What is an expired domain and how can it help you in your internet marketing endeavors?
Put simply, an expired domain is a domain that hasn’t been renewed.
There could be a number of different reasons for this - maybe the owner forgot to renew the domain, there’s a possibility the domain registrar didn’t remind the owner (or the contact email address had changed in the year or more since the domain was registered), maybe the domain owner bought the domain intending to do something with it and then changed focus. There are hundreds of reasons that a domain has been allowed to expire.
So what’s in it for you?
First off, it’s generally considered that the older a domain name is, the more “important” it is. By definition, a domain name that has expired is at least a year old, which means that it is automatically older than purchasing a brand new domain.
Secondly, if the domain was used, there are likely to be links pointing to the website. 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.
Yup, that’s right! There are a lot of expired domain names that have a Google Page Rank and even attract traffic.
The bad news is, you won’t be the only person on the planet who is hunting for expired domains. The best of them are purchased the very second that they are put on the market.
Which means that if you are thinking about buying one or more expired domains either for a site of your own or to quickly “flip” and resell to other people, 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 gives you a head start and will allow you to snap up the domain names you’re interested in as soon as they expire and are allowed to be purchased again.
Check out this excellent affordable service to hunt down expired domains here.