How to Find Expired Domains With ScrapeBox
Whether you're brand new to things like domains, websites, and the SEO business, or you're an experienced domain investor, ScrapeBox might be just the tool you need to find expired domains that can start making you money through your website.
Fortunately, this robust SEO tool is deceptively easy to use, making it an excellent choice for beginners and more experienced SEO professionals alike who are building a new website.
All it takes is a quick tutorial to set you well on your way towards ScrapeBox mastery.
This guide will tell you everything you need to know about finding expired domains with ScrapeBox, from starting your search to exporting your findings.
But first, let's make sure we're all on the same page and take a quick look at what expired domains are and why you would want one for yourself or your company.
What Is an Expired Domain?
If you're brand new to the world of domains, the term "expired domain" might be a bit confusing. But it's actually very simple. Expired domains are domains that someone bought and failed to renew.
If someone buys a domain name for their website, they're called the domain registrant. You'll often hear people call this person the domain name or website owner, but that's technically not true. It's essentially a rental.
You can't buy permanent ownership of a domain name; you can only register it for a set period of time. Once that period's up, you have to pay to renew, or else it expires.
Once a website expires, you might need to follow a GoDaddy expired domain recovery process to get your domain back. Though most domain registrars will usually give the registrant ample time to renew if they choose to. If this doesn't happen, the registrar will do one of two things:
- Delete the domain. This removes all traces of it and frees the name up for whoever decides to register it next.
- Auction the domain. Domain auctions are like regular auctions. People bid on expired domains, and the highest bidder wins the domain registration for a period of time. As an example a NameCheap expired domain auction has some great domains, but they're only from the NameCheap platform.
If a domain you're interested in is about to expire, you'll have to choose between trying to score it at an auction or snagging it as soon as it's available after deletion, depending on how badly you want it and how much competition there is.
If your niche is super specific, you might have less competition for the domain than a more generic niche that many people are interested in.
Why Would I Want an Expired Domain?
If there's so much information online about how to find expired domains, you can bet that there are plenty of reasons why you're want to do so.
Let's take a look at some of the basics.
Using Expired Domains for Your Business
Many business owners choose to repurpose expired domains for their brand domains, especially if they use the same keywords for their niche.
This can give them a head start on SEO metrics because the new website using the old domain benefits from the original website's domain authority.
Backlinks from an authority website will automatically direct to the new site URL and increase website traffic with no effort on the part of the new website owner.
Of course, it's worth noting that these benefits are generally only applicable if the expired and new sites offer similar products.
Selling Expired Domains
Buying domains as soon as they expire and reselling them to the highest bidder is a straightforward way to make money, much like buying and selling stocks and bonds.
As with any other reason for buying expired domains, before you buy, you'll want to make sure that:
- The domains have many high-quality backlinks
- The domains have a fair amount of traffic
- The domains have a high level of domain authority
After all, if you're hoping to make money based on demand, you don't want to buy sites that no one else wants.
Otherwise, you'll be out the registration amount and be stuck with sites you don't want.
Building a Private Blog Network
A somewhat shady side of SEO is the private blog network, or PBN.
Some SEO professionals build networks of private blogs that they use to create backlinks to each other, thereby tricking Google or other search engines into thinking the web pages have more authority and a higher link profile than they actually do.
If you buy expired domains to do this, make sure you know what you're doing, or the site backlinks will lose all credibility, and your SEO metrics will crash.
Then you'll have to start all over again, resulting in more effort overall.
What Is an Expired Domain Finder?
As you may have guessed, an expired domain finder is a tool that helps you find expired domains.
These services, which some also call crawlers or checkers, can save you hours by crawling through Google and other search engines looking for recently expired domains.
You can filter your expired domain searches by keywords, backlinks, and site authority.
Most of these services also include a way to qualify the sites they find so you can find a site that will be easy to drive traffic to.
After all, winning maximum site traffic with minimal effort is the name of the game when it comes to repurposing expired domains.
If you're looking into Scrapebox Expired Domain Finder, there's a good chance you have at least an idea of all the ways an expired domain checker can help you.
Let's get to the heart of the guide and take a look at this impressive tool.
