Since I normally use DropDay, I will provide some examples and

screenshots of how I use this service to find expired domains.

DropDay.com offers a free trial membership, so if you want to try out

the service yourself you can do so (the trial membership lasts for 10

days or 100 searches).

The process of finding a domain will be quite similar when using

RegisterCompass or FreshDrop as well, although the user interface for

these different services will differ a bit.

How to sort through available domains When you do a search using

DropDay there will literally be thousands of domains to choose from,

and you will want to narrow the search to those that will perform best

in your blog network.

For the purposes of this exercise, I will show how I would do a search

for a PR2 domain. There are a few important features you will want to

select when doing such a search.

First, you will want to make sure you are searching only for the PR

range of domains you want to purchase. You may also want to limit

your search according to certain domain extensions (.com, .net, and

.org - for example).

Second, you will want the domain to have some age to it as well.

Normally, I only purchase domains that are at least three years of age

or older. This means I will want the domain to be registered at least in

2008 or earlier.

Third, you will want a domain that still has some links showing up,

and preferably from multiple sources. I usually want to make sure that

it has at least two or more separate domains linking to it - although the

more the better.

Here is a screen shot of the search screen at DropDay.com and how I

will usually fill it out when doing a search:

As you can see, I've selected boxes for certain extensions I like (.com,

.net, .org, .info), PR2, creation date of 2008 or later, and I've also

chosen to search for domains expiring the next day (April 15th). After

I've filed out the search form and click on the "FIND" button, here are

some of the results I see:

At this point you will want to manually check the listed domain names

to make sure that they are not associated with porn, gambling, hate

speech, illegal selling of pharmaceuticals and similar undesirable

elements. You want the sites you have in your network to be as clean

and inoffensive as possible, so avoid any domains that have names that

may be controversial. I would also avoid any domains that use trade

names as well, to avoid legal problems down the road.

If you are simply purchasing sites to use to post articles for a variety of

different niches to, the domain name itself is probably not important

unless you are building a niche specific posting network.

However, even with niche networks, you can re-purpose a domain for

your niche by retitling it something relevant. For example, you might

purchase Sharonweisenbach.com for a health niche network and retitle

it "Sharon Weisenbach's Health Blog" (or something similar), and then

fill it with health related content.

Looking at the list returned by dropday, I decided to check out the last

one: Epicslo.com. This domain was registered originally in 2008, so it

has some age to it, and it shows at least six different sites linking to it. I

will next move on and start to do the necessary "Due Diligence"

checks on it.

Although sites like DropDay.com will often alert you if they think the PR

is false, you should check this for yourself. Fake PageRank is one of the

biggest problems domain buyers encounter, and you always need to do

multiple checks.

First, you should do a check with Google using the info: command. To

do this, type info:epicslo.com and info:www.epicslo.com into Google's

search engine.

When you do this search you will want to make sure that the domain

results show the same domain as you typed in.

Here is what it should look like:

And here is what it should not look like:

By the way, the fact that there is a video returned in the results is a

good sign - it means there was probably some real content on the site

beforehand and possibly multiple pages that can be recreated that may

have some PR to them as well (I'll get into that further below).

I will also use the following websites to do additional PR checks:

http://www.rankchecker.com/pagerank-checker/

http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php

Here is a screen shot of the results from www.rankchecker.com:

A check using both of these sites comes up as it having valid PR, so I'm

ready to move onto the next step!

Your next step will involved checking to see if the domain has any

history of being "dropped" from the internet registry. Some blog

network experts have suggested that if a site has been dropped in the

past, it has a higher chance of losing it PageRank down the road,

although this claim may be a bit speculative.

For me, I don't worry too much about domain drops for PR1 or PR2

domains. But once I get to PR3 domains or higher, I pay careful

attention to drops. If a domain has suffered a drop within the past two

years, I generally avoid it. Also, if a domain has had multiple drops, I

tend to avoid it as well. To check whether a domain has ever been

dropped you need to go to:

http://whois.domaintools.com and enter in the domain name. When I

do this, I get the following results:

(I've blurred out some of the previous registrar's name for their

privacy). These are good results - the domain shows only one registrar

and has never been dropped. It has passed this check.

But what if it had been dropped? For example's sake, here are the

results for another domain found up for auction at DropDay.com:

This domain shows one drop and at this point you might want to see if

you can figure out how long ago it was dropped. Looking at the above

information we can see that the domain is actually six years of age

(where it says "32 changes on 13 unique IP addresses over 6 years). For

even more information, click on the "Registration" tab.

Here you will see that the domain was re-created in 2008. This means

the drop is four years old, and is probably safe to purchase as many PR

updates have happened during the past four years and it has retained

its PR so far.

Back to the domain epicslo.com - we now want to double check the

previous content on the site, to make sure it is not offensive in any way.

To do this, we can use the "Wayback Machine" at archive.org.

This website captures screenshots of websites, so you can see what the

original content was on the site.

To do this, first go to: http://archive.org/web/web.php - and type in the

domain name and click "Take Me Back". The results we get look like

this:

What this shows me is that there are only two screen shots of the site

archived - one from early 2011 and another from 2008. I click the

results from 2011, and see the following screen shot of the site from

January 28, 2011:

I like what I see here. The site looks like it was originally quite rich in

content and had videos (which is why there was a video showing up in

our earlier info: check). This also means it may likely have many other

pages as well that can be re-created, possibly some with PageRank to

them. And the content is not at all offensive: in fact, it seems to be

mostly religious in nature.

