If you are in the SEO game, you’d know how useful Ahrefs can be.
The tool makes the life of every SEO easier.
Even when you need it for something unique like finding expired domains.
The right expired domains carry a lot of SEO value, but finding them can be a pain in the neck.
This is where investing in a paid tool like Ahrefs comes in handy.
In this article, you’ll learn all about finding high-quality expired domains with Ahrefs.
Let’s start.
What are Expired Domains
When a domain owner voluntarily or involuntarily doesn’t pay for a domain’s renewal, it expires.
And, after a domain expires, anyone can purchase it.
But, of course, expired domains aren’t as straightforward to register; you’d need to find them first.
Importance of Expired Domains
Smart SEOs use expired domains in a variety of ways.
Expired domains generally are under the use of someone for a specific period of time, until they stop paying for them.
And, high-quality expired domains gather high-authority backlinks over time, which makes them so valuable.
Here is something amazing: One of the reasons why SEOs give their time and energy into finding high-quality domains is that they are inexpensive.
Even if an expired domain has a backlink from a 90+ DA website, you can get it at the same rate as a new one.
Here is why expired domains are so popular among the SEO community.
Transfer Link Juice
SEOs estimate the value of an expired domain by the quality and number of links it builds over time.
Any domain that links to your site transfers its authority and trust.
SEOs call this link juice.
Improve Your Site’s Authority
So, when you link a high-quality expired domain with your main site, it improves your site’s trust and authority.
This eventually helps your site’s ranking on the SERPs (search engine results pages).
Uses of Expired Domains?
So, in what ways you can use expired domains?
SEOs generally use expired domains to:
- Build private blog networks (PBNs)
- To create an authority site
- To pass the link juice to a money site
Let’s have a look at each method briefly.
To Build a Private Blog Network (PBN)
Let’s first see what a private blog network actually is.
A private blog network is a combination of several blogs pointing to a single blog. The purpose is to pass the link juice to the main site.
These sites need to be of high domain authority and trust, so SEOs generally use expired domains to build PBNs.
To Redirect Them to Your Money Site
You can either link a PBN to your money site or a single expired domain.
The more expired domains linked to a site, the more its authority.
But, of course, you need to check the quality of an expired domain before using it.
To Create a New Authority Website
Another way to use expired domains is by building a website on them.
You see, when you buy a new domain name and create a website, you have to work on its SEO from scratch.
By buying a high-quality expired domain instead of a new one, you’d be getting a head-start in your SEO efforts.
This strategy can save you a lot of money and time down the road.
Now you know what are expired domains and how SEOs use them.
It’s time to address the elephant in the room.
Related – How To Find Expired Web 2.0
How to Find Expired Domains Ahrefs
In this section, you’ll learn to use Ahrefs to find authority expired domains. But, let’s first see why you should trust this SEO tool.
Why Trust Ahrefs
Source: Ahrefs.com
Ahrefs is an industry-leading SEO tool trusted and recommended by webmasters and SEOs all around the world.
It helps you identify growth opportunities and loopholes in your SEO efforts and points you in the right direction.
Here is something to keep in mind: The data any SEO tool provides isn’t always 100% accurate, but it’s a good estimate.
Ahrefs is one of the most accurate SEO tools out there, so you don’t need to fret about its authenticity.
But, it’s a paid tool and might be a little expensive for some.
You do get a lot of value though; for instance, finding a list of great expired domains could cover your cost for a long time.
Now, if you are trying to find expired domains once, and don’t do it on a regular basis, you might want to check out Ahref’s 7-day trial.
Although it’s not free, you can get your hands on all of its features for just $7. And, if you can complete your project before a week, it would be well worth the investment.
Ahrefs isn’t the only tool you are going to use to find expired domains though.
There are a couple of free online tools that you might need to use to filter out high-quality expired domains.
Let’s talk about these tools very briefly. This will help you throughout the process.
Excel
Once you find a list of expired domains using Ahrefs, you’d need to export or download them on your computer.
