How to Find High PR Expired Domains – Compiled
12 votes, 3.50 avg. tacos (69% full)

Update: Although PBNs still work, they now have a history of being targeted by Google and therefore may not be the safest option. This is why we now focus on creating online businesses that are independent of SEO traffic.

 

Note that this is part of the expired domain series which has been compiled in order of importance here.

 

This was originally a private post for interns, but I’ve opened it up to anyone and everyone now.  Enjoy.

<Disclaimer> A lot of people are having difficulty finding domains.  There is a real learning curve, so please be prepared for this.  As an option for those that are just starting out, I recommend you prove the model by first purchasing a few domains, or try out our latest service, RankHero.

RankHero allows you to test the viability of this method without having to invest the hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars it takes to find, build, host and maintain your own Private Content Network. </disclaimer>

 

Before you do anything, make sure you’ve gone through all of the following existing posts:

 

Podcast with Spencer #1

http://www.nichepursuits.com/podcast-9-30k-a-month-from-niche-sites-post-penguin-with-hayden-miyamoto/

 

Podcast with Spencer #2

http://www.nichepursuits.com/podcast-10-how-to-find-valuable-expired-domains-with-hayden-miyamoto/

 

How to find PR5+ expired domains for $9 Part 1

https://www.nohatdigital.com/blog/expired-domain-training1-html/

 

How to find PR5+ expired domains for $9 Part 2

https://www.nohatdigital.com/blog/expired-domain-training2/

 

Checking for spammy domains

https://www.nohatdigital.com/blog/do-not-buy-this-expired-domain-or-ones-like-it/

 

Domain Valuation (Outdated)

https://www.nohatdigital.com/blog/what-is-your-potential-expired-domain-worth-and-how-you-can-buy-a-list-of-available-ones/

https://www.nohatdigital.com/blog/valuating-expired-domains-v2-and-how-you-can-buy-a-list-of-available-ones/

 

Download this spreadsheet and use it to keep a record of your domains and their value:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AjWvbi29vDwmdFhGWHB2T21FMUlNTExRS25SX1FCTFE#gid=0

 

Figure out the Potential PR of the Domain (UPDATE: I no longer think this matters)

https://www.nohatdigital.com/blog/how-to-judge-the-immediate-potential-pagerank-of-an-expired-domain/

 

 

 

New Posts

Now that you’re sure you’re up to date with all of the existing material, you can move on to this post on how to use the DA Checker.

 

How to Use the DA Checker (Outdated)

https://www.nohatdigital.com/blog/how-to-use-the-da-checker/

 

After that, it’s time to work on your list building.   We’ve made the following posts for you to go over the options.  I suggest you read them all and find the technique that works for you.  Do make sure to spend at least a day on each technique though. Live casino games are really popular now. These games can be found in almost every online casino. Casino experts at https://casinomech.com have prepared an article about live dealer games and discussed significant aspects of these titles.

 

Using Scrapebox to Find Expired Domains

https://www.nohatdigital.com/blog/using-scrapebox-to-find-expired-domains/

 

Domain Finding Strategy: Public Data Sets

https://www.nohatdigital.com/blog/public-data-sets/

 

Domain Finding Strategy: Mining Drop Lists

https://www.nohatdigital.com/blog/expired-domains-drop-list-mining/

 

Metrics to look for and tips on expired domain hunting!

https://www.nohatdigital.com/blog/metrics-to-look-for-and-tips-on-expired-domain-hunting/

 

While you”re going over your domains, be sure to check this new post on checking for spam:

https://www.nohatdigital.com/blog/how-to-check-for-spam/

 

 

How to Find High PR Expired Domains – Compiled
12 votes, 3.50 avg. tacos (69% full)
  1. Hey Hayden. You should make a post on what to do after you buy a domain. What I mean is build it. Do you 301 all 404s to recieve pagerank? Do you rebuild the pages that have high PR pages linking to it? Or just put a few pages up and let it sit for a little bit? Also have you had luck just 301ing a expired domain to a brand new domain?

