<Disclaimer> A lot of people are having difficulty finding domains. There is a real learning curve, so please be prepared for this. As an option for those that are just starting out, I recommend you prove the model by first purchasing a few domains, or try out our latest service, RankHero.
RankHero allows you to test the viability of this method without having to invest the hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars it takes to find, build, host and maintain your own Private Content Network. </disclaimer>
Update #4 August 1: I have created Version 2 of the valuation here. This page is now an artifact, but I will keep it here for posterity’s sake.
Update #3 July 17: After doing a lot of research on domains since the July 6 linkscape update, I have lowered the DA expectation by 5 points overall. If you purchased with me before July 17, you’ll still get domains based on the 40.
Update #2 July 11: I am going to redefine standard domains and premium domains as domains that have 3 of the metrics instead of 2. I just want to make sure that people get good domains. For those that bought domains that only have 2, they are likely still worth developing, so don’t hate on me.
Update July 11: Changed from using page MozTrust as a metric to root domain mozTrust as a metric. SEOMoz had an update on July 6 that changed the results of page MozTrust in particular, and I believe that root domain MozTrust is a better # anyway as it takes into account www and non-www versions, as well as links to the domain as a whole not just the homepage. I am still experimenting with this number so it may change this week.
I’ve gotten tons of emails and comments asking about how to value an expired domain based on its metrics on Open Site Explorer. Maybe a domain has a high MozTrust but low PR, or high PR but only a few linking root domains, should you still buy it?
I’ve gotten an equal amount of emails from people telling me that this process takes them a long time, and can’t they just buy domains from me? So I figured I would kill two birds with one stone and write this post. Note that I think anything considered a standard domain or higher is worth developing, and the first domains I bought were all standard domains, and this combined with my keyword research practice is ranked the 400 sites that are earning me $1000/day.
I am going to try to privately sell some of the lists of domains I’ve collected, and this is what I think is a fair price:
$97 for a list of 5 available “standard” expired domains
Standard domains would have any 3 of the following:
- Potential PR3 or higher
- PA 30 or higher (www or nonwww homepage)
- Update: DA 25 or higher (lowered from 30)
- 10 LRDs or higher
- Update: Root Domain MozTrust of 3 or higher (was using mozTrust to page)
- Age 4 years or older
Standard+1 (all 5 domains match 4/6 of the above criteria) Add $40
Standard+2 (all 5 domains match 5/6 of the above criteria) – Add $70
Standard+3 (all 5 domains match 6/6 of the above criteria) – Add $100
$197 for a list of 5 available “premium” expired domains
Premium domains would have any 3 of the following:
- Potential PR4 or higher
- PA 40 or higher
- Update: DA 35 or higher (lowered from 40)
- 30 LRDs or higher
- Update: Root Domain MozTrust of 3.6 or higher
- Age 7 years or older
Premium+1 (all 5 domains match 4/6 of the above criteria) Add $80 (Sold out)
Premium+2 (all 5 domains match 5/6 of the above criteria) – Add $140 (Sold out)
Premium+3 (all 5 domains match 6/6 of the above criteria) – Add $200 (Sold out)
Obviously the provided list would be unique to each person, and it would be thoroughly cleaned (links still exist, no spam/comments/directories, no more than 3 drops). I think is a good value in terms of what it would take to do this yourself using the techniques I’ve come up with, while still giving a great ROI if you just plan on flipping the domains at auction.
If you are interested in purchasing some domains at the prices above, send me an email. They are available in very limited quantities at the moment, these are just extra domains that are still available that I did the research on but decided not to develop. Whether or not you want to buy, this post should help you determine the quality of the ones you’ve found so far, and give us some nomenclature to use. Saying “I just found a premium+2 domain” is a lot simpler than “I just found a PR4 DA30 3.4 MT 8 yr old domain!”.
michael says:
Thanks for the detailed breakdown. When I think of all the money I’ve wasted on services like SenukeX and UAW and BMR it makes me sick. I could have been building my own network.
Aron says:
I managed to find 4 standard and 1 standard+1 today so I registered them:)
It is starting to get easier finding longer lists which is the trick. Plus, your video explaining how to use xenu in combination with excel certainly speeds up the process.
