Exploiting the Power of Pre-Owned Domains

Every day, thousands of previously owned domain names become available again. You may be wondering how this is possible - well, it's quite simple really: their previous owners did not pay the bills when it came to renewing their domain names (remember, you have to pay a fee every year to keep control over a domain name!) and, after a suitable "grace period" has expired, the registrar that the domain name had been registered with released the domain name back into the pool of all available names.

So what? Well, a pre-owned domain name can, under the right circumstances, be a very desirable commodity.

Picture this scenario: the owner of a website gets busy with other things, loses interest in their site and - for whatever reason - does not renew the domain name associated with that site. Now, this website has been on the Web for a while, and many people have visited it, found it interesting, and bookmarked it - or linked to it from their own sites.

Since the domain name is no longer registered, it does not point at any site and so does not "resolve" (instead, potential visitors clicking on a link to the old site will get an error message in their browsers).

And here's where the lightbulb should go off... You could be bringing these lost visitors to your own site!

If you "reactivate" the domain name by registering it and pointing it at your site, all the people clicking on the old links associated with the domain name will end up at your site - bringing instant traffic! This is great, especially if you can find a "dead" name associated with a site that was similar to your own, e.g. if you can find a "dead" pet shop domain, and you own a pet shop. That way, the visitors you pick up won't find themselves too disoriented!

IMPORTANT: You need to be very careful when approaching previously owned domain names, because there are many potential problems associated with them. For instance, the previous owner of the domain name could go to court to try and get the domain name returned to them (or at the very least, to stop you from profiting from all their hard work)

While common sense must be your guide in any such transaction (and Internet Goldrush explicitly disclaims all responsibility if you decide to register a previously owned domain name that was pointed at an active site) here are a few pointers that may help:-

A) Is the domain name trademarked, or does it contain clearly trademarked terms? You can research US trademarks for free at MarksOnline.com - so be sure to take the time to investigate possible conflicts up front.

B) Was the domain name owned by a company of the same name? (e.g. fishingbait.com previously owned by Fishing Bait Inc.) If so, it's best to avoid the domain name since it will be much easier for the previous company to stake a claim to it (after all, they filed incorporation documents bearing the same name as the domain!)

It's pretty hard to find out who owned a domain name before it expired, but there are a couple of tricks of the trade that may be able to help.

- Alexa maintains a huge database of countless millions of websites, tracking all kinds of popularity and other data about each one. You can access their statistics for a particular domain.

There may be no useful Alexa data on your previously owned domain (Look under the "Contact Info" section to see if you can spot the previous owner's registration details)

- Google caches many sites that it spiders. You may be able to visit a cached copy of the site, and from there see copyright or other information indicating who owned the domain name previously. Just go to the Google search box and type in the domain name, including the extension (e.g. fishingbait.com). REMEMBER to only visit the cached results for the site, since the site itself no longer exists!

Now that we've covered the dangers of a pre-owned domain name that used to belong to an active site, it's worth taking a quick look at the upside: a domain name that used to be connected with a busy, popular site could still bring several hundred to several thousand visitors a day, even if it has been dormant for a while!

If you would like to know whether a domain name you're considering registering was previously used for an active site - and just how active the site was - there are a few tools that can help you in your investigation.
MarketLeap's Link Popularity tool should be your first stop on your quest to find out all about a previously owned name. All you need to do is go to the site and type in the domain, and you can instantly see how many references to the domain are stored in six of the main search engines.

If a domain has ZERO links to it registered in any of the search engines, then it was NOT an active domain (or used for an incredibly unpopular site). If however one or more search engines still register links to the domain, then it clearly used to be used for an active site.

There is some correlation between the number of links to a given domain and the popularity of the site it was associate with, but the connection is tenuous: it's quite possible for one domain to have 200 incoming links and another to have 2,000 incoming links, yet the first was associated with a much more popular site.

This is where a tool we looked at earlier on this page comes into play again: Alexa. By following the same research technique outlined in the previous "Help" box, you'll be able to find out all kinds of things about the domain name. If you're lucky, it will even come with an Alexa "ranking" (look down in the "Site Stats" section for an indication of the amount of traffic that came to the site, and the number of visits from Alexa users)

While Alexa is a very blunt tool, it's great for determining order-of-magnitude popularities. For instance, it's impossible to really say, just from Alexa data, that a site rated 200,000th is busier that a site rated 300,000th since the data isn't very precise - but it's a safe bet that both sites are busier than a site rated 3,000,000th!

By making good use of both Link Popularity and Alexa research, you'll be able to see whether the domain name is an exciting investment - or a complete waste of time!

One more thought to leave you with: in your quest for previously owned domains, most of the value will be in the traffic - so it's relatively immaterial if the domain name doesn't sound so good. So long as there are plenty of incoming links, the domain name will produce relatively steady traffic - again and again, day after day - all for the price of a simple, low annual registration fee!

Good luck in your hunt to land a big domain fish...

Author: Edwin Hayward - Internet Goldrush