A name you would say out loud
If you would be embarrassed to put it on a business card, no metric rescues it.
Expired Domain Hunter
Find expired domains with links worth investigating
Use Domain Hunter Gatherer for Windows to discover expired domains through keywords, website crawls and backlink paths. Check availability, compare the evidence and export your shortlist with Premium or Pro.
- Keyword searching
- Website crawling
- Live availability checks
- Filter and export
Four ways in
Start off on the right foot
There is no single correct way to begin. Start from what you know, and let the software do the legwork from there.
You know the subject. You just need the names.
Start from a keyword
Give DHG the words your audience searches for. It looks for expired names connected to that subject, ready for you to compare and filter. Keyword discovery is included in Premium and Pro.
Good sites link to other good sites. Some of those have expired.
Crawl a site you already trust
Point DHG at an authority site, a resource page or a competitor. It then crawls the site looking for outbound links, checking the availability of all unique domains found, which is how it finds names that never appear on a public drop list.
Five spreadsheets, no way to compare them.
Bring your own candidates
Import domain lists that you have and automatically check all for availability. Then you can easily analyse them and filter and sort to bring the best domains to the top of the list.
The tactic everyone overlooks
Run a reverse hunt
Start with a competitor website and explore backlink paths to find additional domain candidates. Check each candidate for availability, relevant history and link quality before deciding whether it fits your project.
See it properly
A full hunt, start to finish
Watch a real session: picking a seed site worth crawling, letting it run, then cutting several thousand results down to the handful actually worth opening in a browser.
Watch on YouTubeThis is a real campaign
Crawl stats and data from the video
You set it going, you go to bed, and it keeps working. This is a genuine readout from one campaign seeded with a single well-connected website. Press play and watch roughly forty seconds of it.
Total work progress
23.85%
Current job progress
100.00%
- Current depth
- 2,385 / 10,000
- Pages at this depth
- 2 / 2
- Total pages crawled
- 676,914
- Unique domains seen
- 258,675
- Domains checked
- 39,418
- Available right now
- 12,058
An illustration of the software using figures from one real campaign. Nothing is being crawled from this page.
Available domains found
17 of 3,740 listed
- freelinks.win Short, on-topic, unusual extension
- tweetpushreview.com Review site, social tooling niche
- seobonds.com Brandable, straight in the subject
- expresslinks.io Twelve characters on a .io
- soloadly.com Solo ads, clean brandable form
- digitaltrafficsources.com Exact-match on a commercial term
- affiliatemarketing411.net Affiliate niche, memorable suffix
- revenuesharingworld.com Established monetisation topic
- besthomebizthisyear.com Home business, heavy forum history
- dreamaffiliatelifestyle.com Long tail, strong topical match
- starbucksnearme.net Brand adjacent, check trademarks first
- isellvideogames.com Retail, says exactly what it is
- enchanedportraits.com.au Australian, local citation history
- supertweak.ca Canadian ccTLD, tech flavour
- dubaisearch.ae Regional directory, .ae extension
- subscriptionscripts.com Software niche, buyer intent
- changeyourbudget.com Personal finance, brandable
Waiting for the first find…
Names shown are genuine results from this campaign at the moment it was captured. Availability changes constantly — always check before you plan around a name.
Why the numbers get small
Hundreds of thousands of pages crawled, twelve thousand keepers
With DHG, finding domains is the easy part. Most are already taken, and a majority of the rest are not worth having. The work is in the narrowing the list down, which is the part DHG does for you.
-
676,914 pages crawled Following links outward from one seed site
-
258,675 total domains seen Every distinct name encountered along the way
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39,418 unique domains checked Queried while the crawl kept running
-
12,058 actually available Roughly 5 in every 100 domains it met
That last number is where your judgement starts. DHG gets you to a shortlist; deciding which names deserve your money is still a human job, luckily DHG also helps with this.
Before you reach for your card
What actually makes a domain worth chasing
Four questions worth asking about every name that survives your filters.
Links from places that make sense
Inspect the pages behind the numbers. Relevant editorial references are more useful evidence than a large unexplained link count.
A history that fits your plan
Check the archive. A domain with an awkward past can be more trouble than it is worth.
Numbers that hold up on inspection
Metrics point you at candidates. They do not make the decision for you.
Then what?
What people actually do with the ones they keep
Build something real on it
Put a proper content site on a name that already fits the topic and has a credible past.
Point it somewhere sensible
A carefully matched redirect, where the old subject and the new destination genuinely line up.
Hold it as an asset
Brandable and commercially useful names have a habit of being worth more later than they cost today.
Support your other projects
Chosen deliberately, after you have looked at quality, relevance and historical risk.
When finding them is not enough
Pro picks up where the hunt leaves off
Discovery is the first half. Pro adds the tools for the second: richer quality context on the names you like, a prepared search for when you want results now, and archive recovery for when you are ready to build.
- Everything in Domain Hunter Gatherer
- DomDetailer credits for deeper metrics
- Easy Expired Domains access
- DomRecovery included
Reasonable questions
The things people ask before they buy
Straight answers, including the ones that are less flattering than a sales page would normally allow.
What actually is an expired domain?
A domain name that somebody stopped paying for. When a registration lapses and is not renewed, the domain eventually returns to the pool and anyone can register it. Some carry years of links and recognition. Plenty carry nothing at all, which is exactly why the research matters.
Will an expired domain boost my rankings?
There is no guaranteed ranking benefit. Previous links and age do not establish the value of a domain by themselves. Review its history, relevance and link quality, then judge whether it is a suitable home for the content or service you intend to build.
How long does a hunt take?
As long as you let it. We ran a campaign (for a video) and it crawled over 24 million pages and was 3% through its total workload. You can stop at any point, export what has been found so far, and pick it up later. Visit the Video Guides section and see the "90k domains" video for how this went.
Which plans include this?
The keyword, niche and authority-crawling tools are in the current Premium and Pro plans. Pro adds DomDetailer credits, Easy Expired Domains and DomRecovery for the extra research that comes after the find.
Can I analyse a list I already have?
Yes. Import it and it goes through the same checks and filters as anything DHG finds itself, which is the only way to compare candidates from different sources fairly.
Go and have a look
The next good name is already out there, unregistered
Pick a plan, point it at a site you rate, and see what it drags back.
Plan your first search
From an expired domain search to a checked shortlist
Follow our step-by-step guide to finding expired domains to choose a search method and review the results. If you are comparing previously used names, the beginner's guide to aged domains explains the history and quality checks to make before registration.
Already have a shortlist? Compare registration options in the domain registrar directory.
Plans that include this feature
DHG Premium costs $27 per month or $247 per year, billed in US dollars.
DHG Pro costs $97 per month or $679 per year, billed in US dollars. These are suite subscription prices; the feature is included with the relevant plan.
Compare plan features, billing options and the Pro Lifetime licence before choosing.
Continue with a written guide
Set the scope of a hunt with our practical guide to choosing DHG crawl levels.
For a focused search, use our walkthrough for finding forgotten domains in your niche.
Choose useful crawl starting points with our guide to researching domains linked by competitors.
Before registering a candidate, follow our steps for checking domain history and link quality.