Finding Expiring Domains with PageRank

Domaining and SEO pro Rob of the Wholesale Directory has contributed some knowledge here about finding good domains that are about to expire. The emphasis is on those domains with established PageRank, in order to speed up the SEO process of ranking the website/domain for its selected keywords. If you enjoy the read, consider my free newsletter.
I frequently field questions about how one would go about finding expiring domains with high Google PageRank. When I realized that some people are simply checking the whois for current high-PR domains and hoping the owners will forget to renew, I thought I’d share my method for finding these domains.

The serious domain speculators who make 6-figures+ from domain reselling have their own software and sometimes entire teams of people working to find them good domains. Not all of us have those sort of resources at our disposal. My method, which does not require either, can be broken down into 4 steps.

1. Find the domains
2. Trim the list
3. Check the PR
4. Check the backlinks

Finding the domains

The easiest way to acquire a list of expiring domains is from a drop catching service. Personally, I get my lists for free from Pool.com. On their website, you can download a text file(in a zip) of all domains that are expiring within the next few days. Just click on the “Deleting Domains” tab and choose “Download the Full List”. This text file can be simply copied and pasted into MS Excel or any other spreadsheet program. Sometimes the list is too big to actually paste in its entirety, so you may have to split it in half.

Trimming the list

The problem with the lists you get from Pool.com is the extra characters. The text files are formatted much like a CSV file, and contain numerical values and commas after each domain. Here is where the excel “Find and Replace” feature comes in handy. From the “Edit” menu, choose “Replace” (or “Find and Replace”, depending on what program you’re using). You’ll be presented with two text boxes: one for the text to find, and one for the text to replace it with. The text you want to find is “,*” without the quotes. Using * as a wildcard tells the program to replace all commas and everything after them. But you don’t actually want you replace them – you want to remove them. So leave the second text box empty. Let ‘er rip!

Now you should have just a spreadsheet of domains. Here are a few other search strings that may come in handy for the “Find and Replace” tool at this time…

“*.biz” – Will remove all .biz domains, and can also be used for other TLDs you may not be interested in spending your time checking.

“*2*” – Will remove all domains with the number 2 in the, and can obviously be used for all numbers if you’re not interested in domains with numbers in them.

“*-*” – Will remove all domains with hyphens in them.

If you choose to use these strings to remove domains, be aware that you will now be left with quite a few empty cells. A simple “Data  Sort” (ascending) will allow you to remove the empty cells.

Checking the PR

Now that you have your list trimmed exactly the way you want it, it’s time to begin checking the PageRank of these domains. Rather than check one at a time, you can use a Bulk PR Checker like the one at http://seotools.alfalogic.com/bulk.google.rank.php to check up to 25 domains at a time. The rest is simply copying and pasting the domains 25 at a time and checking their PR. Personally, I ignore any domain under PR4. Write down the domains that you are interested in and save them for the next step.

Checking the backlinks

Just because you have purchased a domain with a high PR doesn’t mean it will retain that PageRank after the next PR update. Regardless of whether or not you intend to develop this expired domain, a domain with active backlinks is always more valuable than one without. Since the Google site: command has been on the fritz for quite some time, I prefer to use Yahoo Site Explorer (http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/) to check backlinks.

Since chances are you didn’t check the PR of every domain on your list, you may have stopped at between 10-20 domains of interest. Check their backlinks and decide on which ones you’d like to buy.

The process of buying an expired domain involved first requesting it from a drop catcher, and then bidding on it if more than one person has requested it. There is no way to know, however, which drop catcher will get a domain. For this reason, it’s best to sign up and reserve your domains at as many drop catchers as possible. DNForum.com is a great place to read reviews of drop catchers such as Pool.com, ClubDrop.com, etc.

Thanks again to Rob for the great SEO and domaining tips! Rob maintains Wholesale Wiz, the Wholesale Directory.

Related articles are archived in the topical categories the domain markets, domains and domain names.