How to Use ScrapeBox Expired Domain Finder
ScrapeBox is one of the best-known SEO tools on the market. Some of its core features include:
- Harvesting Google and other search engines
- Harvesting keywords
- Checking links
- Proxy harvesting and testing
- Mining online business data
- Scraping webpages
If you're in the business of SEO manipulation, you've definitely heard of the service and very likely tried it at some point.
However, the company has augmented its offerings in recent years, adding even more helpful SEO add-ons.
In addition to the services listed, ScrapeBox provides numerous additional plugin options. As you might have guessed, one of these plugin options is the Expired Domain Finder.
You can use the plugin to find expired domains and check their Majestic and Moz and metrics. Here's how to do it.
Find Expired Domains
The first step on your checklist is searching for expired domains in your niche. You can find several ways to narrow them down, which keeps the resulting list from getting overwhelming.
You can filter your search by niche-related keywords, top-level domains, and more.
After you enter your chosen filters, the crawler gets to work checking its URL list for suitable expired domains.
Don't worry if you have to play around with the filters a little bit before you start to find websites that you're interested in.
The more you experiment, the better you'll get at narrowing down the options to only websites that perfectly match the niche you're going for.
Filter the Expired Domain Names You Found
Once you find expired domains related to your niche, you can start narrowing domains down by quality to find the very best. To do this, you'll need a few additional plugins:
Domain Availability Checker Plugin: Confirm that the expired domain is available for purchase. This is a logical first step because you don't want to spend time qualifying an expired domain that isn't available.
Page Authority Plugin: Use Majestic and other metrics to determine domain authority. You don't want to end up with a site with terrible metrics, or you'll have to spend a lot of time and money fixing the domain's SEO issues.
Backlinks Checker Plugin: Get useful data about the number and quality of a domain's links. You can even use this tool to see where your competitors are getting links from.
We suggest using the plugins in the order listed above. This method will keep you from wasting time combing through domain data for a domain name that isn't even available.
The service itself is a time-saver, but there's no reason you shouldn't try to streamline things even more.
Save Your Work
Save your expired domain list and the associated metrics so you can reference it later.
This also allows you to experiment with filters without worrying about losing your work. You can reload the saved snapshot at any time.
This feature is ideal for those times when you have to step away from your expired domain search but want to come back to it later without having to start from scratch.
Download Expired Domains
If you're happy with the list of expired domains and related metrics content you gathered, you can export your findings to your computer.
ScrapeBox gives you several ways to do this, whether you prefer to work in Excel or to use plain text files.
Exporting your list of expired domains is particularly useful if you're searching for a brand domain for your business and want to show other decision-makers what the options are.
Whether you show them all or limit the list to those that score especially high on the metrics analysis is up to you.
ScrapeBox Final Points
ScrapeBox is an excellent SEO tool with a lot of uses. In fact, members of the SEO community are so passionate about ScrapeBox that many fans have created video tutorials and blog content explaining how to use it.
However, some users don't love all the plugin add-ons necessary to take advantage of all the services that ScrapeBox offers. Note that many of these plugins are free, and updates are always free.
Fortunately, if ScrapeBox's expired domain finder plugin doesn't sound quite right for you, you can find plenty of other options, as you'll see below.
Overall, ScrapeBox is a powerful tool with many SEO applications. The Expired Domain Finder is only part of the company's offerings, so if you're looking for a single SEO tool that can do it all, you may have found it.
If you're more interested in finding the most comprehensive expired domain checker on the market, though, you might be able to do better with SpamZilla.
Are You Looking for a ScrapeBox Alternative?
It's no secret that plenty of tools, websites, and plugins are out there that can help you find expired domain lists.
Each one has a slightly different value proposition and will meet different sets of needs to a varying extent. If using multiple ScrapeBox plugins sounds like too much work, try an all-in-one expired domain checker like SpamZilla.
One of the most comprehensive tools for finding available expired domains is SpamZilla, which not only crawls through thousands of expired domain names in minutes but also analyzes the site's SEO value using metrics from MOZ, Majestic, and Ahrefs, and more.
Look for expired domains using SpamZilla, and you'll end up with high-quality expired domains full of backlinks that direct traffic to your site.