For that, you’d need Microsoft Excel installed on your computer.
Website SEO Checker
Source: websiteseochecker.com
You don’t want to use an expired domain that has a domain authority score of under 50 (we’ll see why later).
Online tools like Website SEO Checker give you DA scores of domains in bulk. The best part about this one is that it’s free to use.
The tool also lets you check the page authorities of individual pages.
DA and PA are third-party SEO metrics that just tell you how authoritative a domain is.
The higher the better.
You can also use a Website SEO Checker to extract domains from URLs. We will see how later.
Name.com
Name.com is a domain registrar that can help you find the domains that are available for registration.
All you’d have to do is copy and paste the domains you find with Ahrefs and see if they are available or not.
But, there is a limit to how many domains you can check at a time.
Name.com lets you analyze 500 domains in one go, which is good enough as it does that for free.
So, how do you scrape or find expired domains using Ahrefs?
Let’s find out.
How to Find Expired Domains Ahrefs
To find expired domains using Ahrefs, you’d need to use your competitor’s website.
The first step is to pluck your competitor’s website into Ahref’s site explorer and hit search.
Source: Ahrefs.com
Once the tool loads the data for that site, look for the “Broken links” option on the left side of the panel under “Outgoing links”.
Remember, “Broken backlinks” under “Backlink profile” is something else.
You want to go to “Broken links” under “Outgoing links”.
Here is another thing to remember: You only want to go with “Do follow” broken links.
You can filter the list of broken links in Ahrefs simply by selecting the filter at the top.
Source: Ahrefs.com
Notice that Ahrefs also shows the URL rating for all the domains.
URL rating is a score given to a domain to showcase its authority.
It’s similar Domain Authority score by Moz.
A higher URL score means higher domain authority.
So, of course, the higher the better. We’ll go into the details of domain authority later.
After getting the list of broken links pointing to your competitor’s site, simply export it.
Source: Ahrefs.com
You can then download the list in the form of a .CSV file.
Source: Ahrefs.com
Click on “Start export” and the tool will download the .CSV file on your computer.
Go to the download folder and open the file in Microsoft Excel.
You’ll see a column of broken links URLs.
Highlight that full column and press CTRL + C to copy it.
Next, you want to filter out the domain names from the URLs.
Otherwise, you won’t be able to bulk-check them.
Just go to Website SEO Checker and paste the copied column into the box.
Source: websiteseochecker.com
You also want to remove the duplicates from that row and convert all of the broken links to lowercase.
After check-marking “Remove duplicates” and “Convert domain to lowercase”, hit “Filter”.
Wait for a few seconds for the tool to finish its job.
Once it loads the domains, copy all of them.
Now, you have a list of broken links pointing to your competitor’s site.
But, broken links don’t always mean expired domains.
So, you need to check the availability of these domains.
As already discussed, you can use a free online website/tool called Name.com.
Go to the domain name registrar’s website and scroll down to the bottom.
You’ll see the following option.
Source: name.com
You can now enter those domains into the box and click the search icon.
Source: name.com
The website will now go to work and scrape the domain names that are available for registration.
The best thing is, you might be able to register these expired domains for as low as $12.
You’ll see a lot of expired domains available around that price point.
Just copy them and start making a list of them in Excel.
Repeat the process to get as many expired domains as you want.
But, wait, there’s more to expired domain hunting.
Similar Article – How To Find Expired Domains for PBN
How to Check Expired Domain Quality and Health
This is an important and often overlooked part of expired domain hunting.
If you don’t look at the quality and authority of an expired domain, you can’t be sure of its effectiveness.
So, what aspects of an expired domain you should be looking at before buying it?
Let’s see.
Check DA
As already mentioned, the DA of your expired domain reflects how authoritative it is.
SEOs strive to get their hands on expired domains that have DAs over 90, but that’s a tough nut to crack.
If you can find a domain name with a DA of over 90, great! If not, an expired domain with a DA of over 50 would do the trick.
So, how to check an expired domain’s DA?