    Thank and great job on the site. Looking forward to new content.

    Nick

    • I have deliberately not made such a post as I’m pretty sure the majority of people will just copy it thereby leaving a much larger footprint.

      301s to brand new domains don’t work well enough to be worth it. I’ve heard to subpages is alright, but I still see much more value in keeping the domain alive as it is an asset on it’s own.

      If a page has enough links to make it PR4+ I will rebuild pages.

      • Yeah I kinda figured. Thanks for the response though. I have one more question. Im having a hard time seperating the subdomains from the domain (sub.domain.com to domain.com) in excel. I have seen the videos but somehow I cannot seperate them. I might be dumb lol but it would be awesome if you could let me know how. If you want you can shoot me an email.

        Thanks Nick

    • You can use Open Site Explorer’s “Top Pages” tab to figure out what pages are worth manually recreating. As for PR, I tend to focus more on the Domain Authority and Root Domain MozTrust metrics, and let the PR chips fall where they may. Of course, I guess it depends on if you are expired domain hunting for Page Rank or for link building.

  2. Hey Hayden, thanks for another valuable post! @ Nick John Muller from Google do said in one one the Google webmaster hangout that, Google will not pass 301 links juice if you simply do a global 301 redirect to the domain homepage. Instead 301 redirect old url to new one, or simply do 301 redirect to a new category.

    You can also use archive.org to locate and then reconstruction some of the old url I get better result doing it this way!

    Do not forget to put privacy lock on the expired domain you buy, I once forget to do this and none of the domain ever regain their PR, I think google see that it now owe by a new owner. But I have since learn my lesson I now use internetbs(dot)net, they offer a free privacy protection for life, not just the first year like namechaap.

    Ed

    • Ed, I have found that you sometimes have to take Google’s advice with a grain of salt. Instead, analyze the backlinks profiles of the domains at the top of the SERPs and see what THEY are doing. Like the old saying goes, if you want to be successful, do what successful people do.

      For example, I have found some domains with very spammy/poorly-spun content ranking at the top of the SERPs for highly competitive terms. They also had an overwhelming amount of exact match anchor text links. By all accounts, Panda and Penguin should have penalized them. But, the only thing I can see that they are doing differently is that they had a 301 redirect from a very authoritative domain.

  3. I bought a org.uk domain few weeks ago, set it up as a blank installation of wordpress, immediately it regains its PR 5. i left the PR 5 domain sit there untouched for few weeks.

    3 days ago, i asked my VA to put some content in it. My VA ended up putting some IM content on the webpage, which is totally unrelated to the former niche webpage.

    Today i found out the website turned into a PR 0. i checked the google index, it is still index, just no PR 5 anymore. i checked the backlink profile, the authority .gov backlinks are still there. Now this is a domain with strong backlink profile, not just a single high PR pointed to it. there are several high PR authority sites pointing to it, if one link took off, others will still be available. I am really confused as to what has just happened.

    Is it because the webpage niche is unrelated to the previous?
    Now this is a .org.uk domain, there are no privacy available. Or is it because google sees this as an obvious reclaimed domain?

    Other issue i came across is, some times i bought a good domain with a strong backlink profile. from the backlink analysis, the domain is a PR 5. but when the TBPR update hits, it turned out to be only a PR 2. the links are not no follow, this doesnt follow the page rank chart at all.

    can anyone lighten me up on this please? thanks.

    • The PR5 to PR0 is probably a penalty related to content (low quality/dupe), I don’t have whois protection on the majority of my domains and they’re fine.

      Also if you’re website had 0 content after the minor TBPR update about 10 days ago, then it would get a PR0. It would be PR5 after the next update if you add content and G crawls it.

  4. Hi Hayden!!

    First of all I want it to thank you for sharing such a great content. This stuff can LITERALLY change people’s life. Just by buying some high PR domains you can make a lot of money!

    Now, back to my question:

    I listened to both podcast you did with Spencer Haws, and in the last one you mentioned you like to get high PR expired “web 2.0” websites.

