Domain Hunter Gatherer Review

Domain Hunter Gatherer is one of the best tools on the market for finding aged domains/expired domains that already have amazing backlinks profiles and traffic. Domain Hunter Gatherer makes life easier by automating most of what is normally a difficult process for you.

And if you’re like me…you know the power of buying expired domains.

A domain that’s been around for many years can have a lot of quality backlinks.

They retain their previous ranking and SEO power, so if you buy them…it could give you a head start with search rankings and traffic.

Unfortunately:

Not all expired domains are made equal!

So if you want a great expired domain, you need to do your research.

You need to look at:

You should also check it’s Majestic or Moz Rankings to determine the quality and trustworthiness of the website.

Yeah.

Finding a decent expired domain can be pretty time-consuming and challenging so I am going to show you how to use Domain Hunter Gatherer to find the real diamonds.

I’m also going to share some of the amazing expired domains that I found using the tool and the settings I used to find them.

What is Domain Hunter Gatherer?

Domain Hunter Gatherer is a desktop-based tool that allows you to search in real-time and access a near unlimited supply of high quality expired domains.

It contains all the essential metrics from backlinks and SEO checkers like Majestic and Moz. This is extremely helpful when it comes to assessing the quality of the website.

It really does take the hard work out of buying expired domains while helping you to avoid all of the most common pitfalls.

What Are Expired Domains and How To Use Them?

An expired domain is one that was previously registered by a business or person and wasn’t renewed before the expiration date.

Meaning rather than buying a new domain with zero SEO value you can search for the perfect expired domain for your niche.

So how can you leverage them to your advantage?

• Build an Authority Site: If you start from scratch with a new domain, you need to build its authority. An expired domain that already has authority, tons of SEO value and backlinks. This way, you can rank much faster.
• Create a Private Blog Network: Here, you can build a network of private blogs that link back to your site. This is a fast way to build backlinks and rank higher. It’s also an extremely powerful technique because…you’re in control of everything (from content, relevance to even the strength of the domain!)
• 301 Redirects: While I don’t recommend you do too many of these, you can also redirect the expired domain to your website. Here you can pass over the link juice and traffic

 

How Much Does Domain Hunter Gatherer Cost?

Domain Hunter Gatherer offers 3 different plans.

A free plan, a premium plan costing $17 per month and a professional plan costing $97 per month.

These include:

• Free Plan: The free option is great if you want to test and trial the service. It’s supported by ads (so you’ll get the occasional pop-up here and there).
• Premium Plan: The Premium Option costs $17 a month. Here, you gain all the features from the free plan and access to Web 2.0 Hunter. It’s a solid option if you want to find expired domains to build a PBN or several authority sites.
• Professional Plan: The Professional Plan costs $87 a month. It’s significantly more expensive than the premium option as it comes with exclusive features. If you’re looking to build multiple authority sites and numerous strong PBNs, explore this option.

 

Domains I Bought With Domain Hunter Gatherer

I’ve purchased a few great expired domains with solid backlinks with this tool because I knew I couldn’t create the same backlink profile with this kind of budget.

Domain 1 – $79

The first one I purchased was in the blogging sector.

This expired domain had 128 backlinks from some very solid sites in the niches.

It has backlinks from Wordpress and CopyBlogger… and one of the largest content marketing education companies online.

Domain 2 – $125

I purchased another expired domain in the digital marketing sector for $125.

It has a solid backlink profile from lots of relevant high authority domains.

But that’s not all. There were also backlinks from GIPHY, a major SaaS company and a popular digital marketing forum.

What Do I Get For My Money?

So let’s take a closer look at the tool to show you what you actually get for your money.

Desktop Based Tool With Real Time Searching

One of the things I love about Domain Hunter Gatherer is that it’s desktop-based.

That means it runs on your local computer and runs all of it’s queries in real time – no cached out of date results here.

If you want something quicker with instant results, you might want to have a look at my Spamzilla review instead.

5 Ways to Find Expired Domains

Domain Hunter Gatherer offers many ways to find expired domains. First, we’re going to look at the Expired Domain Hunter tool.

Hunt for Keywords:

Enter a few keywords from your niche. It will find expired domains with links from websites that are currently ranking for these keywords.

Hunt From Websites:

Enter a website to find expired domains that link back to that website. For example, you can find expired domains with links from key authority sites like Wikipedia.

Reverse Hunt Domains:

Enter a domain, and it will find all the backlinks to that domain. The software will scan these backlinks to find expired domains. A super clever and a great way to snap up domains that also link to your competitors.

Domain Auction Hunter:

Unlike the approaches above, we’re going to click on the Domain Auction Hunter tab at the top. Then, we’re going to focus on Hunt Domains. Enter your keywords to search 8 expired domain marketplaces.

Web 2.0 Hunter:

We’re also going to switch to the Web 2.0 Hunter tab at the top. Search for current keywords to find relevant expired domains from 20 different web 2.0 platforms.

Below, we’ll go through the step-by-step instructions on how you can find expired domains via these 5 different ways.