You can use any DA checker tool of your choice. We’ve talked about Website SEO Checker before.
Let’s take a look at another one.
Bulk SEO Tools is another free website/tool that spits out the domain authorities of a complete list of domains.
Source: bulkseotools.com
However, there is a limit to how many URLs can you check in one go.
If you have more than 200, you can find their DA in multiple sessions.
Check Trust Flow (TF)
Trust Flow, as the name suggests, is a metric that indicates how trustworthy an expired domain is.
It’s also a third-party metric developed by a reputable company Majestic.
Although there are other free online tools that can tell you the Trust Flow of a domain, Majestic is the most accurate for obvious reasons.
However, it’s not free.
Check SPAM Score
The spam score of an expired domain is a good indication of whether the previous owner has been using it for spamming purposes.
Fortunately, you can check the spam score of a list of expired domains for free.
Just go to the Website SEO Checker tool again and paste expired domains, one per line.
Source: websiteseochecker.com
The spam score essentially takes into consideration the gap between the number of backlinks and the number of referring domains.
So, generally, if there are a lot of backlinks coming from a single or a few websites, the spam score would be high.
The more the number of unique domains linking to an expired domain, the lower its spam score.
How to Find Expired Domains Ahrefs (For PBNs)
Because expired domains can carry a lot of authority, SEOs also use them to build private blog networks.
Private blog networks are any combination of links that point to a money site, attempting to increase its trust and authority in the eyes of Google.
The process of finding expired domains for PBNs is similar to what we’ve discussed above.
Just pluck your competitor’s site into Ahref’s Site Explorer and go to the “Broken Links” linking to that site.
Then, “Export” the “Do Follow” broken links to your computer. Lastly, trim the URLs of those domains and check if they are available.
You might not be able to spot a PBN link with confidence, but you can get every expired domain linking to your competitor’s site with this method.
You can then replicate your competitor’s backlink profile to outrank them on the search engines.
How to Check the Availability of Expired Domains?
We’ve talked about a tool before that tells you the availability of domain names in bulk. It was Name.com.
Let’s tell you about another effective and popular bulk domain availability checking tool. NameBright tells you whether a domain name is available for registration or not.
Source: NameBright.com
However, the website only allows you to check the status of up to 20 domains at a time.
How to Find Expired Domains Ahrefs – FAQs
What are Expired Domains?
Domains that haven’t been renewed by their owners are considered expired.
Anyone who can find these expired domains can re-register them.
Why Use Expired Domains?
Many expired domains tend to generate backlinks over time, which builds their authoritativeness.
The more high-quality backlinks an expired domain has, the higher its authority.
In What Ways Expired Domains Can Be Used?
Because a high-quality expired domain carries a lot of value, it can be repurposed in multiple ways.
SEOs use expired domains in the following ways:
To build an authority site: You don’t always have to link an expired domain to your money site. In fact, many bloggers prefer to start their journey from an expired domain instead of buying a new one.
This gives them a head-start as far as off-page SEO is concerned.
Google already recognizes and trusts a high-quality expired domain; so, all you have to do to rank is produce great content.
To pass the link juice: Probably the most popular way of using expired domains is by linking them to an established site.
Every time an authoritative website links to your site, your site’s trust and authority tend to increase.
So, an authoritative expired domain should have the same impact on your money site as well.
To build PBNs: A private blog network is generally a combination of expired domains pointing to a single site to boost its rankings.
So, in a PBN setup, you are essentially linking multiple expired domains to your money site.
Final Thoughts
This was all about how to find expired domains Ahrefs.
High-quality expired domains can add real value to your site’s organic rankings, but finding them can be tricky.
Fortunately, tools like Ahrefs make it pretty straightforward and effective.
You’ve read this far, so by now, you have an action plan on how to find authoritative expired domains using Ahrefs.
Just make sure to check their domain authority, trust flow, and spam score to ensure long-term benefits.
You may also like – Expired Domains – Everything You Need to Know in 2021