    But I haven’t found on your blog further information on how to do this. Can you share some tips about it? What special queries on Google or Scrapebox do you use for finding this expired high PR web 2.0 blogs??

  5. Hi all and thank you Hayden for sharing your techniques.

    I wondered if somebody could tell me how these Web 2.0s are actually found and registered? most of the free hosts will not let you register the expired ones…. Has anybody been able to register these successfully?

  6. Hi Hayden!

    Thanks for your info about High pR domains, I have a few questions, that may interest not only me, may be you do a post on this … :)
    1 I’m having a problem with Private blog network that I started. When you link from your High PR site, you link from the blog page, and the blog page doesn’t have that PR as the main domain, does it matter somehow? Or you post all you articles on homepage? For me that doesn’t make sense since I’m building news sites from them and I have more than one page and only the homepage have a pr3 for example. What you do in this case, how you structure you Sites?
    2 I’m competing with my keywords on a local niche where there is low with competition but the websites have a lotttt of indexed pages, you think I have chases with only a 4 pr2-pr3 private blogs linking to my site to rank in such a market?
    3 I have a site that seems to be deindexed by Google, I think the last updates hit me hard. Do you think there is a chance to restore that website positions, or after you got on Google radar, the site is dead?!
    Thanks so Much and I wish you all the best!

    • 1 – I link from the blog page. If you have good internal navigation your articles should be no more than 2 PR lower than your homepage (if you care about PR, which should only be the case when selling links).
      2 – It depends on the niche. If you see others ranking with only a few links and the same amount of content as you, then yes.
      3 – Likely not. I choose to move on with a new site targeting the same keywords.

  7. Hello Hayden. This techniques is very useful not just for me but to everyone who are still in doubt in finding expired domain. I have recently purchased a domain from domainka.com and wonder if how old it is and other history of the domain, I really don’t know what to do and I have found your site and I tried this techniques and it works. Thank you so much.

  8. Hi Hayden! Is me again =) I just came up with another question: I was reading Spencer post about expired domains and he said that the PR of the expired domain he purchased came back 5-7 days after he installed and add content to it. Now… Does this happend all the time or was because Spencer was lucky and the PR bar update was just around the corner? In any case, based on your experience… How long have you have to wait to see come back the PR of the expired domaind you bought?

    • It depends on the domain. If it’s off a droplist or something you should get it quick. Otherwise I tend to get about 20-30% success rates on IMMEDIATE PR. However after the next TBPR update they almost always get their predicted PR.

  9. Hi Hayden,

    When the stats from seomoz don’t look attractive (low DA and inbound links), but, majestic shows many inbound and overall backlink count very high – what do you do?

    Will you consider a domain that does not show up well on seomoz but other services or programs show many attractive metrics? Is seomoz once in awhile just not accurate when compared to another service and visa versa – others sometimes not as good as seomoz?

    • Yes, often times OSE will crawl a different area of the web than majestic and Ahrefs. Majestic has the biggest and most accurate database, with Ahrefs in 2nd and SEOmOz in last place. But in terms of metrics, SEOMoz is best.

  10. Hey Hayden! Thanks for your posts.

    So I did my thing and found a dropped domain that is linked to from a solid PR7 site, and the actual page the link is on is also PR7 (so even better).

    This dropped domain has a mozTrust of 5.7, which is good, however the other data is not so shiny: Page Authority: 30, Page MozRank: 2.84, Domain Authority: 16 (all from OSE).

    Backlinks are alive, but there are less than 10, and only that PR7 site is a decent backlink (others are not spam but PR0). Furthermore, the PR7 page that has the link, while on a strong site, has like 500 other links on that page (it’s a list of links).

    So which PR am I expecting if I rebuild the site with passable content? Is PR4 or 5 a possibility or the profile is too weak even with that one mega link?

    Thanks again! :)

  11. Great information on here! Any recommendations on the minimum amount of content to put up on the expired domains? I found and created one site. Has only content page with the norm contact us, faqs, privacy policy and etc. Is this sufficient? Or is more necessary?

