20How To Find Expired Or Expiring Domain Names For Your PBN

How To Find Expired Or Expiring Domain Names For Your PBN

1. Buy from domain brokers
2. Buy from domain auctionsIf you’re confident that a domain passes the checks to make it worth the purchase, you can buy directly from domain auctions. GoDaddy Auctions, NameJet, and SnapName are the three main domain auction houses to find high-quality sites with good backlink profiles.However, like all auctions, you can end up in a bidding war and struggle to find a quality domain for a good price. It’s worth trying to bid at the last minute so your offer doesn’t attract too many other bidders.
3. Backorder “pending delete” or expiring domainsWhen a domain has 5 days until its expiry date, it gets categorized as “Pending Delete” and is put up for pre-order at auction. You can (and should, if it’s valuable) backorder a domain through multiple auctions to increase the chance of one of them catching it. In this case, you set your maximum price and only pay once they’ve got the domain for you.It is also possible to try and catch those expiring domains yourself using drop catching software or manual registration. However, if a domain auction is trying to catch it, you’re extremely unlikely to win it over them.
4. Go through archive lists of dropped domainsDomain auctions won’t always pick up on every valuable expiring domain out there. As around 200,000 domains drop every day, there’s always a chance that you’ll find a quality site in archives of dropped domains that they’ve missed.
5. Use an expired domains crawlerFinally, you can use a crawler like DomCop to identify large numbers of domains that are available to register. This is useful if you’re building a large PBN, or if you happen to be a domain broker. You enter an authority website and the tool crawls through all of its pages to find broken backlinks, checks if they’re available, and presents their relevant metrics to you.

What Makes A Good PBN Domain?

Remember that the entire value of a PBN is in its backlink quality. If you need to save money building your network, buying cheap domains is NOT the place to do it.

A good PBN domain is a spam-free, indexed site containing many backlinks from high authority websites that are in the same niche as your money site. Google can identify if a backlink comes from a domain with content that isn’t relevant to your niche, and it will devalue that link. You need to perform checks to evaluate the quality of the domain before buying it:

1. Figure out the value and niche of the domains’ backlinks using a backlink tool e.g. Moz or Majestic. Checking the domain authority, referring domains, and backlink score will help you filter tens of thousands of potential PBN domains down to 10 or 20. Go by the following minimum scores:
   • Page Authority > 20
   • Domain Authority > 15
   • Citation Flow > 15
   • Trust Flow > 15
   Specific tools like Moz’s Spam Score and Majestic’s Topical Trust Flow Category give you further insight into the quality of the domain. The lower the spam score, the better. As for Majestic, aiming for a TF/CF ratio of 1 or above means a domain is trustworthy (Trust Flow – quality of websites linking to the site) and has a high volume of links to pass on (Citation Flow). A TF/CF ratio of less than 0.8 implies a domain has fake backlinks.
2. Then perform manual checks on a domain before buying it. Check each backlink yourself for spam, SEO, redirects, and registrar history.
3. Check anchor text for mentions of porn, gambling, pharmaceuticals, or foreign language content – these are all signs of spam, and domains should therefore be avoided.
4. Check backlinks for signs of low-value SEO like blog network links, directory spam, and comment spam. If a domain does not look natural, Google will devalue its links.
5. Check the percentage of exact match anchor text seems natural: it should be below 15% at the highest.

Check Wayback Machine to see if the site has contained content that isn’t relevant to its domain name. This is a red flag as it implies that the domain has been (poorly) used as a PBN before.

You should also check to see if the site was redirected to a new site before it expired. If so, the link juice will most likely stay with that redirection, so the domain isn’t worth it.

Even if Wayback doesn’t pick up on a redirect, use a plagiarism checking tool to see if all the content has been moved to a different domain and 301 redirect-ed.Check the domain’s “WhoIs”, or registrar history. If it’s been registered and dropped more than once, the Wayback Machine checks are especially important to know it hasn’t been abused.Check the domain is indexed. Run a simple search on Google for “site:domain.com”. If no results show up, the domain has not been indexed and it has been penalized before.

If a domain fails to pass any of the checks in this section, don’t buy it. Chances are it will end up being penalized and will be a waste of your money. This is key to ensuring you’re building a safe and footprint-free PBN.

By using PBN.Hosting, you’ll also have access to reports after setting up your network to keep an eye on your link metrics, measure their impact on your SEO, and flag any issues that could damage your strategy.