How Expired Domains Can Help You

You've maybe heard that there are such things as "expired domains" but you're not sure how buying an expired domain can help you. Som what is an expired domain?

Put simply, an expired domain is a domain name that has come to the end of the time it's been registered for and hasn't been renewed.

As with anything in life, there are all sorts of possible reasons this may have occurred - it's possible the domain's owner simply forgot to renew, maybe their domain registrar didn't remind them (or used an out of date email address to tell them), it's quite likely the domain seemed like "a good idea at the time" but the owner never actually did anything with it and just let it sit in cyberspace. There are hundreds of reasons that a domain has been allowed to expire.

So what's in it for you?

Firstly, Google are said to give more importance to domains the older they are. By definition, an expired domain is at least a year old, which means that it is automatically older than purchasing a brand new domain.

Secondly, if the domain has actually been used, there may be existing links to the site. There's also a very good chance that the search engines will know about it and will have indexed it.

If you're extra lucky, the domain may have had sufficient importance to gain some Google Page Rank.

Yes, that's right! There are a lot of expired domain names that have a Google Page Rank and even attract traffic.

The trouble is, you won't be the only person on the planet who is hunting for expired domains. The best expired domains are purchased the very second that they are put on the market.

So if you're thinking of buying expired domains either for your own use or to "fix up" and sell on to others, you'll need to be quick off the mark.

The simplest way to achieve this is to use one of the online services that will show you a targeted list of domains that are due to expire soon. This will give you an advantage and allows you to snap up the domains you want as soon as they're released back into the pool of available domains.

You can find one of the best services for tracking down expired domains here.