Expired Domains

Let’s talk about expired domains real quick. You already know what this is about. They’re basically free real estate. That is, until someone plants a flag in them for a little over $10 and they’re off the market for good. Well, until that same someone forgets to renew their ownership. What happens then? The domains return to being ownerless, of course. Except, the marketplace that was used to purchase them in the first place has every right to start a bidding war. It’s a complicated mess. Sometimes they’ll just return to obscurity and be up for grabs as if they were never owned in the first place. Other times, they’ll be wildly sought after and people will be throwing money at their screens, hoping to catch them.

Flipping for Profit

Naturally, there are many great ways to monitor both expired domains and domains that are close to their expiration, but not quite there yet. You want to keep an eye out for all kinds of potential investments. It’s quite literally the same logic that goes into proper real-estate. So, following in that same logic, you can buy someone else’s property, wait for them to abandon it, then buy it dirt cheap, enter a bidding war for a domain that isn’t wanted by the original owner anymore and so on.

Once you have a domain, whether it’s new or used, you’re free to either keep it and try to turn a profit with it, improve upon its value and resell it or just flip it right away for a profit, if you can get away with it. There’s also the option to sit on the domain for a long time while encouraging your domain middle-man company to accept offers to purchase and reach out to you. You can specify how much you’re willing to sell it for and wait for a good offer. I guess it’s as much like stock trading as it is like real-estate. This is where ExpiredDomains comes in handy.

ExpiredDomains Vs. Competitors

There’s a reason why ExpiredDomains aren’t listed as the first tool for finding expired domains on my site. Domain Hunter Gatherer took that golden medal for several reasons. The one that should ideally stick out the most to you is that that service is paid. You need a monthly subscription. It’s also backed by a company that does a lot of research to try and stay on top with viable information on expired domains.

Then, there’s ExpiredDomains, which is entirely free. It’s owned and operated by one guy, who offers it to you out of the goodness of his heart. I don’t know his actual motivation, but the damn service is free, so I don’t see how he might be ripping you off. He has no way of earning a profit off of this shit.

Free for All

The owner encourages you to use the site to your heart’s content. There are no real limits to the number of searches you can perform. So, ExpiredDomains could, in theory, be your only source of information when you’re on the prowl for new domains to get your hands on. That being said, there are some natural limitations to using a service that’s operated by one guy. First of all, it’s not lightning fast with the ability to give you a million result Excel sheet dump of the data. You have to use the site and make database calls manually. In layman’s terms, you can filter any way you want, but only get the top results of a given query. This is probably because his site literally can’t handle the mass traffic that would come in if people were allowed to scalp this data en masse. They’d knock his entire operation down.

No Bulk Processing

He also warns against using the site with any kinds of bots, local or otherwise. If you’re using some sort of automatic scraping tool on ExpiredDomains, you will get booted from the site. It’s not permanent. He mentioned that he would reinstate offenders’ accounts if they ask politely. But, using any kind of automated software on his site will lead to a ban, regardless.

I personally don’t see any problem with this, since the service is entirely free. It’s only natural that you’d be limited in ways that serve to keep the damn thing running. There are millions of results on here, with tens of thousands of new expired sites coming in under the “.com” sub-domain alone. That’s a lot of data for a single server to process. It’s a miracle we get to use ExpiredDomains in the first place.

Quick, Simple, Painless

Now, this site isn’t the only free expired domain search location on the web. There are others. Some are even listed here, under ExpiredDomains on my site. You can check them out; they’re pretty great. I like this site specifically because it seems like the labor of love of one guy who really knew what he was doing. All the layouts are perfect and the site itself is simple. There’s no unnecessary overhead, decoration or moving parts. It’s a simple ass site for simple ass porn webmasters who just want to get their hands on the crucial information that gets the job done. So, forget about advanced layouts and animated ads. This is a one-stop-shop for some good old legacy style browsing.

Speaking of the layouts, I have to mention the filters because there are so fucking many of them. You’re free to avoid them all-together if you’d like, but they’re there under the advanced search for when you need them. So, let’s say you’re only interested in domains that are available for purchase. You can check them out exclusively. You can also add in all the domains that are currently up for bids. It’s your choice.

Extremely Specific Filters

If that wasn’t enough, you can also enter entire ranges for values across the number of backlinks, ACR, Alexa rankings, WBY and ABY years and a shit ton of other values. Ok, let me try and cover some of the more important ones. There are a ton of options for the actual text within the domain. So, you can flag unwanted characters or phrases, with as many terms as you want. This is great in case you want to avoid the kind of shit that’d get you blacklisted. You can also opt into specific keywords and cross-filter any way you’d like. This is great for synonym sites, if you’re trying to grow a network.

There are also some checkmarks regarding the name, like, if you don’t want there to be hyphens in the name or if you want something that’s only comprised of letters. Hell, you can even limit the exact numbers of letters, hyphens, vowels, consonants – this is an insane level of detail and dedication. Next up, there’s the dictionary filter, with a bunch of country flags that you can tick. Finally, there are the listing settings where you can choose how recent the actual information is. You’re also free to target sites that are about to become expired so that you can catch the exact time when they become available.

Some Degree of Uncertainty

Keep in mind that all of this information is speculative to a certain degree. It’s not that ExpiredDomains is just guessing, far from it. This site is pulling from a lot of official public sources. This data is legitimate. The problem is that a lot of these domains exist in a sort of quantum state of being both abandoned and not abandoned at the same time – i.e., you have no idea whether their owner will renew them last minute. There are also some domains that straight up do not allow the public to know when they’re going to expire, so guesswork is actually involved there.

Finally, you have to take into account that the SEO information, while very useful, isn’t actually all that helpful. Yes, it’s being drawn in from reputable sources like Alexa, but that’s rarely telling you the whole story. First up, you have to consider why these domains got abandoned in the first place. Maybe they were having a particularly tough time getting off the ground. Or, perhaps they were part of a backlink network that went awry and you’re running the risk of buying a lemon. You really can’t judge all of that from the information you get on this site.

You have to dig deeper, a lot deeper. There are other tools for that job and you can straight up find them under my SEO sections, but for the initial domain discovery, ExpiredDomains will do just fine. If you want something a bit more premium, check out Domain Hunter Gatherer or some of the below listed alternatives. As far as free solutions go, I think that this site is absolutely killing it and I can’t wait to see what this dude does with it in the future. He mentioned a while back that he’s working on an automated API so that users can access data remotely. That’s really something to look forward to.