Should you register expired domains?

The market for expired domains has become far more complicated than it was just a few months ago. It takes a lot more knowledge to make good use of expired domains. I’ve registered a few expired domains. About 25% of the time it turns out to have been a good move. So, 75% of the time, it’s been wasted money/time/effort. I can do a quick analysis on a domain now, about five minutes, and at under ten bucks there’s not much of an investment. I’ve got a couple of real gems from expired domains that I’ve turned into profitible websites, so it’s worthwhile even with the low success rate. Understand a couple of things, though. First, don’t go into it hoping that you’ll get search engine traffic from an expired domain. You won’t. The best names will be snapped up at places like Pool, and Namewinner. Google is putting a penalty on 99.99% of expiring domains, stripping them of most of the value. The domain is also likely to get ‘red-tagged’ in DMOZ. If you’re starting a fresh website, it’s often better to get a fresh domain. The best reason to take an expired domain is if there was an old website there that was right on the topic of the new website you want to build, but only if that domain has some exisiting backlinks. What that means is that there are other websites that have a link to that domain. You can find out about that using tools such as Marketleap’s popularity checker. The potential traffic you could get from those links could far exceed the cost of the domain in value. You can make a good guess at that traffic by estimating how much traffic the pages that link to the domain are getting. You need to act quickly, though, to get a good website up at that domain because webmasters do check who their linking to and if they find the site expired they’re likely to remove the link.