Hopefully tomorrow I will be able to find a premium:)
Hayden says:
Good luck Aron, I’m glad to hear you’ve used this technique successfully!
It really is just a learning curve, once you figure out how to find the right lists it gets a lot easier.
Casey Dennison says:
Hey Hayden!
I have some questions.
1.) Isn’t it true that dropped domains lose a bit of their pr?
2.) Do these domains lose pr if you let them sit for a little while before adding content. If these sites are not registered and have no content, wont the be useless?
3.) Isn’t there a need to install a wordpress plugin like link juice keeper or just recreate the pages that are still indexed, if any? Or is it different for these domains were looking to purchase?
These are just things i read on certain forums. I’m no pro at this, so I was just wondering if this is at all true.
Thanks!
Hayden says:
Hey Casey:
1) Dropped domains lose PR as soon as they are out of G’s index (because they drop)
2) As illustrated in these videos, these domains do not have PR to lose but rather they regain PR as soon as they get back in G’s index. TBPR comes after the TBPR update.
3) I use 404 Redirect to just redirect these pages to the homepage – much easier.
stuart says:
Why not re-create the inner pages with PR of these dropped domains and then use these for extra link juice?
Casey says:
Thanks for the reply!
Aron says:
Hi again Hayden:)
Something that I wondering about was the number of OBL for the sites in the private network. Should we show ten posts on the front page with about 5 links per post ( including links via comments, within posts, and images ), or is more ok?
Is it okay to have posts that do not show on the front main page, for instance more than 10 posts?
Thanks
Hayden says:
I include links to my sites within articles (max 25 links per article, as long as all links are fairly relevant to the article), and not within the snippets on the front page. I don’t limit the number of articles on the front page.
Jason says:
So how many total articles/links would you have across an entire a domain?
Hayden says:
If you mean how many total articles could an expired domain hold, it is unlimited. See my post on what do with an expired domain once you’ve found it.
J says:
Hayden shot you an email. Get back when you can thanks.
Rolf says:
Hi Hayden, you are using OSE and Ahref to determine the value of a domain.
I sometimes use SEO spyglass, what is your thought on that programm. Can this tool also be used eg to replace Ahreff?
Hayden says:
SEO Spyglass is good but incredibly slow. I like that it shows PR and shows whether the link is live, but in the time it takes me to analyze one domain I could analyze 5 using OSE or Ahrefs.
Lee says:
Hi Hayden,
superb stuff!
Just sent you an email reply when you can.
Cheers
Lee
Bradley C. says:
Hayden (or anyone else),
It seems that OSE/Mozscape has tweaked their algorithm in the last couple of days. I’m going back and retesting a few of the domains I found a few days ago. I’m finding that many of the domains that had a MozTrust rank of 4.x (no more than 72 hours ago) now have a MozTrust of 5.4 or above!
Needless to say, this is completely throwing off my evaluation gauge for qualifying purchase-worthy domains. Now, I’m not sure if I need to look for domains that have a 6.x MozTrust or just throw the whole damn metric out the window.
Anyone care to share what they have found?
Hayden says:
Thanks for pointing this out Bradley. Linkscape had a big update on the 6th, and the overall size of the index dropped considerably in favor of more fresh updates (stuff crawled no earlier than May). I am now playing with mozTrust of the root domain as a metric instead of the page, as it allows for links to other pages and also covers www and non-www version. So far from what I’ve seen I would consider 3.3+ as standard, and 4+ as premium. I will update this page when I analyze more domains and have a clearer picture
Bradley C. says:
That’s good to know, Hayden. Thanks.
After using your new criteria to go back and look at the last batch of domains I just picked up, it seems that I got a pretty mixed bag. Looking at the root domain’s mozTrust, I have a couple in the 4+ range, several in the 3.3+, and (unfortunately) several below 3.
As a side note, before I purchase a domain, I have been checking each domain in MajesticSEO and looking at the “Trust Flow” metric to see if there is anything to worry about. After comparing this number to the backlink profile of the site, it seems that anything above a 15 is decent. Anything above a 20 is pretty sweet.
This “Trust Flow” metric seems to change a lot depending on whether I use “domain.com” or “www.domain.com”, so I have just been sticking to the metrics for the www. version.
