Learn How To Find Powerful Expired Domains Step By Step

Video Transcript

Hi guys Matthew Woodward here and welcome to my tutorial. Today I’m going to show you how to get a head a head start with search rankings and traffic by taking advantage of expired domains.

You’re going to learn how to find powerful expired domains in any niche and I’m also going to share some secret advice with you on how to find domains with existing traffic.

Last but not least I’m going to show you the easiest way to rebuild an expired website in just one click. But before we get into the meat of the Tutorial I just wanted to share with you three different ways that you can use expired domains to your advantage.

The first one is you can buy an expired domain that already has a tonne of SEO value backlinks and traffic and then use it to build out a new authority website.

For example; would you rather build out a site on a domain that already has 100 strong backlinks, or would you rather register a new domain with no backlinks?

The answer is easy, you want the one that already has existing backlinks and SEO value. That means that when you build your site out on that domain it already gets a head start in the search engine results that you wouldn’t get with a new domain.

The best thing is, expired domains cost the same as new domains, it’s the same price. So if you’re looking to build a new website you should always build it on an expired domain that has tonnes of SEO value, backlinks and traffic.

The other way that you can use expired domains is by building a private blog network. Now, a private blog network in essence puts you in full control of your most powerful links and you can use your network of sites to rank any site that you want easily.

I’ve actually created a dedicated course around this and it is very very powerful. A private blog network link is the most powerful type of link that you can get because you are in control of everything.

From the content, the relevance, the strength of the domain, the anchor text. Everything is in your control and you can use expired domains to build a powerful private blog network easily.

The third way that you can use expired domains, and this is kind of the lazy option I don’t recommend that you do a lot of this.

But you can easily get away with buying an expired domain or two, and then just setting up a 301 redirect to your existing site which will pass over some of the existing link juice and traffic of the expired domain that you have bought.

So this is the main interface of Domain Hunter Gatherer Pro and I’m going to give you just a quick tour of the interface before drilling down into how to actually use the software to find powerful domains.

Now, one of the things that I really like about this tool is it’s desktop based. That means it runs on your own local computer and as such it doesn’t have any kind of restrictions in searches. On top of that, you don’t need to pay for any third-party services like other tools.

For example, normally you need to buy a Majestic subscription or a Moz subscription to pull in extra information when searching for domains but this actually includes all of the Majestic and Moz data within the tool. So that saves you around $150 a month in subscriptions alone.

As well, I like that you can really sort by any metric that you want. If you can think of a metric it’s in here, you can sort it. So you can sort by Majestic Trust Flow, Citation Flow, and a bunch of others that I’m going to cover later on.

You can also choose to search for domains from specific countries or in specific languages, which is another really awesome unique feature and it makes it easy to export domains just in one click into any format that you want.

On top of that, you also get a bonus piece of software that allows you to rebuild entire websites in just a couple of clicks and I’m going to show you that later on.

But for now, all you need to do if it’s the first time using the software is jump over to ‘set up’ and ‘help’ and you can see some different options here.

Now, although there’s space for Majestic and Moz API Keys you do not need to enter them to retrieve Majestic and Moz metrics so you can safely ignore those.

If you want to pull Ahrefs metrics in you do need an API Key for that but it’s really not necessary in the domain screening process.

And the shared count API settings here is to pull in social share data, but they actually release an update to the software this week so you don’t even need to enter that. It will also pull in all of the social data for domains it finds as well.

The only thing that I recommend you change from the default options is to add your own primary proxies in here. And personally I just use the really cheap semi-dedicated proxies from BuyProxies.org.

They’re really affordable and when you sign up you can tell them that you’re going to be using them for Google scraping and they will make sure that you’re sharing with someone that is not scraping Google.

And once you’ve got those you just need to paste them in here, tick use primary proxies and then tick to use them for ‘Auction Searching’, ‘Searching’ and ‘Expired Domain and Web 2.0 Checking’.

Once you’ve done that click ‘apply and save settings’ and you’re good to go.

There are some more advanced settings here that you can customize and tweak but there really is no need to do that.

So let’s jump in and show you how to actually find expired domain names, it’s really easy and the first tool I’m going to show you is the ‘Expired Domain Hunter’ and we’re going to ‘Hunt From Keywords’.

Now, if you type your keywords comma separated up here what this will actually do is go out to Google and search for your target keyword.

It’ll then pull back websites that currently rank for that keyword and then spider those websites looking for links to expired domains.

So, let’s say you want to rank for ‘How to build muscle’. One of the best ways to do that is to get a link from one of the top ten sites that are currently ranking for ‘How to build muscle’.

And that’s exactly what this tool lets you do, it’s going to go out, look at the number one result for ‘How to build muscle’, scan the entire website looking for where the number one website links to an expired domain and then it’s going to pull back all of this amazing data to allow you to figure out if you should buy that domain or not.

