How to Find Expired Domains with Ahrefs (Beginners Guide)

Want to learn how to find expired domains with high authority using Ahrefs? The “trick” is to scrape popular websites in your niche and look for broken dofollow 404 links.

This is the same approach that helped me get lots of expired domains for my niche sites

I also earned hundreds of dollars offering this as a service on Fiverr (call it a side-hustle, haha)

I’m going to show you how to do it easily and fast in just few steps.

What you are going to Learn:

• What expired domains are and their importance
• How to find high authority expired domains ready to rank
• A better and faster alternative to Ahrefs for finding expired domains etc.

What are Expired Domains?

Expired domains are the domains that were registered, due for renewal but the owners due to one reason or the other was unable to renew them, it lasts for longer months and since there was no one to renew it, got expired and ready for re-registration.

The amazing part;

These domains may have had a good backlink profile as well as domain authority that has an ability to rank well on search engines like google, bing, yandex etc.

How about you get them? What would be their importance? you may be asking:

Normally, when you want to start a blog, you need two things to start

1. A domain (The name people would use to find your business
2. A Webhosting  (Where you host your images, blog posts, contents at a whole etc)

Choosing a suitable domain for your business or personal blog is one thing; another thing is growing that domain to one that makes you income (money).

When you register a domain newly, there are many things you’d need to make it appear on search engines such as SEO: I.E. Backlinks, etc.. which would definitely take you some years or months.

Professional bloggers don’t buy new domains for their Authority or Microniche blogs. Micro Niche blogs are those blogs that focuses mainly on one topic E.G: A blog about Ipads, Coupons.

I would be going deeply into what Microniche blogs in the upcoming posts. But for now let me stick to the main purpose of this post.

Importance of Expired Domains

Link Juice

What is Link Juice?

A link juice simply refers to a high authority domain linking to a domain which definitely gives the domain more power and ability to rank well on search engines.

When you register a domain that has lots of link juice then be sure to rank well with it because you would not need to get much backlinks compared to a newly registered domain.

High Authority (Domain Age)

Want to Start that Authority Blog? or Micro-niche blog? you don’t have to buy a brand new domain as you would have to work hard to get it rank on first Page!

How about you get an expired domain that has a good Backlink profile or targeted traffic, has a good Domain Authority (The ability to rank is high) etc.

Guess;

At the same rate of about $12-$14 Yes, you don’t have to pay huge.

“When I choose to build a new authority site or niche site, I never do it on a brand new domain.

The problem with new domains is that you have to invest in building up their authority from an SEO perspective which costs significant time & money to do.

Instead I prefer to register an expired domain that already has authority to build the site on.

That gives me a huge head start and quite often building out a content rich site on a powerful expired domain is enough to crack the first page rankings without any additional work.

You just wouldn’t have that advantage with a brand new domain!

And the best bit?

Registering an expired domains costs exactly the same as registering a brand new virgin domain” – Matthewwoodward

But Getting Expired Domain names are very hard to do; but not anymore as you would be learning how to get them easily.

I’ve spent a lot of time; with trial and error to finding how to get expired domains easily but i would be sharing with you right on this post for free.

The best part;

I offer these service on fiverr for $15 but that would not be the case here because you are a loyal reader of this blog and so am giving you for free.

What you stand to enjoy apart from the SEO benefits;

• let me refer to the service I offer on fiverr for $15; You won’t have to spend always whenever you want to get expired domains because when you order from me or any other freelancer you pay $15 per order.
• You can easily check for expired domains right from your home
• You can make extra income offering the service of finding expired domains on freelancing sites like Fiverr, SEOclerks, Upwork, for friends etc…

I will show you exactly how to find expired domains using Ahrefs below.

Tools You Need to Find Expired Domains with Ahrefs

In order to find expired domains you are going to be needing the below tools and websites.

1. Ahrefs Site Explorer

Ahrefs is one of the best blogging tool in the area of Keyword. It is a toolset for SEO & marketing running on Big Data. They cover backlink checking, competitor analysis, keyword research and more.

Ahrefs is the tool I use for my backlink checking, SEO Analysis, Competitor checks and lots more.

What would be the function of Ahrefs in this Article?

Before you can begin checking for expired domains you need to know if those domains are expired.

Now what you will do with ahrefs is pick a Popular Blog or Website that is likely to get bunch of backlinks.

Example of such website or blogs are Searchengineland.com, mashable.com, and lots of them.

When you are looking for expired domains in your niche, always go for the niche that suits the niche you are trying to get expired domain from.

For example: If you are looking for an expired domain on the blogging and seo niche to register, you should go with blogs like searchenginejournal.com. Its likely to have lots of backlinks its pointing to.

There are lots of others blogs out there you can use.

Now the first step is to get Ahrefs.com

Step 1 Done.

2. An Excel spreadsheet

For importing the broken links gotten from Ahrefs.com

3. Websiteseochecker

With Website SEO Checker, you would be able to check the expired domain DA (Domain Authority) and PA (Page Authority)

Very Important:

You would need this site too to separate domain from urls. normally when you export a broken link it looks like this; http: //domain. com/2014/12/page…. You would use it to make the url into the domain name “http://domain.com“

Surprised? No worries, right here you are going to learn all this.