It’s a shame I can’t just scrape this “Trust Flow” data with my search tool since they don’t allow scraping and the MajesticSEO API seems to be very expensive to use. So, unfortunately, I have to do this final check manually.
Jason says:
All of mine are about .5 higher (4.9 to 5.4)
Not sure how what the impact is….
Bradley C. says:
Well, I just know that in the podcast with Spencer, Hayden said that he was grabbing anything with a MozTrust above a 5.5. In the post on this page, he defined a “Premium Domain” to be 5.2 or above.
This small shift is going to redefine things, for sure. Perhaps this is a correction, though. Maybe the Mozscape folks saw a flaw in their system and are correcting it for the better… I’m not sure.
I’d like to hear Hayden (or someone else with some high PR domains) chime in as to how previously-purchased PR 4, PR 5 and PR 6 domains have changed in terms of MozTrust… because comparing currently-performing domains to the new metric will be key to determining what to look for in new domains.
Nick says:
I have noticed this too. Just gone back over the domains I have found and many standards have jumped up to premium. The question is, are they really premium.
Be good to see what Hayden thinks about this or whether the criteria needs to change.
escalante says:
Question: Which one of these metrics is most important? Can you list these metrics in order of most important to least important?
What metric do you track from aHrefs? Refering Domains?
Hayden says:
For backlinking purposes (wanting to rank sites you link to, or rank the site in question):
mozTrust (root)
DA
PA
LRDs
Age
PR
For wanting to sell text links / flip the site for its link profile:
PR
Age
LRDs
DA
PA
mozTrust
Hayden says:
Yes just referring ips from ahrefs as it has a different set of data and cheaper API than Majestic
escalante says:
I was starting to drown in the data. Bought too many junky domains. Starting over and cleaning up my lists.
Plan is to organize list for Ranking sites. I have 30 or so domains for the blog network and was trying to judge which to develop first.
Thanks
conners says:
What I have actually done is create an excel spreadsheet, and used conditional formatting with filters (pretty simple) and put every domain I check in there with 2 or more of the standard credentials listed above (i will now change this to 3), after I have finished going through a load of domains I will filter them to decide which are really worth buying.
escalante says:
By chance would you be willing to share a blank copy of your spreadsheet?
conners says:
Sure, its nothing special, all the information has to be put in manually, but it displays which are good sites more clearly. send me an email conners.hallbrown(at)hotmail.com
Jeremy says:
Maybe I missed this, but is domain age based on when the domain was first registered according to domaintools.com?
Obviously if the domain is not registered it does not have age in the since that the domain has been live for a site for a long time.
Nick says:
I hav eput a lot of time into finding network domains and I think I have been gettin gthe hang of it, but I am still struggling to find good domains to register. I have found one potential PR 4 and several 2+ domains. I think I am doing the porcess correctly, but perhaps my query for scrapebox needs help. I use a query like blogroll -2012 -2011 -2010 – 2009 -2008 and I vary the topic like “blogroll economics” or “blogroll musicians”, to get about 100 results with PR higher than 2. After going through the analysis, I’m not finding many good domains. Any help on the Scrapebox query would be appreciated.
thanks, –nick
escalante says:
You want your your scrape list to be PR5 and higher.
Another term to search is “archive” “archives”
Nick says:
thanks es, I’ll try that one.
–nick
Cesar says:
Thanks for the “archive” and ‘archives”
Any other terms to search for? Can’t seem find anything with blogroll, etc.
Osiris says:
Hayden, really cool stuff. Thanks.
You mentioned in the podcast that you could flip a PR 3 for $150+ and you also mentioned in the video that you could easily flip those PR5 domains.
Do you have any sections of NoHatSEO for info on flipping these domains? If not, could you share the service you use to flip and realistic valuations?
For example, if I were to purchase the lowest level domains you are offering at $97 and not use them for SEO purposes, how would you suggest flipping them and for how much?
Thanks!
Osiris
ExactLee says:
Wondering if any of these are still available?
Maroso says:
what does LRDs mean? Is it “Links to Root Domain” or “Links from Root Domains” or something else?
Yisroel Reiss says:
Maroso,
Hayden means Linking Root Domains. So it means the amount of domains that are linking to the domain you are purchasing.
I hope this helps.
Hayden – thanks for changing the world over and over again with your vision and ideas.
Sincerely,
Yisroel