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How to Buy Expired Domains for SEO (Without Getting Burned)
How to Buy Expired Domains for SEO (Without Getting Burned)
I've bought dozens of expired domains. Some were gold. A few were radioactive. Here's how to tell the difference before you spend a cent.
$87.
That was domain #1. 2019. Some dental practice in Tucson — the dentist apparently got tired of blogging about root canals and just let the thing expire. I still remember the exact domain name. Won't share it though because someone else owns it now and they're doing better with it than I did, which, fine. DA 35. Thirteen backlinks from health-related sites. Nothing special.
I threw up some teeth whitening content. Picked that niche because I could crank out reviews fast, not for any strategic reason. Eleven weeks later the site was pulling maybe 400 organic visitors a month. A fresh domain? That would've taken a year. Maybe longer. I didn't appreciate at the time how unusual that was.
So I got cocky. Obviously.
$200 on domain #2. DA 42, which I thought was incredible at the time. I was doing ad revenue calculations in my head while still on the checkout page. Embarrassing in hindsight. What I completely missed — because the Tucson thing had gone to my head and I thought glancing at a DA number was "research" — was that somebody had been running a PBN on this domain for two straight years. Spun articles about insurance, payday loans, the link farm greatest hits. The referring domains list was basically a spam museum. Every garbage directory in Southeast Asia.
Zero rankings. Not one keyword. The domain was radioactive and I was the last person to figure it out. Let it expire, ate the $200.
My buddy has a phrase for this: "stupid tax." He's not wrong.
The difference between domain #1 and domain #2 wasn't luck or timing. It came down to about 45 minutes of research I was too confident to bother with. That's really the whole thesis of this guide. Expired domains work for SEO — I've proven it to myself enough times now. But the gap between a domain that makes you money and one that eats your money is disturbingly narrow, and I've purchased 30-odd domains total at this point. Maybe 10 or 11 were mistakes. Some expensive. What follows is what I wish someone had spelled out for me before domain #2.
Why people bother with this at all
Dead simple concept. Domain registration lapses — owner forgot, owner doesn't care, business folded, whatever the reason. All the backlinks that existed? Wikipedia references, Reddit threads from 2022, some blogger who linked to the site in a roundup post three years ago? Those links are still out there, still pointing at the domain. Only now nobody owns the domain they're pointing at.
You register it. Now they point at you. Years of backlink building someone else grinded through, just... inherited. Overnight.
That's the sales pitch anyway. And honestly it works. I've watched it work on my own sites.
But Google's been cracking down hard, which — fair enough, people were abusing the hell out of this. March 2024 they dropped an "expired domain abuse" policy that goes after people scooping up domains to redirect link juice to unrelated sites or stuff them with garbage content. John Mueller called the practice "SEO-flotsam." Not exactly a ringing endorsement from the search team.
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What still works (I think — who really knows with Google at this point) is buying a domain that had a real life and rebuilding it with content in roughly the same area. Doesn't need to be identical to what was there before. Just close enough that the old backlinks still make sense in context.
Where I find them
I've tried like six or seven platforms at this point. Most are fine.
ExpiredDomains.net is the one I keep going back to. Calling it an addiction is... probably accurate. It's a free aggregator — indexes millions of expiring and dropped domains. The site looks like it hasn't been redesigned since 2008. It probably hasn't. But the filtering is weirdly good for how ugly the interface is. TLD, domain age, backlinks, DA, Trust Flow, Wayback snapshots — all there. Doesn't sell domains itself, just points you at whatever auction platform has them. I've burned entire Saturday mornings on this site (yes, I'm that person). Not proud of that.
GoDaddy Auctions is the one everyone knows. Pre-release auctions, standard expired auctions, and these closeout sales where stuff that didn't sell at auction gets listed at fixed low prices. $4.99/year for a membership. Weirdly enough the closeout section is where I've found some of my best deals — domains the auction crowd glossed over that still had like 15-20 solid referring domains. Requires patience though. A lot of patience.
Then there's NameJet and SnapNames, which do this backorder-to-auction thing. You drop $69-79 on a backorder, and if you're the only person who wanted that domain, congrats, it's yours at that price. Multiple people wanted it? Private auction. Prices climb fast. I lost a domain I really wanted last year because someone outbid me by $12 at the last second and I was too stubborn to go higher. Still think about it sometimes. Probably shouldn't admit that.
