How professional domainers find and buy expired domains

The aim of this article is to give you an idea of how professionals purchase expired domains and how you can do the same. A professional domainer looks at different aspects of a domain based on the reason to buy the domain. There are three types of professional domainers:

Domain Traders – A domain trader buys and sells domains. Often these domains are sold to users who care more about the domain name than the metrics. Consequently a domain trader looks at:

  1. Brandability – The domain should be short and be brandable
  2. TLD – The domain should be a .com (sometimes .net and .org are also picked up)
  3. Trust Flow, Domain Authority – After the death of Page Rank, educated users are starting to prefer checking the Trust Flow and Domain Authority of a domain.

Domain Parkers – A domain parker buys and parks large number of domains and makes money off serving advertisements to organic traffic. He cares little about Trust Flow, Domain Authority and other metrics and much more about the natural organic traffic the domain gets. He looks at:

  1. SEMrush Traffic Metrics  – SEMrush provides details on the keywords that the domain ranks for in the SERPs and the volume and cost of the traffic it gets from these rankings
  2. Compete Visitors – Compete provides monthly traffic estimated from US to the domain
  3. Keywords in domain name for EMD algorithmic benefit – Although the Exact Match Domain (EMD) does not give as much SEO benefit as it used to, a Partial Match Domain (PMD) still has benefit over a domain that has no matching

SEO – A Search Engine Optimizer (SEO) buys domains in order to create a private blog network and build links to his website, thereby increasing the rankings in the SERPs

  1. It’s all about the back links – he spends a lot of time looking at the back links to the domain – placement, quality and whether the link is contextual
  2. Trust Flow is important – he places a lot of emphasis on the trust flow of a domain, as a high trust flow means that the domain has links from trustworthy sites.
  3. Topical Trust Flow Categories – domains with links from the same niche get a lot more benefit and therefore the topical categories are important for the domain
  4. Domain Authority – DA shows the ability of the site to rank in SERPs. Although DA has been recently losing favor with the top SEOs, it still is something that is looked at.