm saying this is because buying an expired domain isn't just about finding a good deal on a domain auction. It's about vetting the backlink history of a domain, the quality of those backlinks, and having a really clear strategy on how you're going to rebuild this and layer on a directory or even a SAS or e-commerce store, whatever it is that you want to go and do to monetize.

Why Expired Domains Are Not for Beginners

My point is, it's pretty timeconuming to go and research these expired domains and do it correctly. And if you're just starting out, then you might be doing what my dad calls holding the corner and losing the full picture. So, I think it's a better idea that you just go and build the thing rather than sitting around and waiting for that expired domain to pop up and then going to build that thing.

Who Should Consider Expired Domains

Now, with that said, if you're someone who's built multiple directories or projects and you're familiar with SEO and you're trying to enter a more competitive market like finance, legal, healthcare, where ranking is typically really slow and competitive, then this actually makes a lot of sense. So, I'm going to show you exactly how I vet these expired domains and how you can go and conduct this research for yourself.

Where to Buy Expired Domains

So, in this video, I'm going to walk you through a few different places that you can go and buy these expired domains. And then after that, we're going to go and vet one of the expired domains that I find. We're going to look at the back links, identify the good quality backlinks and the bad quality backlinks, and then we're going to go over some key considerations that you want to do if you decide to go and buy the expired domain.

Popular Marketplaces

With that said, let's go ahead and dive in. So, let's start with where to actually find and buy these expired domains. Right now, I'm on NameCheep, which is my personal favorite. I've purchased a couple expired domains in the past and they do have this auction as well as some domains that you can just purchase for cash, but there are other ones like the GoDaddy auction which I think a lot of people know about. And in the recent Chris Corner podcast with the owner of Dude Ranch, he mentioned Snapnames as well as namejet.com.

Example Domain Review: magpress.com

We'll be spending most of our time looking at the SEOfriendly domains and trying to understand why magpress.com is currently being bid for $300, whereas other ones are only, you know, $15 or so.

Importance of Backlinks

It's no surprise that backlinks are one of the most difficult things to get right in the SEO world. They're often expensive. People buy them all the time, and that's why they're so valuable. So, if you can find an expired domain that has really solid backlinks from high authority domains, we just want to make sure that when we're buying these expired domains that we don't buy something that's already penalized because it's not going to do us any favors and it's going to be very difficult to rebuild it back up and have Google trust that domain.

Evaluating the Backlink Profile

That's why the first question I'm asking myself isn't whether I can build a directory in the swimming niche. It's what does the backlink profile look like? because if it doesn't provide any value from a backlink perspective or there are back links but they look like spam or there are signs of toxic backlinks that's a massive red flag and I'm just not going to buy this domain.

Research Process

So with that said let's go ahead and start looking at some of these domains and you do get some information if you click into it like the href's referring domains semrush but the whole point of this is to dive a little bit deeper and investigate what kind of backlinks they're actually getting. So, I'm going to go ahead and take this domain and pop it into the site explorer in hres and let's just see what we find.

Good and Bad Initial Signs

So, right off the bat, I can see some good signs and some bad signs. The good signs is that it's a DR59, which is pretty good, pretty authoritative. And the other good sign is that there are 422,000 back links where I presume that there are some highquality backlinks included in this number.

Red Flags

Now, the bad sign is that there's probably a lot of spam backlinks as well because this used to be 27 million at its peak. We also see that the traffic chart here has a really sharp decline.

Backlink Deep Dive

But the first thing I'm going to do is look at their back links here. And I'm just going to go straight to their best links only because I want to see what Hrefs considers their strongest, most relevant high authority backlinks.

Backlink Examples

And here we see hostingpill.com...
Scrolling down, we do see a backlink from wpdocctor.jp…
There's chiefexecutive.net…

Niche Confusion

And that is kind of all over the place…

Quality Analysis

Even looking at the best links—no page traffic.
Sorting by domain traffic—still no meaningful traffic.
Many links look spammy or irrelevant.

Non-Spammy Link Check

We do have a backlink from github.com…
However, it's nofollow, so no real link equity.

Checking Page Traffic

We have a backlink for big data analytics.com…
Another link from a primary school website—irrelevant niche.

Referring Domain Scan

I would also check the referring domains really quick…

Traffic & Growth Pattern Analysis

The traffic chart reveals suspicious growth in backlinks between 2015–2016.

Likely Google Penalty

This unnatural spike may have triggered a penalty.

Verdict on magpress.com

I personally would pass…

Who Might Buy It

1. WordPress Theme/Plugin Developers

There may be a play…

2. People Selling Backlinks

Because it has DR59, even though it has no real traffic.

Wayback Machine Research

If the domain passed checks, the next step is to check Wayback Machine…

Historical Niche Verification

You want to stay in the same niche or closely related niche…

Rebuilding Old Pages

You could rebuild old high-traffic blogs using the same slugs…

Final Thoughts

So, that's what I would do if all this data looked right…
Expired domains are fascinating…
If I ever buy a clean one, I'll make a case-study video…

Conclusion

But hopefully you learned something in this video…
Grateful for your support…