4. Name.com

Name.com is a Domain registrar you can use to check those domains you are going to copy from excel. You will be able to check all those domains in bulk using name.com E.G: You can check more than 500 domains to see if available or not. All at once.

Keep reading! You are going to learn all this soon!

Its very simple following my methods and the steps below

Using Ahrefs to Find Expired Domains, A Step-by-Step

Follow the practical steps below to find expired domains using Ahrefs.

The process is quite simple;

Just enter your competitor’s website into Ahref’s Site Explorer and head to the “Broken Links” tab.

Then, “Export” only the “Dofollow” broken links and open it via Microsoft Excel. Lastly, trim the URLS of the domains and see if they are available.

Now let’s get to it step-by-step.

1. Sign up for Ahrefs

The first step for finding expired domains is signing up for an Ahrefs account. So ensure you have an account with Ahrefs.

2: Get Broken Links

To find the expired domains, you will need to get the broken links your choice Authority Website is linking.

1. Login to Ahrefs.com/site-explorer
2. Pluck the Authority Website’s Domain into the search box and click search
3. When it displays the website stats, navigate to broken links; these should be under outgoing links (Down left) not under backlink profile. Below screenshot should direct you on which of the broken links

Remember you should only go for the dofollow broken links.

Now you need to click on the link type and select dofollow.

3. Export Broken Links

Click Export and select the necessary export type. Use the below screenshot

4. Open Broken Links in Microsoft Excel

Now you will need Microsoft Excel to open and get your broken links.

Open your download with Microsoft Excel and click on the Broken Links URLs Tab. Highlight All of that role and Ctrl + C to copy all.

As seen below;

You need to filter the urls from the domain itself. This is because you won’t be able to bulk check the domain names except you filter the urls from the domain.

That is why you will need websiteseochecker to do the job within few seconds (Its free) Remember I said “without spending a dime at the beginning”

5: Extract URL to Domain Name

Copy the broken links and go to websiteseochecker.com/extract-url-to-domain

Paste them into the first box and follow the below screenshot

Now wait for few seconds for it to filter the domain from urls. When its finished scroll down a little to the result, highlight all the domains, copy it and proceed to the final step below.

6: Check Domain Availability

Now we need to know which domains are available for registration.

Name.com is perfect to check lots of domains in one go.

Go to Name.com

Click on Domains >>Bulk Domain Search as seen below

and paste all the domains copied earlier from websiteseochecker. Click search and also click on Show all 43 TLds.

Now watch name.com search the domains and give you ones that are available for registration for as low as $12-14 and ones that are taken in the below screenshot.

Below screenshot shows those that are taken and not expired or not available for registration.

Below is a screenshot of one that is put up for sale. Its premium and not expired.

you shouldn’t go for it.

Below is a screenshot of an expired domain out of those broken links. This is $12 and definitely what you need. Simply copy it to your excel spreadsheet.

As seen above you’ve gotten one expired domain you can definitely register at  namecheap.com or any other domain registrar.

As you scroll down for more you’d get as many expired domains as possible. I get more than 50 expired domains most times on my search.

Now copy all of the expired domains one by one into your excel spreadsheet and save.

Repeat the same steps highlighted in this article to get as many expired domains as possible.

There’s more to this; you need to check the domains’ health before using it.

7: Check SEO Metrics

You may be asking “prosper, so when I buy an expired domain are you aware of anything I should be careful about? any way to check their history?”

It’s time to check the domain’s DA and PA

To check the domain Authority before registration, go to websiteseochecker.com/domain-authority-checker/ and pluck the domain into the box. You’d see its DA and PA.

8: Register the domain Name

The last step on the list is to register the domain that is available.

What to Do before Registering Expired Domain

This is very important:

Before buying an expired domain, you should check these things.

1. Make sure you check if it’s already banned or not using this site: https://ctrlq.org/sandbox/
2. Check what was on the domain before it expired. You could use www.archive.org for this, just pluck in the url and you’d be displayed with how the site looked like.

Make sure it wasn’t a spammy PBN [Private Blog Network] or something similar

1. Check the Spam Score of the domain.
2. You can also check to see If it’s disabled for indexing by Google though you can always file a reconsideration request via webmasters console.

This really is how to find expired domains using Ahrefs with high authority.

A Better & Super Fast Alternative to Ahrefs for Finding Expired Domains

No doubt, ahrefs is a very powerful tool for manually finding expired domains using the strategy in this article.

However, if you don’t want to go through all of the stress, then you can use a premium expired domain finder such as Domainhunter Gatherer. 

All you have to do is just input a keyword or website in your niche and It will go ahead and automatically hunt for thousands of aged expired domains with high authority and good links for you.

This will save you the stress and time and it’ll only cost you some bucks of course but they are by far the best in the industry for finding expired domains in seconds.

With it, you’ll be able to: 

• Find Web2.0s with Links and Social Shares
• Quality aged domains from $10 or less
• Crawl authority websites
• Search for niche related expired domains
• Reverse Crawl Websites
• One of a Kind Domain Spam Check
• And more.

 

All in all, hope you enjoyed the article? Do share with friends and leave your comments if any questions.