Why Are Expired Domains Valuable To Authors?

Book marketing is necessary to sell books. Paid traffic through Facebook or Google is one way, buying book reviews like we sell is necessary, buying backlinks is powerful, but a lessor known marketing tool for authors is buying Expired Domains.

Expired domains have value, but not just because they exist. The real value of expired domains is found in certain characteristics, like the domain name’s relationship to your book. Choosing an expired domain is more complex than it appears on the surface. This is a guide for authors to assess and extract the value of an expired domain through a careful selection process.

For more budget friendly ways to promote your book, click that link to read a thorough article about it.

Author Case For Selecting An Expired Domain

In the world of domain names, there are two main categories. One category is the new domain that someone creates and hasn’t been owned by anyone else. The second category is the aged, dropped or expired domain in which someone has owned the domain name before and is no longer using it.

The second category of domain names are for sale, and it sounds easy to purchase one. Buy a domain that gives you a jumpstart on starting your website, and you can quickly start attracting book buyers. Or buy an expired domain to 301 redirect the entire site to yours in an effort to pass along all the link juice.

This is super common in niche site marketing. Say someone wanted to create a home supplies niche site, you might buy something like homeguru.com below so you start with backlinks and traffic first. Sound simple enough, right?



Wait a minute! It’s not that easy. Expired domains have value, but not all of them have value for authors. Evaluating expired domains is similar to building a business case for a project. You justify your choice of expired domain through a careful evaluation of the benefits, risks and costs of various options.

A good expired domain could cost you thousands and if you don't know what you're doing you may not even be legally allowed to own it. Ignorance is costly in Expired Domain world.

The following sections discuss:

1. The basics of the domain name
2. The four ways expired domains are used
3. A process for finding the best domain to suit your purposes and guidelines for choosing an expired domain
4. Consideration of the legal issues to keep in mind

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Value Of Expired Domains To Authors

The domain you choose (expired or new) is a crucial marketing tool for your book that helps internet browsers zero in on what your book is about or links a name to the book and author. Can perform search engine optimization (SEO) duties by making it more likely the domain will become a higher ranking search result.

One of the first things you’ll discover when shopping for an expired domain on a site like GoDaddy Auctions is that it’s difficult to choose one because you’re also adopting the domain’s history. Since the domain has a history, the selection process involves assessing a number of factors, like link profile, keyword ranking and much more.

Expired domains have value, but some are more valuable than others. They become most valuable when they have certain characteristics that include:

• Quality link profile
• Relevance to your current website or the website you plan on developing
• Authority already developed as an established site
• Wasn’t used for spam purposes
• Has a high Page Authority and Domain Authority rating
• Doesn’t have a history of negative reviews posted online
• Was never used for X Rated purposes
• Meets legal requirements

The challenge is finding an expired domain that meets the criteria within context of your book WITH good history. For example: you find an expired domain with a good link profile. However, the domain was used for spam purposes. It's useless. On the other hand, you like a domain name. Your research proves it has a weak link profile, but you are planning on building a new book website from scratch. In that case, you might go ahead and purchase the expired domain. As you’ll learn later, there are some reasons that override any decision, such as a domain name that has a history of poor reviews or was clearly used for spamming. It’s all about doing due diligence on the expired domain.

Utilizing Expired Domains For Book Sales

Redirect An Expired Domain To Your Book’s Website

This technique uses a redirect strategy to merge purchases of domains. An old backlink on an expired domain becomes a new backlink on an active domain. It relies on using a redirect status code. To do this you will use a 301 redirect.

301 redirect status code - webpage has permanently moved to a new location; ensures people and search engines will land on your book website or your page content through different URLs than the one originally requested; most commonly used redirect status code.

Once a website is 301 redirected, it basically can't be done again. So when you're analyzing an expired domain make sure to check for 301s.

In SEO terminology, you are siphoning ‘link juice’ from the expired domain because many links still have value even though the website is not active any longer.

The 301 redirect is by far the most common redirect used and probably most appropriate for the expired domain project you’re doing. Your domain authority is boosted through simple 301 redirects to a website or your page authority is boosted through 301 redirects of specific page content to your content posted around the internet. The 301 happens at a page level, so 301 every page of the old domain.

Google’s Gary Illyes confirmed what John Mueller at Google said earlier that same year (2016) - that no PageRank is lost when doing 301 redirect.

John Mueller with Google had said there is no lost PageRank for 301 or 302 redirects from HTTP to HTTPS.

So redirects will pass PageRank. However, PageRank is only one factor of hundreds used to rank pages. In theory, a 301 redirect of a webpage to an exact copy of that webpage under a different URL shouldn’t experience any loss of traffic.

This is an issue for those thinking that they will buy an expired domain in their industry, redirect it to your site and gain all the benefits from the link juice. Google has said that the machine needs to think it is the same company. That said, we've spoken to people who have received the link juice benefits from expired domains using 301 redirects to new sites. So not 100% proven here.

