How to Find Expired Domains With Ahrefs

Are you looking to boost your website’s SEO with expired domains? Ahrefs can help you find the perfect one quickly and easily.

With its advanced domain and backlink analysis features, you can identify high-quality expired domains with valuable backlinks.

In this article, we’ll show you how to use Ahrefs to find expired domains, check their health, and explore alternative methods.

Get ready to take your SEO efforts to the next level!

What Are Expired Domains?

Expired domains are domains that weren’t renewed by their owners and are now available for re-registration. These domains can have a high-authority backlink profile, making them valuable for SEO.

Benefits include an inexpensive cost compared to new domains and link juice, which transfers authority and trust. Expired domains can help boost search engine rankings, trust, and site authority.

What Can You Use Expired Domains For?

There are three popular use cases of expired domains:

Use expired domains to build PBNs

You can build a simple website on the expired domain (which already has strong backlinks, history, and authority) and link from this site to your main sites. This is called a Private Blog Network or PBN. This technique is extremely useful in a few cases:

• When you have more than one website – you can link from your PBN site to more than one of your money sites, which can be significantly cheaper compared to buying links for all of your money sites separately. Of course, you must be careful not to leave any footprints.
• When you have a website in a foreign language – it is extremely hard to find good backlinks for some specific countries, languages, and markets. Examples of such languages are Nordic languages, Dutch languages, and countries in South East Asia. Some of these countries, such as the Netherlands and Finland, have a lower number of websites (due to lower population), yet they are lucrative markets for many high-paying niches. On top of that, you must add the language barrier (unless you are a fluent speaker) when communicating with webmasters and negotiating links. Cultural differences and work ethics also play a role in that, believe it or not. At the end of the day, it could be easier, cheaper, and faster to acquire an aged domain in these languages rather than trying to get backlinks the old-fashioned way.
• When your site is in a “sensitive niche” – some websites can acquire a good amount of links naturally, without even doing any outreach. However, people are very hesitant when it comes to linking to sites related to Gambling, Crypto, Forex, Payday loans, Dating, and more. Many of the webmasters refuse to link to such sites at all, others will require more money.

Build a new money site (main site) on the expired domain

Imagine that you acquire an expired domain with a couple of strong links from Wikipedia, New Yorker, The Guardian, or any other “seed site” for a few hundred dollars or even better – just for the registration fee. Now, imagine how much it would cost you to acquire these links if you start on a new domain. Add to that the expired domain will already be a familiar “object” to search engines, with years of history in your niche, and will already have trust and authority. You see the rocket start you can get compared to starting from scratch, right?

Use the expired domain for a 301 redirect to your money site

This is the easier way to get the most of the link juice and authority from the expired domain and transfer it directly to your site.

More about finding the best domains for PBNs, learn here.

How to Find Expired Domains in Ahrefs?

Ahrefs Site Explorer is a great tool for finding expired domains. Start by choosing a popular blog or website in your niche that’s likely to have a good backlink profile.

Next, use the broken link feature to look for broken do-follow links. Export the broken links to an Excel spreadsheet for further analysis.

Use Website SEO Checker to check the domain and page authority of the expired domains.

To check availability, import them into https://www.name.com/.

Additionally, analyze the backlink profile and any potential penalties to check the health of the domains.

How to Check the Availability of Expired Domains?

Name.com is a domain registrar which allows you to check the availability of the domains in bulk. All you need to do is export the broken links from Ahrefs into an Excel spreadsheet for further analysis.

After that, you can import the domains into Name.com and verify if they’re still available for registration. It’s important to ensure that the expired domains have good domain authority (DA) and page authority (PA).

You can also check the health of the expired domains by analyzing their backlink profile and any potential penalties.

How to Check Expired Domains Health?

Once you have identified the expired domains, you can check their health to ensure they’re suitable for your needs.

Checking backlinks profiles and metrics such as DR, DA, TF, and CF can be a solid indicator of the domain’s health. If the domain is indexed in Google (check with site:domain.com), it is another positive sign.

Another important check is the domain’s anchors – too many exact matches or spammy anchors could be a sign to avoid.

Alternative Methods for Finding Expired Domains?

SEO.Domains

SEO.Domains is the biggest source of expired domains worldwide. The company provides over 100,000 domains for sale with history and backlinks at “Buy Now” prices, saving you the hassle of auctions.

They have domains in 90 languages and 150 TLDs, priced from $30 to $200,000.

They offer premium domains with impressive SEO metrics like DA 85, DR 79, and over 60,000 referring domains (RD).

A notable advantage of SEO.Domains is that they own all the listed domains, eliminating issues that can arise when dealing with resellers. Additionally, they offer services such as PBN building and maintenance, content restoration, free consultations with their experts for domain selection, and more.

Domain auctions

Some registrars and platforms organize auctions, where for a certain time, anyone can bid for the rights to own a specific website domain. An example of a popular domain marketplace with auctions is GoDaddy.

Before you participate in auctions, you must evaluate the domain and take factors such as metrics, history, name, backlinks, and TLD into consideration. The highest bidder must pay their bid plus associated fees to secure domain ownership.

You should keep in mind that good domains get very expensive, and you can rarely buy one at an affordable price. However, you can still give it a try. 

Conclusion

Finding the perfect expired domain for your website can be a daunting task. But with Ahrefs, you can easily find the right expired domain with valuable backlinks.

You can check its availability and health and even explore alternative methods to find expired domains.

With Ahrefs, you can boost your website’s SEO and authority in no time.

So what’re you waiting for? Start your search for the perfect expired domain today!