Dynadot I use less, but worth mentioning — low barrier to entry, just $5 in prior account spending to start bidding. Their auctions run 7-11 days with soft closes, so last-second sniping is harder. Kind of refreshing after GoDaddy where you feel like you need to be glued to your screen in the final minutes.
My actual process, for what it's worth: find candidates on ExpiredDomains.net (usually when I should be doing something else), pull up the metrics in Ahrefs, then go bid or backorder wherever the domain lives. It took me maybe 6 months to figure out that workflow. Before that I was all over the place.
This is where the money goes
Evaluation. The boring part that everyone skips and then regrets skipping. I've hemorrhaged more money here than anywhere else in this whole hobby (business? obsession?). Also made the most here. The difference was just whether I did the homework or got excited and clicked "buy."
I am not a patient person. Ask anyone. But I've forced myself to stick to a process, and I don't deviate anymore. Not even when there's a domain I'm desperate for and I can see auction time ticking down. FOMO has cost me actual money. Twice last year alone.
Wayback Machine first. Always.
Forget DA. Forget backlinks. Before any of that, go to web.archive.org and look at the domain's history. Click through snapshots from different years. The question is straightforward: did this domain stay one thing, or did it keep switching identities?
Gardening blog for five years. Then casino affiliate site. Then pharma spam. Close the tab immediately. Identity switches mean someone bought the domain to exploit old authority for something unrelated, and Google hammers that pattern now.
You're looking for evidence that a real human operation existed at some point. Actual articles, some design effort, a business that served real people. You're hoping not to see: parking pages ("this domain is for sale" — the kiss of death in my experience), redirect chains, auto-generated junk. Backlinks that piled up during a period of obvious manipulation are a liability, not an asset.
Dead periods trip people up too. Took me a while to understand why they matter as much as they do. Say a domain was active 2015-2018, then just parked for four years before it expired. Those 2015-era backlinks have been pointing at a dead page for ages. Link value degrades — slowly, but it does — and a long dormant period basically tells Google "nobody cared enough to keep this going." Not a great look.
Story time. Last year I found a domain — DA 50, backlinks from TechCrunch, Wired, The Verge. My hands were literally shaking. (I get weirdly excited about this stuff. It's a problem and I'm aware of it.)
Opened the Wayback Machine convinced I'd hit gold. 2012-2016: legitimate tech blog. Good content, real readership. Then 2017 happens and some genius buys it, turns it into a link farm. Two hundred-plus outbound links per page, all pointing at SEO tool affiliate programs. The TechCrunch and Wired links were from the good era, sure. But the domain's last four years alive? Radioactive. I closed the tab. Somebody else bought it — I'm guessing they paid several hundred bucks. Checked the DA a few months ago out of curiosity.
Google doesn't forget.
Backlink audit (this is where I get obsessive)
Okay, Domain Authority rant. DA is a Moz metric. Moz invented it. Google does not use it. I'll say that again because I've had this argument in Slack channels more times than I can count: Google does not use Domain Authority. Useful heuristic, sure. Starting point. But I've stared at DA 70 domains where the entire backlink profile was link farm garbage — 300+ referring domains, every single one worthless. Meanwhile a domain with DA 55 and 40 clean backlinks from real publications in a relevant niche? Crushes it.
Every time.
So. Pull the full backlink profile in Ahrefs or Semrush or whatever backlink checker you prefer. I use Ahrefs because that's what I'm used to, but they all show you basically the same data. I spend probably 15-20 minutes on each domain, which adds up when you're evaluating eight in one sitting (because I'm obsessive like that), but it's the 15-20 minutes that separates the $87 win from the $200 loss.
First thing I look at: referring domains. Are they real? I mean actual websites run by actual people. Businesses, publications, .edu sites, government pages. Or are they "best-seo-tips-2024.xyz" and "cheap-watches-online.net" — domains that were clearly created to pump link juice? You develop a sixth sense for this after a while. Takes about 30 seconds of scrolling to know.
Then anchor text. This might just be me, but I'd argue it's the single most reliable signal for whether a domain was legit or artificially pumped, and most buyers don't even check it. A real backlink profile has messy anchors. And I mean messy — the brand name, raw URLs, people writing "click here" and "this article" and "source" and whatever other lazy anchor text real humans use when they link to things. Some keyword-rich anchors too, sure, but mixed in naturally. You open the anchor text report and 60% of the entries are "buy cheap insurance online" or "best payday loans 2023"? Tab closed. Someone was running a link scheme and Google knows. Or will know.
Who's doing the linking matters too. If the domain was a food blog and the backlinks come from Bon Appetit, Serious Eats, random recipe bloggers — that's coherent. Passes the sniff test. Food blog with 50 backlinks from online poker forums? I don't care what the DA says. Something weird happened and you don't want to inherit it.
Last thing on backlinks (I swear). Dofollow versus nofollow ratio. You want a natural mix of dofollow from a bunch of unrelated sites — that's what real backlink profiles look like, because different webmasters have different linking practices. What you don't want is mostly dofollow from a tight group of 15 or 20 sites that all seem to link to each other. That's a private blog network. I nearly bought PBN domains twice because the surface metrics looked incredible. Caught it both times by looking at the referring domains list and noticing how many of them shared the same hosting provider and WordPress theme.
Weird heuristic. Works though.
Quick sanity checks before you wire money
Run site:domain.com on Google. If a domain that used to have tons of content returns zero results, it's been deindexed. Don't buy it. Full stop. People in SEO forums will tell you deindexed domains can be rehabilitated. And I mean... maybe? I've never seen it work reliably though, and I wouldn't bet $200+ on "maybe."
Cached pages or residual results in that search are encouraging. Means Google still has the domain in its index and the authority signal might still be live.
Trademark thing — this one bites people and they never see it coming. A domain expiring doesn't mean the trademark expired. Some guy I used to trade DMs with on Twitter bought "BrandNamePlus.com" when it dropped, figured it was fair game. Three weeks later the trademark holder filed a UDRP complaint and just... took it. No refund. Nothing. Check USPTO for US trademarks and WIPO for international ones before you buy anything that could conceivably be a brand name. I stick to generic, descriptive domains unless I've triple-checked. Maybe quadruple.
Oh, and run the domain through Google's Safe Browsing checker and Spamhaus. If somebody used the domain for phishing or malware at any point, it might still be blacklisted. Those blacklists are sticky. Like, really sticky. They hang around way longer than the actual bad behavior did.
The money part
Those $10-50 closeout domains everywhere? Mostly junk. They expired because nobody — not the original owner, not any domain investor — thought they were worth keeping. Once in a while you'll stumble on something decent in the bargain bin, but the hours sifting through garbage rarely justify the savings. I tracked this across 12 domains I bought in the sub-$50 range and exactly one turned out to be useful. Not great odds.
$100-500 at auction is the sweet spot in my experience. That's where you find domains with real backlink profiles that nobody overpaid for. Strong authority, competitive niches, brand-adjacent names — that's $1,000-10,000+ territory. And the premium stuff? I saw a single-letter .xyz sell for $100,000 on NameBio earlier this year. Wild.
The purchase price is just the beginning though. Renewal fees (sometimes included, sometimes a nasty surprise), platform/transaction fees, and the big one — content. You actually have to build something on the domain afterward. If you're buying an expired domain just to let it sit there or slap a redirect on it and hope for the best, you're wasting money. Probably inviting a penalty too.
Okay you bought one. What now?
This part frustrated me when I was starting out. Every guide I read ended at "purchase the domain." That's it. Good luck! No one told me what to actually do with it, and this is where I (and most people I've talked to about this) proceed to mess things up.
Rebuild content. That's the move, nine times out of ten. Go back to the Wayback Machine snapshots from earlier. What was the domain about? Write content in that lane. If it was a marketing blog and the backlinks come from marketing publications, you write about marketing. You do NOT turn it into a pet supply store. I'm saying this because I watched a guy on Reddit do exactly this and then complain that his "DA 45 domain isn't ranking." Of course it's not ranking, man. Links from MarketingProfs and HubSpot pointing at pages about dog chew toys make zero sense.
Why people expect otherwise I will never understand. But they do.
Redirecting the domain to a site you already own can work too. But the topic overlap has to be real — not "close enough," actually real. Marketing blog domain pointing at your marketing agency? Fine, Google tends to respect that. Marketing blog domain pointing at your sneaker store? I've watched Google just... ignore those redirects entirely. Saw it trigger a manual review once. Neither outcome is something you want.
Day one — I mean day one, not "I'll get to it this weekend" — add the domain to Google Search Console. Five minutes. Look for manual action notifications. Bad news if they're there, but way better to know now than after you've spent three weeks writing articles. The coverage report is worth checking too. Sometimes there are residual rankings you can build on. I picked up a domain in late 2023 that was still sitting on page 2 for three keywords. The day I registered it. Three keywords! Just sitting there.
If you see sketchy backlinks, Google's Disavow Tool is there for a reason. But be careful with it. Only disavow the stuff that's obviously spam — like, no-ambiguity spam. I learned this the hard way in 2022 when I decided to "clean up" a domain's backlink profile and disavowed something like 40% of its links. I wanted a pristine profile. What I got was a 30% traffic drop in two weeks. Chainsaw when I needed a scalpel. Took months to recover from that one and I'm still annoyed at myself about it.
Sometimes it just doesn't work
I debated cutting this part. Who wants to read about failures? But omitting it would be lying to you, so.
Two of mine went nowhere. I did everything. Wayback checks, backlink audit, the whole paranoid process from this post. Both ranked for zero keywords.
One was a travel blog. DA 48. History looked clean, backlinks came from legitimate travel sites, I even recognized some of the publications linking to it. Wrote travel content for three months — real articles, not junk. Google acted like I didn't exist. The other one was a tech review site, must've been from around 2014. Same story. Both indexed fine. Neither ranked for a single keyword.
What went wrong? I genuinely have no idea. Still bothers me.
That's the dirty secret nobody in SEO says out loud — Google's evaluation of inherited authority is a black box. Ahrefs gives you one number, Moz gives you another, and Google over in Mountain View quietly disagrees with both. Some domains carry invisible baggage from previous owners that no tool on earth can detect. You spend the money, you do the work, and you find out three months later whether any of it mattered. The only word for that is maddening.
Backlinks die too, by the way. Ahrefs studied this in 2024 and found that something like 66.5% of links vanish within nine years. A domain showing 200 referring domains right now — how many of those still actually load if you click them? 130? Less? That number shrinks every year. It's not real estate. It's more like a used car. Depreciates constantly. I'm not saying don't buy (I obviously still do), just... know what you're getting.
Google's official policy on expired domain abuse is, uh, not subtle. If you're gaming rankings instead of building something real, you'll get caught eventually. The timeline varies. What happens after doesn't.
Most SEO mistakes that tank rankings felt smart when you made them. That's the pattern. Expired domains can absolutely work. I've proven it to myself enough times to keep going. But they're seeds. Not gardens.
Or you could just not do any of this
My partner has asked me to stop browsing ExpiredDomains.net at 2am. More than once. The habit has not fully stopped, and I don't think it will, because I actually enjoy this. The scouting, the auctions, finding a domain with TechCrunch backlinks buried under 8 pages of spam results — it's like a treasure hunt for weirdos and I am, apparently, the weirdo.
The time math doesn't add up though. I know this because I tracked it. Sat down with a spreadsheet (because I'm that person) and logged my last acquisition round. Three to four hours scouting per domain that looked promising. An hour of due diligence on each one. Then you have to actually win the auction, which half the time you don't. Then write content. Then wait like two or three months hoping Google notices you exist.
Factor in that roughly a third of my purchases have been duds and the hourly return on my time is... well, I did the math and then closed the spreadsheet because I didn't want to think about it.
So yeah, this is where I mention Revised, and yes I'm biased, I work on the thing. But the whole expired domain process I just wrote 3,000 words about? We do it at scale. We scan thousands of expiring domains a week, throw out the spam, audit backlinks the same paranoid way I described in this post. When a domain has real authority — Wikipedia links, Reddit threads, news sites, that kind of thing — we register it. What's different from a normal expired domain marketplace: we don't sell you the domain and disappear. The contextual backlinks from those domains are what you actually get access to.
End result is the same — real backlinks from real sources pointed at your site. You just skip the 15-20 hours of research and the auction stress and the 2am rabbit holes. And the lying awake wondering if you missed a PBN signal on page 47 of some referring domains report. (That one might just be me.)
I'm not going to push it harder than that. You know where to find us.
Want to DIY the whole thing instead? Fine by me. I've done it 30-something times. The guide above is literally my process. Just — and I'm begging here — do the homework. All of it. I've watched too many people get excited about a DA number, drop $400, then three weeks later they're on Reddit going "why isn't my domain ranking" and it turns out the Wayback history was a horror show. Check the history. Check the backlinks. That's what matters. DA, DR, whatever metric is popular this month — that stuff is just decoration.
