Plan a project, search for a suitable domain name and register it, if it is free – this is the usual process of creating a new website project. But SEO experts know: There is another, tempting opportunity to start a project with a new domain – one that brings many benefits. This option is the use of Expired Domains.

Expired domains are domains that have “expired”, e.g. have already been deleted at the respective registry or will soon be. Thus, Expired Domains are former projects of other webmasters who could not or did not continue to care for them. After a certain expiration period, an Expired Domain can be re-registered – including the properties it has gained so far.

SEO benefits through Expired Domains

Therein lies the big advantage of Expired Domains: Often they already have backlinks , a domain popularity and other SEO-relevant features. Thus, an Expired Domain maintained by the previous owner is a perfect start to a new project and can save a lot of work on link building and building good visibility. An Expired Domain with a lot of good backlinks can help you to advance your project in the search results and at the same time forms a basis for further link building. In addition, SEO features such as domain popularity and the number of backlinks are a positive signal to potential cooperation and advertising partners.

But be careful

At least if the domain was actually maintained. After all, backlinks are not per se positive, but can even be harmful if they come from spam, irrelevant and / or unwanted pages. Also the way, if any, link building was operated, can decide on the quality of the Expired Domain. So should a contemporary link profile of course, so have a mix of different link types, and also contain soft anchor texts. If this is not the case, the website can be penalized or perhaps even already – ugly, if a new project is to be started.

In addition, caution is advised in a thematic turnaround: It can lead to a punishment from Google to register an Expired Domain on the topic of “housing” and suddenly operate them as a tech blog. If you want to modify an Expired Domain thematically, you should remove the old content and adapt it slowly to the new topic.

Also problematic: Although platforms specialized in Expired Domains allow for the search for specific criteria, you can never fully understand the entire history of a domain before you register it. So there is a certain risk to get a domain that has bad backlinks, whose link profile is unnatural, that has been punished once, contains spam or the like. There is no complete guarantee, even with expensive Expired Domains, which can quickly cost a high three or even four-digit amount.

Find a good Expired Domain

Expired domain services like serpchampion domains list and categorize Expired Domains of various industries and quality. There you can browse or search for specific criteria (such as topic, TLD, language, etc.) to find an Expired Domain that fits into your planning. In addition to the domain name, topic, age, domain popularity, PageRank and TLD, as well as the price, depending on the provider many details about the offered domains can be checked. This provides some assurance, but does not give you complete assurance that the domain you are ultimately opting for is flawless. In any case, you should have basic knowledge of the most important SEO metrics to assess the quality of the domain.

Internet users trying to locate and re-register deleted domains will quickly find that this can not be done manually. Professional domain merchants are very familiar with the registrars’ deletion processes and rely on sophisticated algorithms to pinpoint when a domain becomes free. Result of this research work are so-called deletion lists . There are numerous datasets on the Internet with domains that have already become vacant or could become vacant in the near future. Often, however, these can only be viewed for a fee.

Another problem is the re-registration by hand. The reason for this is so-called backordering providers , who pay for being able to observe expiring domains over a certain period of time and register them with automated processes as soon as they become available. Promising expired domains are, therefore, usually already out of print before a user manually clicks through the registration menu.