Search By Keywords

To begin, click on ‘Expired Domain Hunter’ and select ‘Hunt from Keywords’.

In the search keyword bar, enter your keywords, separating them with a comma. Domain Hunter Gatherer will go to Google and search for your target keywords.

It will pull out websites that currently rank for that keyword and then spider those websites, looking for links to expired domains.

Then, click on ‘Search’.

A popup will ask you if your list of keywords is correctly formed. Click on ‘Yes’.

It will then go out and search for these results.

As you can see here…

There’s a list of expired domains ranking for the keywords I typed above.

I’ve organized my columns so that my Majestic Metrics are to the left, and the list is ranked based on Majestic’s TrustFlow score.

Here, if I click on one of the sites like ‘veganbodybuildingtoday.co.uk’, you can see that it’s available to register right away for $7.58 per year.

If you’re wondering which domains are the best to choose from the list, I’ll go into the critical metrics below.

Find Expired Domains With Links From Specific Sites (Authority Links)

If you want a link from Wikipedia, you’ll need to click on ‘Expired Domain Hunter’.

Select ‘Hunt from Website(s)’.

And then enter the Wikipedia domain address in the ‘Crawl Website’ box.

Enter in your Crawl Levels.

You’ll see a pop-up that asks you if you want to do offsite crawling. Click on ‘No’.

And the tool will be off to work!

During this process, Domain Hunter Gatherer will go to Wikipedia and pull back 5 levels of pages. It will then crawl those pages, finding expired domains.

Here, you can see some pretty high-level domains with great TF scores…all with backlinks from Wikipedia.

If you want to get started, you can begin by thinking about the authority websites in your niche. Then, find an expired domain with a backlink from that authority site.

Reverse Hunt Domains

Reverse Hunt Domains is one of my favourite features from Domain Hunter Gatherer!

It’ll analyze a domain and then find all the backlinks that are pointing to that domain. It’ll see if any of the sites linking to my domain are also linking to expired domains.

Meaning you can get backlinks from the same domains as your competitors.

To begin, click on ‘Expired Domain Hunter’.

Then click on ‘Reverse Hunt Domains’ and enter in the domain.

Then hit ‘Reverse Crawl’.

You will see something like this.

After it finishes loading, you can see many powerful domains.

Find Expired Web 2.0 Domains

Before I show you how to find expired Web 2.0 domains, let’s look at what they are.

Web 2.0 is the second generation of the world wide web. It focused on allowing people to collaborate and share information. Think…social media, blogs, and online forums.

I’ve used Web 2.0 sites to build a PBN…and I’ve seen some great results, despite some pretty strong competition.

To begin, click on ‘Web 2.0 Hunter’.

Then go to the ‘Search Settings’. Here you can choose exactly which Web2.0 sites you want to find expired domains from.

Now, pop back to ‘Hunt Aged Web2.0s’ and type in your keywords.

Click ‘Yes’.

Domain Hunter Gatherer will find expired Web 2.0 domains around your keywords.

After loading, you will see something like this.

Once again, there are some pretty strong contenders.

There are many domains from:

But the ‘Starbucksorder.tumblr.com’ site is a great site to begin with.

It also costs very little. All you need to do is go to Tumblr and register the domain.

Critical Metrics

You’re probably aware that there are many metrics on Domain Hunter Gatherer.

I’ll go through the general metrics. But I’ll also show you which ones I focus on when choosing the best-expired domains.

If you right-click the top row, you will see this. This is a list of metrics you can add or remove from your table.

You can filter based on:

Domain Hunter Gatherer pulls a lot of data from other tools. So you could seriously save a lot of money by leveraging the metrics that come with Domain Hunter Gatherer.

But if you’re feeling a tad overwhelmed, here are the metrics you need to pay attention to:

1. Domain History

You need to know what the website’s previous activity was.

Below, I’ll show you how you can quickly see what the site looked like and how you can even rebuild it in 1 click.

Click here to learn how to check your domain ownership history & historic domain authority.

2. Majestic – TF, CF, and CF/TF Ratio

TF stands for Trust flow. It’ll show you how trustworthy a site is. The higher, the better.

CF stands for Citation Flow. CF represents the number of links the site has. The more links, the higher the number.

It’s ideal if the TF and CF are in a similar ratio. If the CF is significantly higher than the TF, there’s a good chance the site is spammy.

3. Moz – DA and PA

Moz’s DA (Domain Authority) and PA (Page Authority) metrics predict the likelihood of the domain and page rank on search results, respectively.

Learn how to increase your Domain Authority.

4. Backlink Profile

You can leverage the Ahrefs metrics to see an expired domain’s backlink profile.

If you want further information on anchor text or the quality of backlinks, you may need to consider an Ahrefs subscription.

5. Traffic

Many expired domains already have lots of incoming traffic. You can find, and sort expired domains traffic data via SEMRush metrics on Domain Hunter Gatherer.