So, here I’m going to show you quickly, if we were to write ‘Fitness, Yoga, Muscle’ and click on search, that will ask us if the keywords are in the correct format, you just click on yes and that will now go out and scrape the web and search those results for us.

I’m not going to let this run through because it’ll take a bit of time but you can see it’s already at 2 or 3 percent and it’s scanning for web pages to find expired domains from.

SO I’m just going to stop that quickly. Here we can see I have done a previous scan and what you’ll probably notice is that your columns are in a different order to mine.

You can drag these columns around and put them in whatever order that you want them to be in based on how you research your domains.

And I’ve chosen to bring the Majestic metrics up to the front and you can easily sort by, well whichever metric you want!

For me, I’ve got Majestic Trust Flow sorted high to low, and here straight away we can find an available domain with Majestic trust flow 66 and Citation Flow 52 and it’s 19 years old.

That is a very powerful domain.

Here we can also see VeganBodyBuildingToday.co.uk, Majestic Trust Flow 25, Citation Flow 27 and if we click on that domain you can see that it is available to register right now for the budget price of $7.58.

So that means you can pick up a very powerful domain to either use as part of your private blog network or build a site out on or even just 301 direct to your site for less than $8.

And that’s really just, you know, showing off how powerful this software is and it’s really easy to find domains just like that.

Moving on you can also choose to hunt for expired domains from specific websites. So let’s say for example you wanted a link from Wikipedia.

You can choose to enter the Wikipedia domain name up here just like that.

Tell it how many crawl levels to go down and hit on ‘crawl’. And when this pops up you should click on ‘no’ and basically what it’s going to do is; it’s going to go to Wikipedia, it’s going to pull back 5 levels of pages and then it’s going to crawl those pages to find expired domains.

That means you can then register the domain and use it however you want but safe in the knowledge that domain has a backlink from Wikipedia.

Now I’m going to stop this because I’ve already done some searches and again we can see some really powerful domains here and I’m just going to load some others.

I also did a search from BodyBuilding.com, if you’re in the fitness niche you might want to find some domains that have links from BodyBuilding.com.

And I have another Wikipedia scan here, and here we can see again, some really powerful domains with high levels of metrics.

So, this tool allows you to register expired domains with links from specific web pages.

So just think about the authority websites in your niche and how powerful having a link from one of their websites would be.

Now, the third way of finding expired domains with Domain Hunter Gatherer Pro is the ‘Reverse Hunt Domains’ option and it really is quite clever in how it works.

First of all, we want to just input a domain and I’m going to put my blog for example.

And what this will do is it will look up my domain, then find all of the backlinks pointing to my domain and then finding if any of the sites that link to my domain are also linking to expired domains to register.

So this means that we can get backlinks from the same domains that our competitors have really easily.

SO if we put a domain in and set the crawl levels to 1, hit ‘reverse crawl’ and you’ll see that it’s found 5,221 websites that link to my site and now it’s going to crawl each of those websites looking for links to expired domains.

And again I’m not going to let this run through because I have some sample data in here for you already.

So if I just clear those and we can load my previous searching.

We can see here a bunch of sites I actually, in my test, I put in some domains from the blogging world and these are expired domains that also share backlinks with some of the top sites in the blogging world.

And again you can see some really powerful domains here with really good metrics sorted by Citation Flow and also by Trust Flow.

And don’t forget when buying a domain I’m going to include my checklist for checking domains for spam, underneath this video on my blog so make sure you pay attention to that.

So in essence I always look at Majestic Trust flow and Citation Flow first as to how powerful a domain is and then the closer to 1 this ratio is the less spammy the domain is.

For example, this domain here with ‘1’ is perfect but this one at ‘0.15’ – I would avoid that this tells me it’s a highly spammed domain.

The closer to 1 it is, the better. And again, just going through this we can also go and look at Moz data and I haven’t actually calculated the rest of the data here.

But if you wanted to pull in Ahrefs data, Alexa link ranks, SEMRush links and all of those other things, all you would have to do is come up to ‘Analyse Domains’, you can choose ‘All Domains’ and then tick exactly which additional metrics you would like the software to pull in.

By default, it always pulls in the Moz Data and the Majestic data straight from the off without you having to do anything extra.

So this Reverse Hunt Domains feature is really handy to try and get the same links that your competitor does.

And by rebuilding your competitor’s link profile you can easily get a leg up in the SERPs.

So those are the three main expired domain hunter tools.

And just to recap ‘Hunt From Keywords’ goes out to Google, searches your keywords, finds the domains ranking for those keywords, and then scans those domains for expired domains.

‘Hunt From Websites’ allows you to put in a specific website, and it will crawl that website looking for expired domains that website links to.

Really great for getting authority links from Wikipedia, New York Times or any other major big website that you can think of, just plug it in here.

