How To Buy Expired Domains

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Everything about Expired Domain Names

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When you plan to launch a website for your business or just move the website to a new domain, you can even look to buy an expired domain name. Expired domains come with a lot of baggage and you need to be aware of each of those pros and cons.

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If you can find a domain that matches your business, this can be a great deal for your business.

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There are few things that you need to understand and consider before you try to purchase an expired domain.

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What is an expired domain name?

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When a domain name that pointed to a specific IP address isn’t pointing to any domain now is said to an expired domain. The internet sees the websites as IP addresses, so every web server has a DNS system that translates the domain names into IP addresses.

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 When the domain has expired, the DNS won’t be able to translate or connect to an IP address and so it does not point to any live website.

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When a domain name expires, it does not become useless for an internet business, but it can be used to point to any other IP or a new website altogether.

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Can you Buy Expired Domain Name?

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First of all, we need to know that when we buy a domain, we do not get to own it. We only get it on lease for some amount of time ranging from 1 to 10 years. Most people when they buy a new domain set it for auto-renew so that they don’t have to worry about getting it renewed every time.

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When the domain is not renewed on the set date, anyone else can try to buy it. The process of buying an expired domain name is not the same as registering a new domain name or a brand name for a business.

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Depending on the type of expired domain name, there are a few ways that you can try to acquire it.

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How to buy expired domains?

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#1. The domain remains in the grace period if its expiry date is between 1-30 days in the past. During this period the domain can be renewed by the last registrant. In this case, he will have to pay a greater fee than the normal renewal amount.

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#2. If the domain is not renewed in the grace period of 30 days, the registrant loses the ownership of the domain. When this domain is up for sale, it will first be informed to the people who have expressed their interest to purchase it and they will be invited to purchase it.

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#3. If there is no expression of purchase interest for the domain, or the people who were earlier interested to buy it are no longer interested to purchase the domain, in that case, it will be auctioned to the highest bidder. The process of auction ends in 7 days.

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#4. Those domains that are not sold in the auction process are then termed as closeout domain names. These domains are entered back in the registry. Then domain resellers can hold these domains and “lease” out to any person or business wanting to buy these domains.

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#5. Those domains that have been dropped from the Registry and there is no record of them available are called deleted domains. These deleted domains can be bought in the same way as the new or unregistered domains are purchased.

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Is it good to buy an expired domain name?

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Expired domain names should not be bought just because they can be bought. Before buying an expired domain you need to check if it clean or not. The past record of these domains, if not clean can do considerable damage to your search engine rankings.

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Bounce rates can increase because of expired domains

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Depending on how the domain was marketed in the past by the earlier registrants, your site can attract unwanted and unrelated traffic.

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For example, you purchase a domain letscleanit.com for your company in the business of waste removals. You will most likely seek people looking for waste clearance. Your marketing efforts will be focussed on building links on the home cleaning or construction sites. Through these kinds of links, Google gets to know what your business is about.

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But if the previous owner of the domain letscleanit.com was in the business of waste paper shredding and has done his marketing efforts for those customers looking to have the office waste shredded. If these kinds of customers start coming to your website, they will not find what they want and will leave your site immediately. This kind of behavior is called bounce rate and if increases can be very harmful to your search engine rankings.

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Spammy backlinks for expired domains

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Businesses often want to buy expired domains so that they can build a high domain authority website. The domain authority of a domain is its relevance for a specific subject area or industry which is measured by link metrics.

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If a domain has a good quantity of inbound links from other sites, it is said to have higher domain authority. Each inbound link is said to be an endorsement from other websites. When these inbounds links of good quality, the search engines consider your websites to be relevant and trusted and so start ranking it higher.

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Search engines determine the value of these inbound links by way of relevancy ranking factors to check whether both the websites getting and providing links are of similar topic or business.

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So if the expired domain you just acquired had their links built on the websites which were in some other business completely different from yours, Google will see these links as spammy and can penalize your website. 

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If this domain had been penalized earlier for spam links, this can be passed on to your website and its rankings can suffer.

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How to carefully examine an expired domain

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How to check if an expired domain is safe or not?

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There are several ways by which you can vet an expired domain. Every domain that expires leaves some footprints behind that you can trace to check the history of the domain. Some of the ways are discussed below:

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#1. Try to check the online reputation of the domain online. Also, find out what kind of the website the domain associated with using the Wayback Machine. You can also find out the IPs associated with the domain from the domain checked websites like whois.

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#2. Use some free backlinks checking tools like Moz Open Search Explorer or Link Research Tools to see the old backlinks if any. This will give you an idea if the old links are spam or not.

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#3. Check if the domain is also clean. It has not been associated with malware or malicious codes. This will give you an idea if the domain has been blacklisted for any malware.

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It is very important to check these before you plan to buy an expired domain or else if the domain you just bought has a bad record of being banned or spammy for the backlinks, it will seriously harm the search engine ranking of your website and also the business.

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This kind of damage if done is tough and takes time to regain the lost authority of the domain.

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