in Black and White | SEO Secrets & Insider Tricks

Buying Expired Domains

The idea of buying an expired domain is not a new one, and many shrewd marketers have been taking advantage of this loophole for years. A domain may have expired for a variety of reasons; perhaps because the business no longer exists, or the owner has moved on to something new, or simply that the site has been forgotten about.

But whatever the reason for its expiration, a domain that has been registered in the past also has the potential to have been developed, and that means there could be a large amount of existing traffic. There are no guarantees of this, and in fact the opposite could also be true: If the domain was developed as a black hat site then it might even be banned by the search engines.

That is the gamble, but the potential rewards are massive and there are many who are more than willing to take the risk. One possible way to get an idea of the history of a domain is to run it through Way Back Machine to see how the site looked in the past.

Useful Tools:

Way Back Machine, Found at: http://www.archive.org/web/web.php