The only reason for me to get an expiring domain name is because of link popularity. I get to know about expiring domain advantages while searching for a new one that best represent my new website. I take a piece of paper and wrote down tons of domain names that best represent my new website. Almost all of the domain names I listed down was taken. I am so frustrated about it. My new website still hang there for weeks waiting to be named.
Choosing domain name can be tough but not if you have plenty of money to spend with. If you don't you'll have to crack your head to think of something easy to remember, short and best represent your site. But what if you get the perfect domain name to suit your new website and yet you are struggling to position your new domain name and website to search engine and luring traffic? If you already got a strategy to promote it, I congratulate you, but if you don't I would suggest you to get an expiring domain name.
Why expiring domain name? link popularity equivalent to traffic, when you buy a quality expired domain name, it adds value to it. You are purchasing the existing effort build from previous owner and gain from it. A new domain name can get search engines months to index your new domain name or you might not even have chance for dmoz.org directory to include your link. More … expired domain name with pre-existent incoming links, pre-built Google Page Rank, type-in traffic, residual traffic from old content, ensuring not only high chances of selling them later at higher prices, but great profits to be made by parking them and collecting daily pay-per-click revenue. Modest, but steady and passive (no work to be done) income is usually generated, but there are reports of people making as much as $25,000 a year with a single parked domain.Satisfy? Why should you make your life so difficult if you can get an expired domain?
Here are some interesting facts about the domain drop cycle:
- 120,000 to 200,000 domains expire daily due to non-renewals. Many of these are renewed as soon as the registrant realizes that their e-mail or site no longer works.
- 25,500 to 60,000 domains drop (become available) daily as part of the regular drop cycle.
- Approximately 1.5 million domains are registered and dropped daily as part of domain tasting.
- At the time of this writing (2007-02-20) there are approximately 65 million registered .coms and 9 million .nets.
- The official drop time for .com/.net is between 11 AM and 2 PM Pacific time (domains are deleted in batches throughout this period).
Before you plan to acquire an expiring domain name, you got to know the domain drop cycle process. Usually domain name is registered for 1 year, if you don't renewed after 1 year, it's expire. When it expire, it doesn't available to purchase immediately. You need to wait for 75-80 days until it's fully released to purchase. The first 75 days, the owner still got chance to renew it. After that, its pending delete for 5 days or registrar can choose to delete off after 75 days. You can know the expires date for a domain name from whois nameserver and do your math. If you want to get a domain name that's already known will be renewed by the owner, you can forget about it. Normally you can't get an ideal domain name from expired domain, you only can pick from the list of domain names which is going to drop for that day. You can find tons of expiring domain name service website on the internet which will list domain names that will be drop for the day or is going to be drop soon. Beforehand, you can standby everyday until it's fully released.
Registrar and Registry Differences
A registrar is a company that allows an individual or any legal entity to register a domain name. The registrar uses its dedicated connection to the registry to process domain registrations, renewals and deletions.In other words, a registrar is what one would use to register a domain name, change contact info for a registered domain and much more. A registry is where one would go to become a registrar and sell domain registrations.
Consideration when getting a domain name, you can refer to the following metrics when getting an expiring domain name, the more usually better.
- Google™ Pagerank
- Type-in Rank (Overture™ TLD score)
- Term Popularity (Overture™ term score)
- Google™ Link Popularity
- Google Term Popularity
- MSN™ Link Popularity
- MSN™ Term Popularity
- Alexa™ Link Popularity
- Alexa™ Traffic Rank
- Wayback Records
- Wayback Age
- Dmoz Directory Listing
- Dictionary and Adult Domains
- Three and Four Character Domains
The fact of getting an expiring domain names is that you can't actually guarantee you can get them even you were the first one to noticed that great domain, because you are not the only person in this expiring domain names game, people from around the world who had the same interest is actually looking at it. Chances become lesser if you are against domain sharks bidding several thousands of dollars for the name you wanted. Usually, I don't choose those super high popularity one, I choose those average one because you will have higher chance to acquire them. Sometimes you might find them hardly to get also.
What should I do if the domain name I prefer is drop today, where to grab it?
You should go look for domain drop catchers (See what is domain drop catchers in below quote). If you are getting an expiring domain, 1 day or 5 days (pending delete period) before it drop, you can check on those domain drop catchers website. Here's 3 most popular drop catchers:
I would only discuss about SnapNames since I only use them before. Here's my experience. What I do is I would query the soon expiring domain name and see if there's any open auction, if there none (if the domain name listed do not have auction start date), I would wait for the last day. Snapnames.com charges you $60 for your domain but worth getting it. If the last day still don't have auction start date, then you would wanted to start the auction and wait for the clock to tick till the auction ended (usually 3 days). Upon reached the third day, you got to stand by in front of your computer 10 minutes before the auction end to make sure don't have last minutes bidders to get it away from you. If there's a bid for the domain in live auction, the auction will add another 5 minutes to end the auction and will continue adding 5 minutes till no more bid. You can get a better picture visiting snapnames faqs.
Domain Drop Catchers, as the name implies, are companies that register domains as soon as they become available (drop) on behalf of their customers.
The technical aspect of drop catching is a bit complicated, but the overall concept is easy to understand. Drop catchers usually own or partner with registrars. This is because registrars have direct access to the registry (known as a registry connection) and have the right to register domains. During the daily drop times (11 AM to 2 PM Pacific time for .com/.net) the registrars will send massive "register" queries to the registry to try to grab a domain for the drop catcher.
Since no one knows exactly when a particular domain will drop, the the only sure bet is to constantly send these queries until a domain is either registered or the drop time has elapsed.
Finally, I end up getting an expired domain for my new website which is consider good and best represent my new website.
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