Domain Names

I don’t recommend wasting time with typos and trademarks. Your time is valuable, and if you’re going to spend time or money on domains, might as well spend your time and money on domains that are defensible and have long term value. Typos can never really be developed or sold at a premium to cash flow, and trademarks are always at risk of being taken from you. Trademarks also expose you to the potential of getting sued for damages. My attitude is that there are bigger fish to fry. Leave the typos and the trademarks to the bottom feeders. If you’re going to invest time and money into a domain, might as well spend it on a good domain that can be resold with confidence or developed at a later date.

Before you spend your hard earned money on domains, it’s important to know what constitutes value so you don’t waste your money on crappy domains.

Keyword Value

Short memorable domains, devoid of numbers or hyphens, and consisting of high volume keywords that drive sales are the most valuable domain names. I like to think of this as ‘keyword value’. Keyword value is the single most important thing I think about when buying domains. Backlinks erode over time, Google PageRank gets recalculated, Alexa rankings fall, and DMOZ gets updated, but Keyword weight never goes away. Examples of domains with the best keyword value are laptops.com, shoes.com, rentals.com, hotels.com. These are keywords that consumers frequently type directly into their browser or search engine with high purchase intent. They drive sales. Unfortunately all the best domains have already been registered, but hundreds of them expire every month that are sill worth bidding on at the drop catchers. And hundreds of them are available for sale on forums and at auctions in the aftermarket. The best way to identify domains with high keyword value is to use the following tools. You want to find keywords that are searched frequently and that have high CPCs.

I use the following tools when scouting for and deciding whether to buy domain names.

Premium Drops
Excellent dictionary terms filter to identify names that match dictionary terms.

NicheBot Classic
To get access to predicted daily searches on the major search engines.

Google AdWords Keyword Tool
Predicted search volume from Google search engine.

Google AdWords Traffic Estimator Sandbox
To get estimated average Cost per Click and Clicks per day.

Legacy Value

Every day thousands of domains expire. Many of those domains represent the culmination of thousands of hours of hard work and effort by a dedicated web site owner. Fortunately for us, lots of web site owners don’t know any better – and they drop their names when they give up on their web sites – and they forfeit all that web site value to drop catchers like ourselves.

We understand the value though, so we pounce when we find good names with stats such as Google PageRank, Alexa Rankings, DMOZ listings, backlinks, and/or aged domains. And so, domainers like us, pick up those domains for cents on the dollar, only to repurpose them with parked pages, 301 redirects, or as small developed web sites, often recouping the purchase price in a matter of days or weeks.

Legacy Value refers to domains that have Google PageRank, Alexa Rank, DMOZ inclusion, backlinks, an aged domain status, etc. Each of these things is important for SEO and raw traffic. Most of the list filtering software mentioned above will have tools that enable you to sort drop lists by these criteria. Or you can visit the Google, Alexa, DMOZ, or your favorite Whois tool to manually check prospective domain purchases yourself.

If you’re confused, or want to learn more about any of these terms, Premium Drops has an excellent Domain Terms Explained Dictionary that I recommend visiting.

List filtering services parse the drop lists and let you perform very narrow searches of the drop lists based on specific criteria. For example, you can search the drop lists for names that meet criteria such as Google PageRank, Alexa Rank, Domain Age, Character Length, Number of Google Results, Overture Ranking, Backlinks, Dictionary Term, DMOZ Directory Listing, etc. Depending on what’s important to you (I’ll cover what’s important in the Valuation Techniques section below), there are many potential searches you could perform. These can be narrowed by drop catcher and/or whether or not the names are Pending Delete.

I recommend setting up accounts at the following three List Filtering Services. Try them all out and stick with the one you like best.

Premium Drops
Their service is the best and is used by the pros. Lots of notification features, bells and whistles, etc. The site is easy to use and is fast. I, personally, use Premium Drops.

Fresh Drop
Cludgy interface, but great integration with GoDaddy auctions.

Drop Day
Not the prettiest or most advanced list filtering site, but it’s free and has all the basics.

Drop Hunt
Expired domain search engine. I don’t use it, but some swear by it.

Just Dropped
Dropped domain search engine. I don’t use it, but some swear by it.

Daily Domain Drop
I’ve never used it, but I have heard good things.

Drop Scout
At the time of this writing, they are still developing the site, but it looks like it will be good.