    • I am currently putting up 3 pieces of content to put them up on backlink brokers. 5 would be much better, I’m only doing 3 as I have a lot of sites that I need to add. I’m pretty sure the whales don’t even look at the sites.

  12. Thanx for all the info ! great thread !

    so i basically get lots of 2 kinds of domains –

    dropped ones, with no great results, meaning most of their backlinks (even though pr 3/4/5 ) are blogrolls with 300+ links.. the stats of da/pa is usually around 20, while moz trust around 3.. and not alot of root domains.

    i get ton of these.. and the process of checking them is daunting.. i mean its extremely bad and i dont find any gems yet (still trying).

    The second type of domains i get are ones which are really wicked. meaning they have amazing stats, linking root domains.. these websites aren’t working but the domain is registered..

    How do you improve the process of finding domains? when im doing everything in bulk i get tons of domains.. weeding them out is the issue !

    Thnx for everything,
    Josh.

    • I still use root domain moztrust and DA as my starting point. Tell yourself you’ll only look at the profiles of say 10 domains a day, and only look at the 10 highest. You seem to have a good grip on the finding of the domains which is the hardest part, so just do that while working on the number of domains you find, and the quality of your list.

    • Im also in that same positions.

      im getting a lot of domains, most of are shit, so i manually weed them out.. lots of time.. BUT when i find good ones, the website dosent work, yet the domain is registered..

      Frustrating !

  13. Hayden – after the latest PR update by Google, I have found that quite a bit of the pages on my network have lost page rank :( Do you find that this happens often?

    • It happens, especially if you cross-link your network. If so, and one blog goes, everything could drop by small amounts.

      I tend to have more domains go up than go down in updates though.

      • Thanks for the response. Yeah I haven’t cross linked my network, they are all standalone – How in the world do you get your sites go up? Do you build more links to them? (or do you actually cross link? Ha)

  14. Hello friends,

    I’m looking forward to buy some expired domains. These are available at low cost at good auctions.
    As you know that if the domain is expired then it can’t show any PR (n/a) and other SEO factors.
    I need a tool to find PR and website history of expired domains. Read More……

    thanks

  15. I founded very good droped domain with 2 PR6 links, but with .org.au TLD. All domain sellers ask me 11-digit number and the name of organization. Can I do anything with this domain, or just to leave it alone?

  16. Do you have a updated spreadsheet with Majestic Citation Flow and Trust Flow as metrics instead of MOZ. I find Majestic to be much closer to google rankings

  17. Hey Hayden, Thanks a lot for sharing your wisdom with us. Highly appreciate it.

    One question, I saw that page rank was displaying on your google search results itself on your video, beside very search result. I tried to find such a pugin but I couldn’t. Please let me know how do you get that.

    Thanks,
    Nick

  18. I’ve been searching for domain names lately and I found several that have the da and pa that I’m looking for. If I look on the who is records for the domain it shows it has a expiration date from over a month ago. If I go to namecheap or godaddy and try to buy it. It says it’s already taken. Would you be able to explain why this is? If it’s expired shouldn’t I be able to buy it? Is there different stages of a domain name being deleted? It’s not like any of the domain names are a keyword or high value. I’ve been reading all these articles lately of people buying domains like this on the cheap and not through bidding wars and I’m lost as to what to do now. Thanks Man.

    Shaun

  19. Hayden,

    thank you for the info. I’m a starting IM and this helps me a lot. I never knew how this stuff worked but now I’m going to create my own blogging network. I’m a fan already and will keep following you and Spencer!

  20. Hayden,

    I’ve been following all of your great information on this site as well as your podcasts over at Spencers site. I wanted to run something by you and I figured doing it here instead of sending you an email could be beneficial to others here looking to find expired domains. So basically here is what I’m seeing :

    Domain 1 – Year 2003 – Dropped 1 time – It has no page authority on the http://domain.com, but on the http://www.domain.com it has a 31 PA, 17 DA, and Domain Moztrust of 2.26, in Open Site Explorer it has 6 LRDs, but in Majestic I see 18. Majestic is also showing a trust flow of 27 and citation of 22.