Also, Google confirmed in 2017 that it will follow up to five redirect steps. That is not guaranteed though, so limiting the number of redirects is a wise strategy.

Start A New Website

You can build a new website on an expired domain. If you choose this route, Google’s web crawler or Googlebot needs to think the new website is the same business as before the domain expired. Otherwise the bot may not give you value for the links.

If Google thinks the website is a new or a different site, it will start at the beginning as far as valuing the links. The webpage could be treated like a 404 error situation, meaning the new website is considered expired content. The reason it does this is because Google will think the website is spammy.
Starting a niche or new website may cause it to take longer to perform well in organic search. It’s like starting from scratch rather than getting the advantage of established links. Your website will have to establish age, trust, relevance and authority, and that takes time.

It’s called the “Google sandbox effect.” The Google sandbox effect refers to a filter believed to exist that prevents new websites from ranking in search engine results. It says “believed” because Google has never officially confirmed the filter.
The proof is based on the experiences of the millions of people who have launched a new website and witnessed a period of slow ranking ascension.

Therefore, the best way to bypass or at least shorten the sandbox effect time period is to start your new author or book website on an expired domain that has the desired qualities, like age, relevance, trust and authority. Content is relevance, i.e. your website selling books won’t rank for queries by people looking for cars.

Links are external citation authority. Assume your webpage selling eBooks has two links. One is Amazon with its powerful link profile and the other is Jane’s eBook Sales Store. Amazon is the recognized authority, so its link has authority and Amazon has a higher PageRank. The Amazon link passes more PageRank to your website.

Google says it doesn’t apply trust to links for ranking purposes, but many believe it does. Trust refers to the trustworthiness of a website as a source of a link. For your purposes, a website is untrustworthy when it sells links to others, has reputation issues and/or has poor content. If you detect any of these problems, then you can believe Google will to.

The links are taken extremely seriously by the Google algorithm. Clearly, this strategy works best when the links are of the highest quality.

Where To Find Expired Domains

When it’s time to find expired domains, there are resources that offer quality assistance with tracking, finding and purchasing expired domains. Godaddy is by far the leader in the space. You don't get much help in determining if a domain is good or not, but the list of domains is refreshing every day and access is only $5 per year. Just sign up and check it out. Start vetting out expired domains and learn what good ones look like vs bad.

Pro Tip: Good domains go for thousands of dollars at closing.

It’s important to conduct due diligence before buying a domain name. This means a comprehensive appraisal of the domain name to ensuring you aren’t buying a domain name with a poor reputation or questionable practices.

How To Qualify The Domain

The due diligence process begins with qualifying the domain. Identifying an expired name that has a poor history or will obviously not meet your needs. There are several paths you can take, but the following two are well-tested and considered reliable:

1. Check Archive.org to verify the domain name’s history
2. Check Majestic to assess the domain’s authority and trust

Archive.org is a nonprofit that describes itself as an online library. It archives a variety of material, including web pages scraped from the internet. There are more than 475 billion web pages archived. The internet archive Wayback Machine includes tools that enable checking for:

• WordPress broken links
• Assists webmasters with 404 handling
• Checking for X Rated sites
• Kind of industry the original site was in

You can enter a specific URL in the search bar and get statistics, like changes in the content of archived URLs. It also now provides API endpoints for search access to archived items by searching against stored metadata. Don’t stop with Archive.org though because webmasters can ask to have their websites removed if they consider the information proprietary and not for public consumption.

Majestic is a link intelligence service. You can search a domain name and get a wealth of data that include fresh and historic external backlinks, referring domains, referring IPS and referring subnets. It provides internal outbound links, crawled URLs, indexed URLs, educational and governmental backlinks and a lot more.

It also offers information on the topical trust flow which is a measure of how close you are to the most trusted websites in nearly 1,000 categories. You can get the link density of inbound links, backlink history, backlink breakdown, referring domains breakdown and anchor text for drilling down into each keyword.

Some of the information is free, but to get the most information, it’s necessary to choose a plan and subscribe.

What To Look For In An Expired Domain

What exactly are you looking for at the qualifying stage? Are there indications the domain has been repurposed or used as a blog network. Following are some guidelines:

1. Is the domain’s previous use (the original use), i.e. if the original website was about honey bees, the new owner's site should ideally be about honey bees as well.
2. A foreign language is now used on the domain
3. One or more links don’t match the same category as the domain (i.e. link to a page about pets is on a website about computers)
4. A website that looks overly generic
5. Each piece of content discusses a different topic
6. Content is of obvious poor quality (probably serving as a link farm)
7. Outbound links are irrelevant, sites were redesigned within days (use the Wayback Machine)
8. WHOIS data is hidden
9. There are few pieces of content.
10. Are there any irregularities in domain ownership (check Archive.org)?
11. Are there irregularities in the changes made in the past (check Archive.org)?
12. Has Google indexed the domain’s pages? If zero pages are indexed, it could indicate the domain was penalized for black hat SEO practices. The penalty may be algorithmic or manual.
13. Of course anything with X rated adult content or gambling.

Here’s the catch. You won’t necessarily disqualify an expired domain simply based on the fact it was used in a blog network. Even in a toxic domain, the backlinks may be valuable, and they can be extracted.

Once you believe a domain needs further investigation, there are many factors to consider before making a final decision.

Relevant To Your Business

The domain niche must be relevant to your book, if you want to leverage the site to gain a competitive advantage among other books in your niche. If the expired domain has topical relevance, then visitors of the last website will stay on your website because of relevancy. In addition, authority (discussed earlier) is built for niche relevancy. You want to demonstrate relevance to users and the search engine.

High Authority: DA and PA

Authority is important, and as mentioned earlier, there are two types of authority. DA is domain authority and PA is page authority, both scores developed and defined by Moz. And by the way if you really plan to spend thousands of dollars buying expired domains, invest in Moz to help the research process. They offer a free trial, so there is no risk.

The metrics for DA and PA indicate site performance.

Page Authority predicts how a specific webpage will rank in search engine result pages. Page Authority scores range from one to 100, and naturally, the higher the score, the higher the ranking ability. Moz says PA is a comparative tool and not an absolute score, so instead of looking at an absolute score, you would use PA to compare against other pages.

Domain Authority measures the strength of entire domains or subdomains. DA is a search engine ranking score that predicts how a website will rank on search engine results. It’s calculated the same way as PA but for the whole domain rather than at page level. DA is a comparative score also, so you can use it to compare websites. DA is not used by Google so does not influence SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). It is also scored on a 100-point scale.

However, it makes sense that domains that score higher for DA and PA are more desirable than those that score lower. A rule of thumb is to look for domains that have a 60-80 score.

Search for High Ranking for Keywords

It only makes sense to purchase an expired domain that has high ranking for the keywords you want to achieve a high ranking in. If you can’t find an expired domain that fits the book's desired keyword profile, then plan on instituting other SEO tactics like building quality backlinks, writing blogs or developing guest blogs either personally or by hiring a blogging service.

Verify the Domain is Indexed

It’s important to verify the expired domain is already indexed in Google. This speeds up the ability to get the SEO advantages you’re looking for. If the expired domain is not indexed, Google will reindex it when the domain is brought back to life. In that case, you’re back in a situation in which the expired domain is treated like a new domain, meaning you have to establish trust and authority.

Assess SEO Advantages

You want to purchase an expired domain that enables you to use it to your SEO advantage. There are two primary strategies for meeting this goal. One is reaching out to webmasters, bloggers, and authors to discuss linking back to your website. The second strategy is creating a URL redirect.

Reaching out – First, extract the backlink profile of the expired domain. Then determine which links are high quality, and focus on them. Research the contact information for each link, and contact the webmaster. The purpose of the communication is to let the webmaster know you acquired the domain that contains their links. Then propose linking back to your website since the domain is expired.

Create a URL redirect – We discussed redirects earlier. Just make sure that the domain hasn't already been 301 redirected somewhere else.

Quality Link Profile

Let’s talk about link quality now. This is one of the most important aspects to consider when looking for an expired domain to purchase. The quality of the links on the expired domain is crucial to SEO. A link profile is the makeup of the links directing users to your URL. The link profile consists of the types of links pointing to your URL, the anchor text of those links and the manner in which the links were acquired.

Google favors links from a variety of sites, and it favors links from high-authority sites. Google also looks for link-building tactics that are engaging in efforts to game the system, i.e. excessive quantity of inbound links to a website.

It’s more important to build high-quality backlinks than to develop a lot of spammy links or low-quality links. Links should come from authoritative, legitimate sources.

Relevance is also considered, meaning the links should make sense. Anchor text is the text of a link that makes it clickable. The text includes keywords, URLs, brand names or just interesting text. However, the anchor text of the links needs to correlate with where the link will take the user.

The challenge is that an excessive amount of anchor text inbound links can look unnatural to Google. The goal is to have links that will look natural to readers and to the search engine.