The House Flip: Is House Flipping a Myth?

House flipping seems like the ideal business: for a low capital investment and with not much effort, you buy a house then flip it for profit. (If you enjoy the read, consider my free newsletter.)

But is house flipping really all it's made out to be? Amongst my first readings on the topic when I first got into web site flipping and web estate flipping, I found a text-centric site put together by a real estate agent. The site's point was that house flipping is a myth.

The 'art of the house flip' as its proponents term it, is about fast turnaround time. You find someone interested in a property, buy it, and then resell quickly for a profit to the buyer you know. There are a few problems with that though.

First, people like to inspect a house and see if they're at ease in it. How can you give a tour of a property you don't own?

Second, a real estate agent can be sued for not finding the best price for a client. A house flipper might be sued to regain the deed if it's sold soon after the first sale. There are also other legal restrictions, varying on a state-by-state basis, which make house flipping extremely difficult or outright illegal.

Third, houses actually on the selling market that reappear on the market soon after they were bought suggest poor quality property. Agents and others will be aware of these conditions.

Really, the only legitimate house flipping is what's known as the fixer-upper. Buy, move in for 6 months to a year, renovate, clean it up, etc. and then resell. Except that if you're going to pursue that sort of house flipping, you'll find site flipping a lot easier, and requiring less capital.

Related articles are archived in the topical category flipping tips, real estate and house flipping (first post on house flipping).

Be Prepared to Sell Your Business!

Be ready and prepared to sell you web site or online business, says a new site flipping piece by Laura Alter. (If you enjoy the read, consider my free newsletter. )

Laura's article as an intermediate-to-advanced article for Site Flippers. The focus of her articles is sharing advice on good business management practices that increase the likelihood of a sale, and the value a web site will sell for.

Laura starts by mentioning advanced stats tracking.

Treat Your Records – Traffic and Otherwise – Like GOLD. What is it, exactly, that you own? Your online real estate is totally virtual. It could go -poof- into thin air in the blink of an eye. So, too, could your traffic stats, financial records, and other virtual data. Do you back up your website? You should be backing up everything, all the time.

In that same vein, make SURE you have a long trail of traffic stats. [..]

Next, she shares sound advice on managing your accounting:

Does Your Bookkeeping Hold Up? How many forum owners treat their forum like a business? Whether that means hiring a virtual assistant to do your books, or simply using a program like QuickBooks to do it yourself – it needs to be done.

I won't quote anymore, because it would just be spammy. But all in all, Laura makes the great point that you're managing more than just a site. Your traffic, accounting, deals with other site owners etc. are part of managing your business. Therefore, be ready and prepared to sell you web site business by following proper management technique!

Related articles are archived in the topical categories website appraisals, buying a site, flipping a website/home improvement, selling a site, negotiating, flipping tips, site flipping case studies, newsletter, Site Flip News, website markets, domains and domain names.

Design Appraisal

Designs cost a fair bit of money for the small to medium business owner, so it only makes sense that site flippers need to understand design appraisals. [If you enjoy the read, consider my free newsletter.]

My friend Ben Bleikamp has a good post on pricing your services over at Yopos, which we also chatted about.

Ben situates himself as a mid-level designer, so he charges mid-level prices. He calculates a bid based on how many hours he estimates the work will take, and multiplies that by his hourly rate. The rate increases or decreases from its baseline depending on the size of the client, and the difficulty of the work involved.

So there's a simple formula for design appraisals:

Difficulty Factor x Hourly rate x Hours of work. Difficulty of the work increases or decreases the hourly rate by up to half. So the possible values for DF range from 0.75 to 1.25, whereby 0.75 is the easiest work possible that results in a reduction by a quarter of the hourly rate. 1.25 is the toughest (Ben's loathed Moveable Type, for instance) resulting in an increase by 25% of the hourly rate.

Simple appraisal, no?

Related articles are archived in the topical categories website appraisals, flipping tips.