    Now I’ve been finding quite a few where there is nothing on the http;//domain.com, but the http://www.domain.com has similar statistics to the domain I mentioned.

    So a couple of questions:
    – Is the domain I mentioned a decent domain to pick up and use in a PBN for link building/selling links.
    – Should I be looking at the referring domains in Majestic or the LRD in Open Site Explorer as a basis to evaluate the domain.
    – Does it matter if the non WWW does not have any valid metrics on OSE or Majestic?

    This would be a great deal of help as I would like to start picking up some domains, but just want to clarify on those things so I am not tossing money away.

    Any information would be very helpful.

    – CJ

  21. Hi Hayden,

    Great article, found some nice new bits of information I have not seen before. This is something i have not read before

    “Use subdomain moztrust for the non-www. If it’s positive it’s likely not to have been SEO’d”

    Going to give that a go and see what comes up!

    Cheers
    Dwight

  22. HI Hayden

    I wish I had found this site a few weeks ago . Basically I have just started my own blog network by trying to piece little scraps of information together and I have bought an expired domain pr3 . The url sound as if it matches my niche.

    Unfortunately after reading your blog and digging a little deeper , I have worked out that the back links to it are Chinese and not related at all. Should I scrap this ( I paid $35 ) or should I just throw a load of related links at it ?

    Any advice welcome.

    Thanks In Advance

    David

  23. Hayden, I just snagged an expired PR 6 in a niche relevant to my site, and 301’d it to my main site. Two weeks later there has been little, if any, impact on rankings. I know you’ll probably recommend building this out as a separate satellite site, but I’m wondering if you might have any insight into why this isn’t working as intended.

  24. Hayden,

    Question: i had my site penalized by google and i am thinking to do 301 redirect and move the content to a new domain, is it ok do that? I mean is google going to see that as duplicate content or not?

    Thank you,
    Martin

    • Scott Davis says:

      That still works for sure, just be sure to identify the reason for the penalty otherwise it will happen again.

  25. Hey Hayden,

    Very nice blog. Do you mind to answer few questions?

    1)Which backlink brokers are you using to sell links? Maybe can you give few links except DP and WF forums if there any?

    2)Do you sell baclinks or rent backlinks? When client stop paying do you remove client links from your PBN sites or you remove them only from the home page and leave them as a blog posts?

    3)Do you sell packages of links(example: 5 sites package) or you sell links for each site individually?

    4)How much would you charge for this kind of package:
    5 sites
    1 guest post on each site written by them
    2 links in each guest post
    relevant to the client niche
    PR=N/A or 0
    PA>=35
    DA>=25
    Domain MozTrust>=3
    CF>=15
    TF>=15
    no spam backlinks

    5)Are you planning to set public your domain analysis tool in the near future?

    Thanks.

  26. Hey Hayden,

    I was wondering:

    Im finding a lot of domains that were previously parked (DomainSponsor,Sedo, etc) via checking them in archive.org. Is this bad?

    Had google penalized these domains for being useless and having the parked ads on them?

    Thanks

  27. Hayden,

    Thanks for your info! I’m finding domains that when put into moz are coming back with 1 linking URL.

    I thought I remember you saying that its possible that backlinks aren’t showing up and this actually does potentially have lots of backlinks but you would have to buy the domain to be sure.

    Am I wrong?

    Also, I’m interested in buying domains from you and I have a few questions about RH. Could we chat for a few quick minutes?

    TD

  28. Hello Hayden,
    Thanks for all those info you gave, lessons learned every other day.
    I also applied rof the internship group and ı hope you approve my application.
    I was wondering, if a domain expired years ago, does it still show up on Google when you searh for the domaion? Because sometimes I quit the domain I find when I don’t see it in the first place on serps? and I think that that domain might have been deindexed because of spam?
    Or am I wrong?

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