‘Reverse Hunt Domains’ you put the domain in, the software will then go and look up all of the backlinks to that domain, and then from all of the backlinks it finds it will then scan those for expired domains that are available to register.

So those are the three expired domain hunter tools. And we’ve actually got two other tools that I’m going to cover, the Domain Auction Hunter and the Web 2.0 Hunter and we’re going to start with the Domain Auction Hunter first.

Now, this is really easy to use. In essence, you just enter your keywords at the top here, so I’m just going to enter a couple.

And then you hit on ‘search’ and ‘all auctions’ and this is going to go out to lots of different auction sites, in fact, I’m just going to stop this search, and it’s going to go out to all of these domain auction sites, find a list of domains that are relevant to your keywords and then pull back all of the data that you need to make a good buying decision.

And you can see this is a search I’ve previously run for some fitness-related domains and we can see TodaysSportsFan.com available for $12 with Citation Flow 12, Trust Flow 23.

And just like in the Expired Domain Hunter you can also search and filter all of these columns to your liking.

Maybe you want a domain that’s got lots of Facebook shares and here we’ve got one that’s got 116,000 Facebook shares.

Perhaps you would like a domain that has a good Alexa rank, you can search for all of that as well. It makes it really easy to cherry-pick those awesome domains.

And really that’s all there is to it, it’s as simple as enter your keywords, hit search, let the software do all of the hard work for you.

Again, you can filter domains and you can do this in any of the tools and choose your filter.

Maybe you just want to see the domains that are .com so you can add that filter in and now you’ll see it’s removed any other domains and we’re just looking at the .coms.

You might also say, I just want something that’s got a Majestic Trust flow of 10 or above and you can see it’s now removed all of those for us as well.

And clearing the filters is easy just click ‘Clear Filters’.

If you want to pull in the additional data which I have done in this search you just need to go on ‘Analyse Domains’ and again pick exactly which data you want it to pull in.

By default, it pulls in the Majestic and Moz data on the initial search which makes it really easy to get a quick look at things.

And again ‘Search Settings’, these are all of the auction sites it covers and you can untick these.

I don’t know why you would want to search less domain auction sites but the option is there if you want it.

So, the last method of finding expired domains is with the web 2.0 hunter.

Now there is a post on my blog about how to build a private blog network with web 2.0 sites, it’s a very popular post on my blog and if you want to understand how to use these expired web 2.0s better you should go and check that out.

I’ll make sure that there’s a link to the blog post underneath this video for you. But in essence, this works in exactly the same way.

First of all, come to the search settings and you can choose exactly which web 2.0 sites you want it to find expired domains for.

In here you just enter your keywords and I’m going to use the same examples and click on search. That’s then going to go out and find expired web 2.0 sites around your keywords and again go and pull in all of the important metrics for you.

So I’ve got some accounts that I saved from earlier, some domains. Let’s take a look at these.

So, immediately we can see that there’s one: StarBucksOrder.Tumblr.Com – Citation flow 28, Trust flow 28 is available to register right now.

It also has a little bit of traffic according to SEMRush so that would be a nice little web 2.0 site to go, and this costs nothing.

This is just going to Tumblr and registering the domain name.

We can also see that it’s found domains from WikiDot, Tumblr, BlogSpot, NewsVine, I think we have some Twitter profiles in here that are all available to register right now and start using as part of your web 2.0 based private blog network.

Again, you need to check out the more detailed blog post on how to use these domains properly, but it’s really easy and as you can see Domain hunter Gatherer Pro makes finding these super easy as well.

Just enter your keywords, click search, sit back, and relax, it’s not any more difficult than that.

So now I’m going to share with you an exclusive tip that’s really quite powerful but often overlooked by people.

Most people when they’re buying expired domains are purely focused on metrics like; how many backlinks a domain has or things like Citation flow, Trust flow, and so forth.

What many people overlook is how much traffic a domain has.

Imagine if you could buy a domain that was already getting 5,000 visitors a month from Google, and either build a site on that or redirect all of that traffic directly to your site.

Well, with Domain Hunter Gatherer pro it actually connects with SEMRush and pulls in that data. So we can actually sort domains by how much traffic they have.

And if we look at this domain here, it’s actually getting over 11,000 visitors per month.

So we can register that domain right now for just the price of registering a new domain and instantly unlock 11,000 new visitors per month.

And if we take a look at that domain in SEMRush sure enough, we can see that this domain is ranking for a bunch of personality disorder type keywords.

This means that we could easily buy the site, take advantage of all of these keywords, and push all of that traffic into different affiliate offers or maybe books, or anything that helps with personality disorders.

Perhaps you already have a site in that niche and you could just redirect the traffic directly to there.

But take a look at how many number 1 ranking this domain has that you could just go out and buy right now.

