Purchasing a high-quality expired domain is an easy way to capitalize on a website's pre-existing SEO metrics, web traffic, and backlinks. However, not all expired domains are created equal.

How to Find Expired Domains With Backlinks

Some could ramp up your website's SEO instantly, while others could hurt your digital reputation or even link back to spammy, illegal websites.

Determining which expired domains are legitimate, reputable, and worth the money may feel challenging, so we've created this guide to help you out.

Read ahead to learn more about expired domains with quality backlinks, why you should purchase them, and how SpamZilla can simplify your search process.

Expired domains are web addresses that previously belonged to another entity but have since re-entered the general registry.

When domain owners neglect to renew their domain names by a specific date, their domains expire and eventually enter domain auctions or closeout sales. At this point, anyone can purchase them to use for their own websites.

Backlinks are links from an external web page to a given domain. Authority backlinks come from high-ranking authority sites such as the Huffington Post, Wikipedia, or ESPN.

Expired domains with quality, authoritative backlinks rank higher in search engine rankings than those with little historical data.

As a result, when people look to purchase domain names, they often search for ones with authority links or links from relevant web pages, as both of these factors can drive up web traffic.

Why You Should Purchase Expired Domains with Domain Authority

As you search for the right domain name for your needs, you should be sure to consider a domain's authority and historical data.

Using domains with solid backlinks, relevant keywords, and several years of history can increase your website traffic, getting you more bang for your buck than buying a new domain would.

Expired domains with quality backlinks are beneficial for several reasons:

1. They May Already Target Your Desired Audience

The best expired domain names have already built up significant web traffic.

If you purchase an expired domain with a similar target audience to yours, you can save the time and effort of building up your traffic from scratch, which can often take months or years to accomplish.

2. They Have Historical Authority on Google

Google considers domain age when determining search engine rankings. Older websites tend to be established and credible, as previous owners often put time and energy into improving their quality.

If you purchase an expired domain that is a few years old, your website will automatically gain some credibility.

Establishing backlinks and citations on authority sites is an essential step in increasing web traffic to your site. However, this process can be incredibly time-consuming.

To get your domain name on other sites, you would need to ask registries to add your domain to their sites, write guest posts for similar domains, or establish a reputation that makes other sites want to reference yours.

Each of these steps takes time and energy, meaning your new website will probably not develop much authority for several years.

If the previous domain owner already established backlinks, you can be sure that your website already has that backlink authority, allowing you to avoid developing authoritative backlinks yourself.

Buying Expired Domains for SEO Purposes

If you're looking to purchase a domain for an existing or new website, you probably want it to rank well on major search engines like Google and Bing.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of increasing your search engine rankings to gain web traffic. Expired domains SEO is a crucial aspect to consider when choosing your domain.

Your first step in buying expired domains with domain authority for SEO is finding a keyword-relevant domain name that optimizes your web content. To maximize your SEO rankings, you should look for a domain name that:

  • Includes your primary keyword
  • Includes your city name (if you are a local business)
  • Is short and easy to remember
  • Has the right extension for your location (.com or .io, for example)
  • Does not include numbers, hyphens, or symbols

Finding a domain name that meets all of these criteria will be challenging, especially when you sort through thousands of domains at a time.

However, if you can hit at least a few of these points, you will have a much easier time ranking highly on search engines. Taking advantage of advanced database filters will also streamline your search process.

Once you have found a decent number of domain names that meet a few of these standards, you should analyze each one's historical information and SEO rankings. Like our SERP checker tool, some tools allow you to view and compare several domains' search results quickly.

Your search process may take some time, and we recommend exercising patience as you sort through dozens of domain lists.

Your final choice will stay with you for a while—your domain registrar may require you to rent your domain for at least a year—so you want to make sure it suits your needs and is an intelligent purchase.

What to Avoid When Buying Expired Domains

The expired domain market can be challenging to navigate, especially if you don't have much experience with domains and web traffic in general.

You may think an expired domain looks reputable and is worth its steep price tag only to find out that it links back to an illegal, spammy website, discounting any of its search engine metrics.

As you search for the best expired domain for your website, do your best to avoid the following domain qualities and practices:

While backlinks play a significant role in SEO, having a high number of backlinks is not always a good sign.

Some expired domains use dozens of backlinks linking to spam websites, and creating a website with these domains could hurt your credibility and SEO.

Unreliable domains often link back to web pages in Chinese or other foreign languages.

These domains tend to receive lower search engine rankings, so it's best to steer clear of them.

Poor Domain Authority and Page Authority

Domain authority (DA) and page authority (PA) are valuable search engine metrics that come from the website Moz.  You can check a domain's DA/PA scores on the Moz website or through our advanced filters and tools.

Google Bans

If the domain you are interested in has contained illegal, spammy content in the past, Google may have banned it from appearing in its search engine results.

Banned domains can still have excellent page and domain authority, so you may be tempted to assume they are of high quality.

However, you should always check an expired domain with a Google Banned Checker before purchasing it.

Highly Competitive Domains

The expired domain market can be very competitive, and the best domains sell for upwards of $20,000 each.  It still is possible to snap up high quality domains from GoDaddy domain auctions, but GoDaddy is a little different and you need to keep an eye on how long does GoDaddy hold expired domains for.

It's easy to get caught up in a domain bidding war, but there's no sense in paying more for a website name than it is worth. We recommend avoiding highly competitive domains unless you are willing to pay a steep price tag to secure them.

Following these tips can ensure that you purchase a quality, reputable domain.

Our website makes the expired domain search process easy. We offer many specialized tools, detection software, advanced filters, and historical data checkers to help you choose the best expired domain for your website.

You can follow this method to find expired marketplace domains on our site:

  1. Create an account: You can start using our services for free. Just enter your email into our contact form so we can send you more information about getting started.
  2. Enter your keywords: Once you reach our domains list, you can enter any relevant keywords into the search bar at the top of the page.
  3. Select your filters: Our site offers over 70 filters that you can use to narrow down your search. If you only want to see domains with a specific DA/PA score, domain source, and availability, for example, you can specify those qualifications through filters.

    You can also take advantage of our filter-saving function to save your preferences for next time.
  4. Search through our domain list: You will now see a free expired domain name list. You can always go back and customize your filters to narrow down your options further.

Our tools and advanced filters make it easy to weed out irrelevant, spam-heavy domains and focus on options that already rank well in search engine results.