Rebuild Website in 1 Click

Domain Hunter Gatherer also has an awesome bonus tool called…DomRecovery.

Normally, this tool sells for $97 per month on its own.

But, it’s included with Domain Hunter Gatherer Pro for free.

So…let’s say you found a cool expired domain with amazing metrics and you want to rebuild the site.

You have two options:

Let’s go through an example…

Watermansportingfishing is an expired domain available for purchase. When I entered the site into archive.org, this is what I found.

If I want to recover this site with DomRecovery…

…all I need to do is click on ‘Recover’ on DomRecovery.

Then, enter the URL of the snapshot from archive.org.

And click on ‘Next’.

Then, click on ‘Next’ again.

Click on ‘Finish’.

DomRecovery will download the entire site for you.

Once that’s finished, you can jump into the folder. You can see here that it’s downloaded the entire website.

You can upload these files into the domain and have the domain rebuilt instantly!

Regular Updates

Domain Hunter Gatherer is one of the most advanced expired domain finding tools.

Not only do you have multiple ways to search for expired domains, but the desktop-based tool is always constantly working on new updates.

These updates help quash any bugs and add new functionalities as requested.

Below is an update log so you can see how often these guys publish updates on their tool-

Checks Domain Spam

When it comes to expired domains, you need to make sure you check for spam.

It might not take too long to check 1 domain and cross-check with the metrics available. But if you duplicate these efforts with many domains, it can take a while.

Thankfully…Domain Hunter Gatherer Pro can help you perform these checks in a matter of seconds with their Domain Spam rating.

You can see here that there is a Domain Spam Column.

There are 5 levels of results when it comes to the Domain Spam Test.

The Spam Test look at:

But if you want to double-check the 2 or 3-star domains, it doesn’t have to be done entirely manually or involve other 3rd party tools.

When a domain is sent through the quality spam check, key information about the tests performed is added to domain notes.

You can view the notes of a domain by right-clicking on the domain and clicking on ‘View notes’ to get a breakdown of the results.

Tons of Filters

If you notice at the top of Expired Domain Hunter, there’s a tab that says filter domains.

Click ‘Add Filter’ and you will find this:

There are a ton of filters (40+).

You can even add multiple filters if you have a minimum benchmark.

A huge time saver if you’re looking for the ideal domain!

How to Find Expired Domains with Domain Hunter Gatherer

While I’ve dived in pretty quickly on how you can get started above…

I’m going to do a step-by-step walkthrough to show you how you can set up Domain Hunter Gatherer and enter domain auctions.

Setup Process

First, jump over to ‘Settings’.

While there is space for Moz and Majestic API keys, you don’t need to enter those in to retrieve Moz and Majestic metrics.

If you want to pull Ahrefs Metrics in, you do need an API key for that. But it’s not so necessary in the domain screening process.

The only thing I recommend you change is to add primary proxies.

Why do you need proxies?

Domain Hunter Gatherer queries and searches for many URLs at once.

Unfortunately, search engines don’t like this. Search engines place a limit on each IP address when it comes to the number of queries searched in a period.

If you exceed the limit, search engines can ban your IP address.

That’s why you need proxies. Proxies act as a middleman between you and the search engines. Your queries will run from many different IP addresses, instead of just the one.

Domain Hunter Gatherer doesn’t come with Proxies.

So it’s something you need to purchase. This is pretty easy and cheap.

I use the really cheap semi-dedicated proxies from BuyProxies.Org. But if you want more options, feel free to check out my lists of SEO proxies and residential proxies.

When you signup, make sure you tell them you’re using them for Google Scraping. They’ll make sure that you’re sharing with someone who is not scraping Google.

Once you’ve got that, paste the IP Addresses into the Primary Proxies Box.

Check the boxes for:

Then, click ‘Apply’ and ‘Save’.

Domain Auctions

When it comes to domain auctions, click on ‘Domain Auction Hunter’. Select ‘Hunt domains’. Then enter your keywords.

Hit ‘Search’, and then select ‘All auctions’.

Domain Hunter Gatherer will scrape different auction sites. They’ll find a list of domains relevant to the keywords entered and then pull back the data.

As you can see here, these are the domains in your keyword that are available for auction.

If you want to analyze these domains, hit the ‘Analyze Domains’ tab.

If that’s not enough, you can right-click the top row. Here, you can access more data options that can help you analyze your list of expired domains.

Wrapping It Up

Domain Hunter Gatherer is a comprehensive desktop-based tool that can help you find and filter thousands of quality expired domains in real time.

I’ve been using it since 2016-

And I’ve purchased tons of power expired domains that I found from Domain Hunter Gatherer, which I was super happy with.

I would not have been able to build a site with quality backlinks at those prices! Don’t forget when reviewing the backlink profile of a domain, you have to ask yourself – how much would I need to invest to build a similar link profile?

So if you’re keen to boost your SEO results and you want to leverage expired domains…

…you really can’t go wrong with Domain Hunter Gatherer (click here for a free trial).

Want to learn how to make profits with domain names? Check these posts: