In the second episode of our comprehensive PBN building guide series we will look into finding the best websites to target, when crawling for expired domains for a PBN, to ensure that you are getting expired domains with backlinks from some of the best websites in your niche.
Following this, I will guide you through every step to getting Domain Hunter Gatherer setup for efficient running, as well as setting up your first crawl job. DHG will crawl only the most relevant parts of the authority website and find domains with links from the most relevant section of this website.
After this guide, you will have no trouble when trying to find expired domains for a PBN. This written guide is based on our PBN Video Guide Series Episode 2: Finding Expired Domains for a PBN.
How to Choose the best Targets to Crawl
The big superpower of Domain Hunter Gatherer is it’s ability to crawl any website looking for expired domains. The best part of this is that you know that all of the domains, as returned, will have at least 1 backlink from a website of your choosing. No other solution offers that ability.
Before setting out on any domain hunt, you will first want to know what are the best targets in your niche, to crawl to find expired domains.
To start with you should be considering the more prominent websites in your niche and your closest competitors. I think the best domains can be the ones with links from your competitors as it can really set yourself apart from them (them linking to you and you not reciprocating is a strong ranking signal). Choosing the highest ranking authorities and your close competitors is essential for finding truly relevant and strong domains.
You can often limit the crawling to specific sections of a website so if one of your authority options has just one section that is relevant to your website, you may be able to limit the crawling to this section, so keep an eye out for that situation.
Setup Domain Hunter Gatherer
Luckily DHG comes, mostly, setup for efficient running so you shouldn’t need to change much when starting out, or for subsequent runs.
One thing that will want your attention is proxies, you should look to get 10-25 decent private or shared proxies. Proxies will help to hide your real IP and ensure that you are not getting blocked when crawling websites. We have some advised proxy providers in the essential services section of our website, any of these will provide good quality proxies.
Once you have entered your proxies you will want to ensure that you have all of the proxies enabled for all uses, as shown in the image to the left.
Note that the proxy format can be entered in as just the IP and port or along with the user name and password.
If you have proxies that do not use a user and password they should be entered in the format below:
IP:Port
If you have user / pass authenticated proxies, you should use the format below:
IP:Port:User:Pass
You can mix both types of proxy. IPv4 proxies work with less issues so it is advisable to stick to these proxies, mainly for simplicity and compatibility.
Selectively Crawl the Target Website
As my first crawling target, I have chosen WarriorForum, it is/was a highly popular forum for SEOs and Internet Marketers to discuss techniques, and generally sell guides to each other. In it’s day, WF was very influential and was a busy hub of entrepreneurs.
As such, it’s posts are littered with talk about, and links to, lot’s of dead projects and business’ websites. Forums and news / gossip / tabloid type websites are great targets for crawling for domains as they will be constantly highlighting websites to the mainstream and often have very strong domain authority, giving their links lots of weight in the SERPs and Ais citations.
With WF being such a huge website, I think it would be beneficial to crawl just a subforum, rather than the whole site. The Search Engine Optimisation section of the forum is probably going to be containing the type of domains that I am most interested in, for this PBN, so I am going to use that section.
Copy the address of this part of the website into the “Crawl” input of the Hunt From Websites tool in Domain Hunter Gatherer.
To ensure that DHG stays in just thsi section we will need to find a piece of the website address that is unique to this section and always present when in this section. In our case, every page in this section has /search-engine-optimization/ in it so we will use this to identify pages in this section of the website.
Take that text and enter it into the Crawled URLs: Must Contain input.
Then set the Crawl Levels high, 10,000 is the max and will ensure it can run for many hours, if the site is truly very large. And click Crawl
When asked if you want to allow DHG to crawl Off-Site, click No, you do not want to crawl off-site, you want it to stay on your intended target as that is where you will find the best expired domains.
Let it Find Expired Domains
This is where you can let Domain Hunter Gatherer take over. It will start by crawling pages at the address you entered and then looking for domains on all of those pages, looking for which ones are available. Once an expired domain is found, DHG will automatically grab the important stats that will be essential for quickly spotting the true gems amongst the returned domains.
Behold: So Many Domains!
After a few minutes of setup and a couple hours of the software finding expired domains, unattended, it has managed to find a whopping 12,000 expired domains. All of these domains have their important stats from DomDetailer, Majestic and Moz, making it really easy to scout some great domains at a glance.
Having instant access to these stats, and the backlink profiles of these domains, can decrease time to decision when looking for expired domains.
As a general rule of thumb, you will want to be looking for domains with 20+ referring domains with 50+ being better, and with both Moz DA and Majestic TF in double figures. This is not a hard rule I stick to but is a good way to quickly see the best domains in the list and limits the amount of time needed for deep dives on domains you wouldn’t want.
Sort or Filter the Expired Domains
Filtering is often given as the next step for whittling down the list of potential aged domains. I see the use of TLD filtering being a useful tool for instantly removing domains on TLDs you would never be interested in, but beyond that, I prefer to sort to find domains.
When filtering, it can be hard to see the whole picture, sorting keeps all results in the list so you get a better idea of where domains are, wrt quality, in comparison to each other.
I tend to start by sorting by either Moz DA, Majestic TF or Referring Domains and then check the other stats as I glance down the list starting with the best at the top. Often, a domain’s other stats may not correlate with Moz DA (for example) and this can be a sign of a spammed backlink profile. Sorting by DA and then looking for the domains that also have a high number of referring domains and Maj TF will quickly show up which domains are decent, and worth looking into further.
We have a great guide on what makes a great expired domain that may be worth a read to get a good idea on more on this subject.
Finding Some Valuable Domains
To see what domains we found, you really should go and watch the video. We find a total of 12,000 domains and of it are able to quickly identify around 10 potentially purchasable domains. All of these domains are available for just the cost of registration, around $10.
These aren’t over priced domains from resellers, they do not have any extra fees to acquire, no auction costs, no bidding, no nonsense. Just register the ones you like and they are yours to do what you want with.
In this guide, we find many domains with high stats (multiple with DA over 50 for example), but the type of domains that are far more interesting to me are the ones with good stats on every platform, a clean history and a good backlink profile.
We will cover how to assess content history and backlinks quality in the next episode, so go subscribe to the youtube channel to be notified when that drops!
Found a Great Domain – Links2RSS.com
One domain I found rather quickly was a real shock to me, as I remember the website, from a long time ago. Back in the medieval times it was a common practice to ping new webpages and content on websites, to link aggregators and search engines in the hopes that it would get you indexed and ranking much more quickly.
Links2RSS.com was a tool where you could take your newly created backlinks, paste them into the website and L2R would create a page with an RSS feed containing those links. This RSS feed could then be used in RSS readers (popular at the time)
To me, this domain has potential. I used the service in the past and have been looking for a domain to put a tool on to, so it was very lucky for me to have found this domain.
Looking at More and Wrapping Up
The video looks into the stats of a few more domains and explains why they would be promising, or ones to avoid, and why.
In the end there are multiple promising expired domain names that have been found and we will be going through them in more depth in the next episode.
Next episode we will cover all of the steps that I will partake to ensure that any potential domains are clean of content issues and have great backlink profiles, before purchasing. We also have a great check list that can be downloaded for processing the domains and ensuring they are all clean and have powerful backlinks that would be a boon to any website owner.
Our guide on how to find expired domains with backlinks from your competitors is related to this topic and would be some good further reading.
