Following this post will save you lots of time and money when buying expireds domains.
What’s the most important metric to look for before buying expired domains?
It’s checking if they are still indexed in Google
Why?
Because if they aren’t indexed, they didn’t receive any love from Google since quite some time, or Google even completely stopped sending love
You then bought another penalized domain
Lets elaborate this in detail:
- Have you ever deleted a domain of yours that still had pages indexed or observed a domain that got deleted?
How long did it take until all pages dissapeared from the SERPs and the domain was completed deindexed?
It can take months, quite often over a year.
This means when the domain finally disappears from the SERPs Google ‘knows’ already since over a year that the domain is dead.
- Since over 10 years expired domains are the way to go in all areas of SEO. You use them for link building, you use them for building sites that rank more quickly than freshly registered domains.
Everybody knows this, including spammers.
That’s why many expireds you see as drops today already have a history of sometimes multiple abuses. They got used for a quickly thrown together and shabby PBN, for a fake shoes shop, for a casino or pharma spam site.
To the most aggressive forms of spam Google reacts with completely deindexing a domain.
This means all pages of the domain are getting removed from the index and no new pages are indexed. This is a permanent ban and it’s hard to impossible to restore such a domain.
Without owning the domain and checking in GSC if it holds a penalty it’s close to impossible to say if a domain just fell out of the index or because it got penalized.
If the expired is still indexed you can at least exclude the most harsh penalization Google has in its arsenal: deindexing and completely removing a site from the index.
So, a domain being still indexed shows it’s kind of healthy.
By registering only expireds that are still indexed in Google you will reduce the amount of bad registrations a lot.
Rule: If a domain is not indexed in Google anymore, don’t pick it, no matter how good the other metrics look.
To quickly and easily check that index status of a list of domains you can use my tool https://indexcheck.net
If you want to learn about the other important metrics in buying expireds for linkbuilding, PBNs or your own sites I recommend you PBNs Done Right. It will teach you everything you need to know to successfully scale your SEO with expired domains.