A Clean Link Profile Has The Following Characteristics:

• Link is from a relevant domain or link is an authoritative information source
• Link is from an authentic website with real traffic
• Anchor text makes sense in that the anchor text with link makes sense for the expired domain
• Anchor text should not be SEO optimized (approximately 1-2 percent keyword density)
• Backlinks should have a low probability of being removed, i.e. one from an outdated article
• Assessing the backlinks in the linking domains is crucial. Too many links from expired domains can look spammy, while too few links indicates the domain has low trust and low authority. Even the right number of backlinks can be problematic, if they are links to low quality domains.
• Heavy foreign language which looks really out of place
• Legal Issues to Consider with Expired Domains (more on this next)

Avoid Buying A Domain Illegally

Every business deal involves legal issues, and buying and using expired domains is no different. Many domains are trademarked or common law trademarked. If the domain is trademarked, you can’t own it even if you managed to buy it (another reason to make sure you use only legitimate companies selling domains likeGoDaddy).

You will get sued and have to give back the domain if you purchase a trademarked expired domain. You're thinking: What?!

Yeah, you're not allowed to own Pepsi.com. Sorry to burst your bubble. You're also not allowed to own pepsichallenge.com or winafreepepsi.com or any other variation.

The challenging part to understand here is that it is not illegal forGoDaddy to sell you the domain. You're just not allowed to claim ownership of it, as you do not own the trademark.

Conventional Trademark vs Common Law Trademark

Traditional trademarks are registered with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). Common law trademarks are not registered with the USPTO, so they don’t have federal protection. The other major difference between a registered trademark and a common law trademark is that the common law trademark is restricted geographically.

You can open a retail store in one state, and the common law trademark doesn’t prevent someone from opening a similar store in another state with the same or similar name. The net result is that local businesses with the same or similar name but are different businesses in different states will have social media accounts with the same name. It can get very confusing for users.

Trademark infringement is measured based on three elements:

1. Prior rights in the trademark established through registration or use
2. Commercial use
3. Likelihood of confusion, i.e. is this the company I really intended to access

The United States is a “first to use” country, as opposed to a “first to file” country. You get some protections if money was paid for goods or services. Domain name usage is protected under common law. The vast number of domains in different formats (.gov, .edu, .com, .net, etc.) means doing deep research to ascertain trademark status is crucial to avoiding a lawsuit.

The disputes are growing over the “second level” domain names, which is the name directly to the left of the top-level name (i.e. in restaurants.com, the top level domain is .com so the second level is restaurants). There cannot be two identical second-level domain names in the same top-level domain. In fact, ICANN doesn’t allow two applications for names that are so similar that their use would create user confusion.

Common law rights are acquired when the name becomes a source indicator in commerce through use, marketing, promotion and advertising.

When you choose an expired domain, you need to understand that it may still be under common law, even if there hasn’t been any commercial use for a period of time. You want to select a domain name that is not USPTO registered and is not likely to confuse customers about products or services or their source.

Generic names can never be trademarked, by the way, i.e. shoes.com or restaurants.com. Calvin Klein owns underwear.com, and it’s proven to be more valuable than calvinklein.com. However, the company has no legal rights for underwear.com.

Legal Issues To Know Before Buying

There are cases of ‘cybersquatting’ in which someone (cyberpirate) without a legitimate claim to a domain registers it with the intent of selling the name, preventing the holder of the trademark from getting access to the name, or diverting traffic. Usually the purpose is to sell the domain name back to the trademark owner.

Another form of deception is typosquatting which is sometimes called “URL hijacking.” Someone registers a domain with an intentional misspelling and makes the website mimic the real website. This practice leverages people’s propensity to mistype when in a hurry.

The Anti-Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (ACPA) of 1999 is a federal statute providing the basis for a court action against cybersquatters. The Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP or Policy) is similar to arbitration. It provides for an administrative proceeding to work for resolution of disputes involving a domain name. It’s the cheapest way to defend domain name.

Under the ACPA and the UDRP, the trademark owner must prove that the infringing domain name is confusingly similar or identical to a domain name in which the trademark owner has rights. A company doesn’t have to register every possible misspelling to retain trademark rights. For example, Target doesn’t have to purchase Targetdepartmentstore.com or Targetretailer.com in order to keep rights to them.

Under the ACPA, a domain name must not infringe when used. When building a website on an expired domain,remember the following points:

• Don’t use an expired domain name that is similar to another domain name or trademarked name in order to profit from it
• Don’t use an expired domain name that is intended to divert customers from the trademarked domain
• Don’t use an expired domain name that could harm the trademarked domain’s goodwill
• Don’t use an expired domain namesimilar to a trademarked name for commercial gain
• Don’t use an expired domain name that willconfuse visitors as to what they are accessing and/or the sponsorship, affiliation, sponsorship or endorsement of the website
• Don’t buy an expired domain that isbranded in any way by somebody else
• Do the research for success

Conclusion

Purchasing one or more expired domains can be a good addition to your book marketing strategy. You can do it by yourself without a costly service provider to pay every month. But it certainly involves more than selecting a name you think sounds good and appears relevant. You should never buy an expired domain without doing extensive research to avoid wasting money and getting involved in a dispute. Faithfully practice due diligence because it’s the key to success.

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