Expired domain names are those Internet addresses that have not been paid for and extended for another billing period.
As a blogger or in other online businesses you should know that each domain needs to be renewed annually. Renewing a domain is simply paying for it before its expiry date.
If you don’t do this at the right time, you will no longer be able to display your website after the domain expires. Other services related to the domain may also stop working.
If you make money on the Internet, you absolutely can’t let your website be inactive.
Therefore, it is worth knowing where to find information about when your domain will expire and what to do in case you forget to pay for the domain on time.
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How to Check Expiry Date of a Domain?
You can check the expiry date of a domain in several ways. The easiest one is to log in to the user panel at the domain registrar.
I’ll show it with the Bluehost panel. You can register a domain there and choose one of several available hosting plans for your blog. This is a very convenient solution because from one user panel you will have access to both of these services simultaneously.
After logging into the panel in the Domains tab all your domain names are shown. The expiry date is presented under each of them. To extend a domain, click on the Manage button and select Renewal. Here you have the option to pay for the next year.
All domains registered in Bluehost have Auto Renew activated by default. This prevents accidental expiration and loss of the domain name.
Another way to check the expiry date of a domain is to use the who.is site. After entering the domain name you are interested in, you will find a lot of information about the domain, including its expiry date.
What Happens When a Domain Starts to Expire?
Each domain registrar sends reminders in advance with information that a given domain will expire. So you’ll have enough time to extend the domain.
Otherwise, your domain will begin to expire. The blog or any other website that was functioning on this domain will be invisible. Also, other services related to the domain (email) may stop working.
After entering the domain name in the browser, the user will be redirected to the parking page, where the information that the domain has expired will be marked.
A domain that is in the expiration period will not be removed from your panel immediately. Therefore, you will still be able to renew it, but an additional fee will often be required. This is called the Redemption Period.
After the expiration period, the domain is deleted. The time when a domain is removed is called Pending Delete and usually lasts from 1 to 7 days.
The domain will be removed from your list of domains and will go to the pool of free names, where it is available for registration for all.
How Can You Use Expired Domains?
Expiring domains may appear to be worthless and not applicable. Why should you be interested in domains that someone does not want to renew anymore?
However, if you know a little about website positioning and SEO, you know very well how valuable some of these domains can be.
If you can find those with a lot of high-quality backlinks, buying such a domain will be an excellent investment.
Traffic from expiring domains
So how can you use expiring domains? One of the most popular applications is to redirect users from an expiring domain to your blog or website. If you manage to buy a domain with backlinks from other large sites, all traffic can be redirected to your domain.
An interesting method of using expired domains is to build on them a background for positioning a particular page on which you earn money. Having a few such mini-sites, from which you link to the target site, you can raise its ranking in the search engine, and thus your income.
Another way to use expired domain names is to build a website or blog on them, which you can monetize. Usually, the age of the domain and backlinks, make the site quickly take high positions in Google. The traffic leading from searches is usually of high quality (targeted traffic), which allows for high conversion and high earnings.
How to Check the Quality of an Expired Domain?
Thousands of domains expire every day. Some of them are very valuable addresses, but at first, you may have trouble finding the most interesting ones.
Here are some important things to pay attention to when investing in expired domain names:
- Check indicators such as Page Authority (PA) and Domain Authority (DA). When buying expired domains try to make sure that their indicators are as high as possible – the Domain Authority is recommended to be larger than 25. I have already written more about PA and DA here.
- Verify that the domain is not removed from search results and that it is not banned by Google. The easiest way to do this is to type the command: site:domainname.com. Besides, it is also worth checking if the domain has not been excluded from Google Adsense. This is important because often displaying Adsense ads is one of the main ways of making money on the website. Other methods you will find in this post.
- It is also worth knowing what happened to the domain in the past and how the domain was used. You can do this by visiting the internet archive – Wayback Machine.
Where to Buy an Expired Domain Name?
Expired Domain Name Search Engine
If you are wondering where you can buy expired domain names, I recommend using one of the several websites offering auctions of such domains.
An interesting site is expireddomains.net, which is a very practical search engine for expired domains. Each domain is described in detail, making it easier for you to find a valuable address.
You can find names with almost any extension. Also available are those with the latest gTLDs. You can read more about how to select the right domain extension here.
You can easily filter the domains using the following indicators:
- BL: External Backlinks according to Majestic
- DP: Number of Backlinks from different Domains
- ABY: The Birth Year of the Domain using the first found Date from archive.org
- ACR: Archive.org Number of Crawl Results
- Alexa: Alexa Traffic Rank (3-month average)
- Dmoz: Status of the Domain in Dmoz.org
- C: DNS Status .com of Domain Name
- N: DNS Status .net of Domain Name
- O: DNS Status .org of Domain Name
- D: DNS Status .de of Domain Name
- Reg: Number of TLDs the Domain Name is Registered
- RDT: Number of Related Domains in .com/.net/.org/.biz/.info (starts with + ends with)
- End Date: Date the Domain will be removed from this Domain List
- RL: You can see a list of Related Links for the Domain
The column indicating the date of removal from the list also shows different colors. They indicate how much probability it is that the domain will be free to register on the specified date.
Green is the most accurate color, while red says the date is very difficult to determine. For some TLDs it is not possible to specify a drop date at the moment.
How to Purchase an Expired Domain Name?
Once you have selected a specific name you want to register, click on it. You will see a drop-down list – marketplace domain list.
Expireddomains.net is linked to 37 domain marketplaces, such as:
- snapnames.com
- dynadot.com
- godaddy.com
- dropcatch.com
You will be able to place a domain backorder on your chosen marketplace. If a domain expires and is intercepted by the service – it will be registered for you, as long as you are the only one interested.
If several people put a domain backorder on a given name – then it will go to auctions of expired domains. Here the rules are simple – the auction is won by the highest bidder.
You will be charged a domain fee only if you win the auction.
If a domain expires and no one is interested in renewing or capturing it, the domain is removed from the register of domains after a certain period of time and returned to the pool of free names. It can then be registered by any user.
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