This domain has definitely passed check #3!

As I mentioned, the screen shot above suggests there were many other

pages originally on the site (you can see some page titles under "recent

articles"). and I can use this information to compile a list of other pages

that used to be on the website, and then check their PR.

However, another important check is to see if any of the previous pages

are still indexed, and to do this you should do a site: search at Google.

Here are the results I get for this site when I do this:

Based on the site: search, I see that a substantial number of pages are

returned. Over 57 pages are returned as indexed in Google. By the way,

if the site itself shows as not indexed in Google, that is not a good sign,

and you may not want to purchase the domain!

Next, I will check to see if any of these pages have any PR to them.

To do this, I can simply click on the links individually and see their page

rank, or use a tool (like Scrapebox) to check the PR of pages.

Unfortunately, for this site it doesn't look like any of the pages currently

have PR to them.

And if you don't own Scrapebox, another alternative is to look at the

top pages for the site using ahrefs.com. Ahrefs.com won't give you the

precise PR of the pages, but it can tell you which pages it believes are

the most powerful.

To do this, go to http://ahrefs.com (using a free account is fine) and

type the domain name into the box that says "Site Explorer" and click

"Explore Links":

One advantage of doing this is that you will also immediately get a good

preview of the existing links to the site. In the example above, you will

see that ahrefs show that the site has 14 current backlinks, including

four from .edu pages.

However, to check existing pages, then you need to click the tab at the

top that says "crawled pages". Here are the results for this site:

The pages shown on this page are listed from most powerful to least,

and you should definitely manually check out the first few results (by

clicking on the link) to see if the pages have any high PR to them. You

will also be able to see if a page has any backlinks by viewing the

"external" backlinks column to the far right.

The research we already did with ahrefs.com gives a pretty good idea of

the number of links the domain has, but we also want to make sure the

site still has links intact and also that they will likely "stick" after we

purchase the domain.

Probably the best tool to do this is SEO spyglass. Although there is a

paid version available, I've found the free version to work for most of

my needs. To download the free version, go to:

http://www.link-assistant.com/seo-spyglass

Once you have downloaded and launched the software, you are ready

to "spy" on this site and learn more about its backlinks. To start, imput

the domain's URL into the search page where it says "Enter a

competitor's ULR to analyze":

Then click the "Next" button.

When you do this, the program will immediately start search for

backlinks and you will see these results when it is completed:

SEO spyglass was able to find 25 backlinks to Epicslo.com - which is

actually 10 more than ahrefs reported earlier.

Next, you will click the button that says "Finish" - but you actually aren't

finished yet.

The next page will ask you if you want even more data on the backlinks:

Click the "Yes" button.

You will then be given an option to choose which factors you want to

research:

At this point, I usually just click the "Next" button. However, it can take

some time to check all the domain factors, so if there were a lot of

backlinks returned, you may want to deselect features that you don't

really need information on - such as "Internal factors".

For just 25 backlinks, the results were compiled pretty quickly. In a little

over two minutes, the results were ready:

Click "Finish" to see the final results:

At this point you will see a wide variety of information, that you will

need to sort through. I suggest you first click on the column that says

"Page PR" to sort the incoming backlinks from high to low according.

Next, you need to check if the link back column shows the link is still

active and valid. For this site, I see that there is at least one PR4 link

intact as well as one PR3 link. This should be adequate to make sure the

site retains its PR2 level. In fact, these are quite strong incoming links,

and I wouldn't be surprised if the PR actually increased down the road!

Furthermore, these links are also from .edu sites!

What you do not want to see when checking SEO spyglass is that the

top rated links are missing. Furthermore, the top level links should not

all be "no-follow" either - since these theoretically don't count.

DropDay.com shows the domain as being for sale via GoDaddy expired

domains, so I will go there to check and see if there are any active bids

on the domain (http://auctions.godaddy.com). (In order to bid for

expired domains at GoDaddy, you will need a auction membership,

which currently runs about $5 a year).

When I go to GoDaddy.com, I see the domain does have one bid

already on it. I decide to put in my maximum bid for what I would pay

for this PR2 domain ($21). I strongly suggest you set a price limit for

yourself before bidding - as it can be quite easy to go over budget at

the last minute with these auctions (or, at least, for me it is!):

Fortunately, the previous bidder's bid was not higher, and I'm now the

high bidder:

But I still haven't won the auction yet! GoDaddy will send me an email if

I've been outbid as well as when I win a domain letting me know I need

to pay for it. Depending on the company, you will usually have between

24-72 hours to pay for a domain once you have purchased it.

Then you will have to wait an additional 3-5 days for the domain to

be transferred to your account. During this waiting period, the original

buyer still has the option to renew their domain. If this happens, your

money will be returned to you. (I haven't had this ever happen to me

personally, but it does happen from time to time).

: I didn't end up winning this auction in the end - the

winning bid ended up being around $40. However, the new owner does

appear to be using for a blog network purpose - so you might want to

see what it looks like now. It is often quite educational to see what

people do with expired domains that you do not end up winning - and

you can learn a lot from paying attention to this!

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