Important Issues to Remember before Buying an Expired Domain name

Copyright (c) 2009 John Khu

Buying expired domains is a tricky topic! You will need to be very careful while buying an expired domain because many of these domains may have some problems associated with their registration. There have been instances when the previous owner decided to approach the legal authorities to reclaim their expired domains. While you need to be very careful in your dealings, you may also need to consider the following issues before buying domains that are expiring.

The issue of domain trademark: Make sure that the domain that you buy does not have any trademark associated with it. You will need to be very careful in dealing with domains that have trademarks against their URL. You could even land in potential legal hassles when you buy such domains. You may wish to conduct a detailed research to check whether the domain expired has any trademark. Use one of the web sites that provide information on trademarks.

The issue of corporate expired domain names: Many domain names have a close relation with corporate businesses. If a company or a business firm owns the domain names, you may even forfeit such domain names. In some instances, companies may simply forget to renew some of their domain names.

Tip: It is almost difficult to find out who is the real owner of a domain name before it expired. However, you can still find out more about a particular expired domain name.

To find out more about expired domains and their previous ownership, use these tools to conduct a detailed research:

a) Go to www.alexa.com that maintains a big database of millions of web sites. You can find out details like link popularity, ownership, traffic, ratings or rankings etc in this exhaustive web site. Just use the following URL to check the previous history of the web domain: http://xslt.alexa.com/data?cli=100&url=DOMAIN.COM. Some times, you may never find any information on some of the domain names.

b) Go to www.google.com to check the cache status of the expired domain names. Google always maintains a cache directory of web sites by using its spider technology. It is possible to visit a cached online copy of a web domain, including expired ones. With this tool, you can find out if the expired domain you want to buy had any trademark associated with it. Type the URL of the expired domain into the Google search engine box and make sure that you are checking the cache copy of the expired web domain.

c) Use link popularity checking tools: You can find out more about previously owned expired domains. Choose any of the link popularity checking web sites and enter the URL of the expired domain to check the links against the name. This gives you a fair estimate of the number of online references related to the domains. Zero values mean that the domain expired did not have any activity while higher values signify that the domain was very active in its previous avatar. However, the downside of this method is that you may find it very difficult to find the quality of these links. Some domains may have just a few links associated with it. However, these links may be very good in that they came from high quality web sites. On the other hand, an expired domain may have lot of links that came from insignificant web domains. Making a comparison just on the number of links may be quite premature and improper.

By using the above mentioned tools, you can find out minute and precise information about your expired domain. However, use these tools with utmost caution and without any prejudice as some of the data extracted could be misleading.