Note from Nathan: I received several complaints about FreshDrop and no longer recommend them. Please use SpamZilla if you want a reliable way to find expired domains.
Wondering how you can find expired domains using FreshDrop? Perfect, because this video will show you exactly what you need to know:
SpamZilla is our preferred choice for finding expired domains now.
Transcript
Hey what’s up, this is Nathan from Gotch SEO, and in this video, I’m going to show you how to find expired domains using FreshDrop. So I’m currently on FreshDrop, and they actually allow you to look at domains without logging in, so you can see a lot without having to pay for their service right away and this is a very, very valuable thing if you don’t want to invest a lot of money. But if you do this is a very high quality tool, and it’s definitely worth the investment.
So with that said let me start by messing around with some of these filters. So the first thing that you want to do is set some minimums for these filters. For this Trust Flow filter I’m going to set a minimum of ten Trust Flow and then for the MOS DA I’m going to set a minimum of ten DA. Then I’m just going to leave all these other filters alone for now and also make sure that the domains are indexed in Google because that’s something that I personally like as a qualification step. So I’m just going to copy this first domain, and I’m going to show you my mindset when I’m going through and trying to qualify an expired domain.
So I’m going to grab the domain, and I’m going to throw it into Ahrefs, and I’m going to click on backlinks because I want to see what the link profile looks like. So right away I see that this domain has a .edu link and so that is a good sign because .edu is very high quality in most cases. Then I’m going to go back here and see that this domain actually has a Wikipedia link as well and so that’s a really good sign. So we’ve found two quality links going to this domain. So now what we want to do is see if this domain has been used for Spam in the past.
SpamZilla is our preferred choice for finding expired domains now.
So just go to archive.org throw the domain in, and we’ll see what this expired has been used for. And so what do we find right away is that this domain has been spammed, and it isn’t being used for the original purpose. And so someone used this domain to spam some sort of Chinese or something of that nature, and so this is one that would be unqualified, and you wouldn’t want anything to do with it. Now keep in mind, one thing you could do is you could actually extract the links from that domain using the White Hat alternative to PBNs and avoid all that spam altogether. So it’s one thing to think about. When you find these spam domains, don’t just throw them out the window right away, just remember you can do some outreach and try to pull those links away from that dead domain.
So now I’m going to pull another domain, and I’m going to throw it into Ahrefs, and I’m going to analyze the link profile. So it looks like this domain does not have very high-quality links, looks like it has some bookmarks, it has a lot of links from Blogspot, which are usually web 2.0s and so this domain is not one I’d probably want to mess around with and also one way to check for spam as well is look at the target URL for this link and then look at the anchor text. Those two things, if they’re not relevant to each other there’s a good chance it’s being used for spam or maybe it’s been negative SEO or something but either way we know it’s not something that we want to mess around with so this opportunity is unqualified. However, I’ll still show you what it looks like in archive.org, and of course it’s been used for spam, so we are 0 for 2.
So now I’m going to get this 3rd domain and see if we can get quality domain out of this process. And so it looks like this domain might have some links, but it looks like they’re probably not going to be high quality. And so we’ll go a little bit deeper and see if we can find maybe a couple quality links, but it looks like this one’s not going to be qualified right off the bat. So this is the link that I pulled up, maybe a small possibility that it could be a decent link, but it looks like this is just nothing more than a link farm or some sort of directory. Not one we’d want to use.
So let’s keep our search going and try to find some better opportunities here. So not what I’m going to do is I’m going to grab another domain, and I’m going to throw it into ahrefs and see if we can hopefully find a better domain. It looks like this domain has some promise. It has some .edu links, looks like it has some decent backlinks going to it. Let’s go ahead and check out, let’s see what this link actually looks like. So we’ll open up actually a few of these links to see if they’re live and see if they’re high-quality pages and let’s open up a few here. And so this first one, that doesn’t look right. This looks like a great link right here, looks like a very good site. Looks like another good site with a link on it. And another site that is high quality so now let’s do our second round of validation that is using archive.org.
So right away it looks like sort of weird download issues going on with the archive.org, but we’ll keep going and see maybe if it is a legit domain, it hasn’t been used for spam or anything like that. So this keeps happening, let’s try it again, go a little bit further back in time, so it looks like this domain has not been used for spam. It does have this kind of weird download issue with the most recent archives. But it seems like this domain has a legit profile. It hasn’t been used for spam based on what I’ve seen, so you could definitely take this domain and use it and leverage its link profile in one way or another.
So if you’re a little bit worried about that download issue, you could always just use the White Hat alternative to private blog networks because that method is so powerful because it doesn’t matter what’s going on at the domain you’re really just trying to extract high quality links so that’s what makes that one so powerful. But if you wanted to use the merger technique you’d want to make sure that you are very, very confident about the domain before you 301 redirected to your site.
That is all there is to it so thank you so much for watching this video and I hope you now know how to find expired domains using FreshDrop. Alright, thanks again.