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Get Traffic Using Expired Domain Names

Each day 20,000 plus domain names expire and become available for anyone to register. This is valuable if you are seeking a domain to help you boost your traffic, or are looking to resell the names for a profit.

Expired domain names have been owned by at least one person in the past. This owner may have built a website, advertised, submitted to the search engines, or traded links with another website owner.

So why would anyone who made any kind of effort with a domain simply let it expire? Well, here are just a few:-

• The Author lost interest
• A company went out of business
• Simply forgot to renew the registration
• Could not afford the fees

For whatever reason, that domain is now available for the taking; and you can take advantage of all that work. You could point it at your existing domain or build a new site.

So, how do you know if a domain name even has expired traffic?

While you can never tell the amount of traffic that is going to an expired domain name, there are some factors you can use to gauge this. Here are a few:

Link Popularity

Link popularity tells you the number of URL's or pages that link to a specific domain name. Basically, the more links coming to a domain name the higher the link popularity and the higher chance of generating traffic. Additionally, a domain name with high link popularity has a better chance of receiving better quality traffic.

Alexa Rank

The Alexa rank is a measurement of a domain's unique visitor traffic and page views. The Alexa toolbar tracks how many users visit a domain and grades those visits as rank. Alexa will normally drop an expired domain name after seeing no page view traffic for 3 months. So, if there happens to be a related Alexa rank, this is a definitive resource for traffic.

Now if that Alexa rank is 1,000,000 or higher, then the domain is really not receiving any traffic. You should look for a domain with at least 100,000 that should translate into at least 2 visitors a day.

Google PageRank

Google pagerank is a value from 1 to 10 that expresses the popularity of a domain name based upon how many quality web pages are linking into a particular domain name. Pagerank can be used for two main reasons when acquiring an expiring domain name.

1. Building a website to boost your main website's pagerank
2. Take advantage of the traffic coming from the inbound links

If you have the Google toolbar installed, you can discover an expired domain's pagerank by typing the URL into your web browsers address bar and looking for the pagerank to appear.

Yahoo And DMOZ Listings

The previous domain owner may have been approved by a Dmoz editor or even paid for inclusion into a search engine like Yahoo or Looksmart. When you acquire a domain name that is expiring, you inherit these listings as well. Do the research and search the directory for the name by simply typing in the full URL for the domain.

A listing in any of the top ten search engines will not guarantee traffic, but will give you a better chance of receiving quality traffic. At the very least you can usually turn these domains around and sell them for the value of the directory listings.

DropDay and Oddity Software publish a daily list of expired domains names so you can conduct your research for free.

As you can see, this is a very affordable way to gain near instant traffic for your website. Try to purchase domain names that are related to what kind of traffic you need. As an example; if you need webmaster traffic, purchase domain names that have keywords that are appealing to a webmaster not a cook.

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