Let me sort the table in the right way, and here you can see it’s number one for so many keywords and this one’s got 2,000 searches per month, 320 per month and all of that adds up to 11,500 visitors per month.

And you can find that domain just by, when you pull in your results, you can go to ‘Analyse Domains’ and in here you want to make sure that you have SEMRush traffic ticked, and then you can pull in those traffic stats for all of the domains in your list here.

It’s really that easy, not many people look at how much traffic a domain has when they’re considering it for a private blog network.

But for example, people will overlook a domain because they’re looking at how powerful it is from an SEO perspective and domains with traffic aren’t always that powerful from an SEO perspective.

So someone could look here and discredit a domain because of its low metrics but then you might actually find it has a high level of traffic and you can repurpose that in a different way.

So that’s a bonus tip I wanted to share with you. Don’t just focus on how strong a domain is from backlink and SEO metrics but also just scroll across and check out its traffic rank as well because there are some really hidden gems to be found when you do that.

So the last thing I’m going to cover us this awesome bonus tool that is included with Domain Hunter Gatherer Pro and it’s called Dom Recovery.

Now, it doesn’t look like much right here it’s just this little box that you see in front of us and normally this sells for $97 a month on its own.

But this is actually included with Domain Hunter Gatherer Pro for free. And what this simple tool does is, it allows you, let’s say you found a domain that’s really cool, really good metrics and now you need to build the site.

You’ve got two options, you can either rebuild the site manually or you can use this tool to recover the site from an old archive.org.

So I’m going to give you a couple of examples. Look at this site for example, Go Fish Waterman Sport Fishing – it’s a domain that’s available to register, and this is the old site how it used to look.

With the Dom Recovery software, we can actually rebuild this in just a couple of clicks, and the way you do that is in Dom Recovery just click on ‘Recover’.

We’re going to enter the URL to this snapshot from Archive.org, click on next, click on next, click on finish and that’s going to go out right now and download the entire site for us.

And once that has finished, I’m just going to drag that window in here, we can jump into the folder and you can see it has downloaded the entire website for us which we can now upload to the domain and have the domain rebuilt instantly.

And if we just open up the index, here we can see the downloaded domain on my local machine.

It really is that easy.

I’m just going to take you over another example quickly. So earlier on we found VeganBodyBuildingToday.co.uk, all we need to do is take that domain and plug it into archive.org, and here we can see the old site and how it used to look with lots of lovely free content that we can use.

We just need to take the Archive.org url and plug it into the Dom Recovery software and again, if you just hit recover, paste in the snapshot, click next, next, finish, and I’m going to let this one run in real-time for you so you can see just how quick it is, and right now it is downloading the initial page, and now it’s downloading all of the other pages.

You can see it’s running 20 threads here, you can run more if you want it to be quicker but you can also reduce it to less in the settings.

And we are just waiting on the final bits of content and you can see within about 20 seconds it has downloaded the entire site.

So if we just jump into the folder we can see VeganBodyBuildingToday.co.uk and inside here are all of the pages and images and we can just open that up.

And there we go, we have a local copy of that site which is now ready to upload to the hosting along with the expired domain we just registered and we’ve instantly built a site as part of our private blog network in, I mean, finding the domain takes a few minutes.

Registering it and setting up the hosting takes up a few minutes and as you can see, you can restore the old site in about 30 seconds.

It’s really simple to do and I know that the tool looks pretty simple but as you can see it is super powerful and there are a few settings in here.

You can add proxies and change threads but you really don’t need to do that.

Just click on recover, enter in the Archive.org snapshot, hit next and that’s all that you have to do it really is that easy.

And this Dom Recovery software is included free with the Domain Hunter Gatherer Pro software.

If you wanted to buy Domain Recovery separately you can do that but it does cost $97 a month.

So that brings us to the end of my review and as you’ve seen it’s one of the easiest to use tools on the market it really is just plug and play, couple of clicks and you can find thousands and thousands of powerful domains.

And not just powerful domains from an SEO perspective but domains that have existing traffic as well.

One of the things I really like is that unlike other tools there’s no need for additional subscriptions like Moz or Majestic, which easily saves you hundreds of dollars per month.

And let’s not forget it includes the awesome Dom Recovery Software to rebuild websites in one click, which would normally cost an extra $97 per month.

And you can use these domains to do whatever you want really. You can either use them as a base to build out new authority sites or as part of your private blog network or even just 301 redirect domains over to your existing website to pass on any link juice and traffic.

On top of all of that, they also include an additional 3 hours of video training that shows you how to get the most out of the software and the domains you buy.

So, thank you guys for watching, I hope this has helped you out and I’ll see you on the other side.

Resources In The Video

Domain Hunter Gatherer – Easily the best tool on the market to find powerful expired domains quick & easily – all rights reserved – with no additional costs.
BuyProxies.org – My preferred proxy provider, you can use the much cheaper semi-dedicated ones.