How to find expired domains

In recent posts I described how to find available domain names and how to avoid banned domain names while looking for that perfect domain name for your website.

If you want to learn more domaining tips and tricks like these, read my domain ebook.

I also made a promise that I will continue that trend of educational posts by explaining how you can find expired domain names and that is what this post is about.

DailyChanges indicate that there are over 90,000 domain names deleted every day. That is a huge number of domains you’d have to traverse in order to find gems that you might be interested in registering. If you try and do this by trying to register domains one domain at a time, you will get disheartened and give up quite quickly.

So, you need a plan to do daily searches of expired domain names.

Firstly, we need to find bulk sources of expired domain names. I find the odditysoftware lists to be quite good for this purpose. Of course, there are others too. Usually, the websites that list bulk lists of expiring/expired domains allow you to filter the lists by date, alphabetically and some also provide a feature to filter lists by character length.

Once you have your bulk list of domains, you should head on over to Moniker, EuroDNS or some other registrar and browse through to their bulk registration tool.

Select and copy a list of domains from your bulk expired domain source website.

Once copied, paste the list of domains into your Moniker bulk registration tool. Some lists might need cleaning up before you can attempt the bulk registration. Hit the register button to filter through this list. (Note: the reason you are doing this is that pretty much all expired lists have domains that have already been snapped up by domain speculators… it is safe to attempt registration with a bulk tool. And in any case, even if all of them are available, you can always empty your cart once you confirm which domains are available. )

Copy the available domain names returned by Moniker’s bulk registration tool into a text document. Repeat the above process. After a while you will have compiled an extensive list of expired domain names that are available to register.

Ok, so you have a filtered list of expired domain names which are available to register. A lot of these domains are available for a good reason - they are simply not good enough to register. Still, some of these domain names may turn out to be quite good.

Your next step involves visually reading through your text document. See if you can spot a domain name which makes sense, contains cool keywords or just strikes you as interesting. The visual filtering process may take you anywhere from 5 to 20 minutes.

Cut these domain names from your text document and paste them into a new, filtered text document - your expired domain short list.

Once your visual examination is over, you will have two text documents. One containing your shortlisted domains and one containing all the available domains.

Before you ditch your long list of available domains, run it past a tool like the Link Popularity Checker to see whether any of the domains have existing links. You might find that some domains - although ugly - have quality backlinks which makes them worth registering.

As for your shortlist of domains, you can run it through the link popularity check tool to to help you decide which to register. In addition to checking backlinks, you can use a tool like WordZe to see how popular and sought after the domain keywords are amongst web users. This may help you decide which of your shortlisted domains to register too.

Stay tuned for the coming days as I post about how you can find expiring domains and prepare a contingency plan to buy them at affordable prices.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 26th, 2008 at 10:59 pm and is filed under Domain News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.