And use them for their PageRank, Age, or Traffic
In this post I will share the easy method I use to find expired domains with age and PR to use for my SEO campaigns. I will also demonstrate how to check for fake PR using Ahrefs, Dropl, and a Fake PR checker website to make sure you don’t get ripped off!
You have to be careful when buying PR domains because a lot of the time the PR can drop/disappear shortly after you set up a new website on the domain. Below the video I show you even more ways to check for fake PR, and also some ways to decrease the chance of a domain losing its PageRank after you buy it, which can still happen even if the PR has not been faked.
Finding Expired Domains To Buy
My favorite way to find expired domains is using Swift Drops. I haven’t found anything else that even comes close to it for finding expired domains with traffic on exactly what I’m looking for. Whether I’m looking for age, PageRank (PR), traffic, or whatever, Swift Drops is the only place I recommend because it’s the best, period.
Simply log in, fill out your options for what you’re looking for (PR, age, traffic, etc), put in your keyword, and hit search. Then you can sort the results from high to low by any of the filters, PR, age, traffic, time left until it expires or until the public auction comes to an end, price, backlinks, you can sort the results by any of those factors depending what you’re looking for.
Buying Expired Domains For Their PR
Check The Backlinks!
The most important thing when buying a domain for its PR is to check the backlinks. The domain age and backlinks are a good indicator of whether the PageRank will stick or not. If the domain has only a few backlinks, or none at all, then stay away! The chances are high that the PR will drop after you buy it and set up a new site on it!
Use Ahrefs or Blekko To Check Backlinks
In the video I show you how I use Ahrefs to quickly check the backlinks to a domain, but you can also use blekko.com to check for backlinks as well. Since the demise of Yahoo Site Explorer everyone’s been looking for a free solution to check backlinks to their domains, and blekko seems to be the best choice for a free backlink checker right now.
Ahrefs is definitely the better choice of the two, but to use it for more than 5 actions per day requires a paid subscription. I use Ahrefs myself and recommend it, but if you can’t afford it right now you can use Blekko. The difference is that Ahrefs is better at finding backlinks, for the example site Ahrefs found 98 links while Blekko was only able to find 25.
To use Blekko to check backlinks, simply type in the URL you want to check and add /inbound after your URL to show the inbound links:
Look for a domain that is a few years old, is still indexed in google, and has backlinks from more than a few different IP addresses. Inspect the backlinks that you find with Ahrefs or Blekko to see if they are quality if you think the backlinks will stick for a long time, or if the site owner is likely to come along and remove the links. If you think the backlinks are suspicious or that they might not stick, then avoid buying the domain because if the backlinks disappear, so will the PageRank.
Checking for Fake Page Rank
The most important thing when checking for fake PR is to check the backlinks that the site has. But you should also go over to this free fake PageRank checker that I usually use when buying domains for their PR.
Just put in the domain you want to check and hit go, if the results come back saying that the domain has fake Page Rank then don’t buy it! If it comes back clean, then check the backlinks to verify it for yourself and take a guess at if the backlinks it has are going to stick, and then make your decision about if you should buy that high PR domain or not.
Buying Expired Domains For Their Age
Really the only thing that’s important when buying an expired or dropped domain for its age is finding out if it’s in Google’s index. To do this, just go over to google and type in “Site:domainname.com” and see what comes up in the search results. If nothing comes up, that means the domain is not indexed and it has no age, even if Swift Drops tells you it is 5 years old.
For the age to count in Google, the domain must remain indexed. Domains can be dropped and expired multiple times, so if a domain was registered 5 years ago but dropped out of the index after being abandoned by a previous owner, then the age went with it. Some people say that this doesn’t matter and the domain carries its age with it whether it is indexed or not.
In a way thats true, you could say the domain is 5 years old. But if you’re using the age for an SEO advantage, it goes by how long Google has had the domain in its index, not by when the domain was first registered.
Buying Expired Domains For Traffic
If you’re buying an expired domain to steal its left over traffic and 301 it to your new site, or to hit them with some sort of advertising, then you really just have to check out traffic stats for the domain on sites like alexa.com and trust what it says on GoDaddy and Swift Drops.
I hope this guide will help you better understand how to find aged domains or domains with PR for your SEO campaigns. If you use the tools and methods I shared in this post it is easy to find expired domains for whatever reason you want.