[Updated for 2025]
Expired domains have long been the most powerful tool in a professional SEOs arsenal to improve rankings and traffic to your website. Going into 2025, and beyond, this shows no sign of slowing.
100s of thousands of domains expired every week and this means there will always be valuable domains up for grabs. The best thing about expired domains, specifically, when compared to general aged domains, is that they are so cheap. You are not paying for any bids, no auction fees, and no necessary transfer fees to get them to your preferred registrar.
Simply find the domains, register them and get to making money from them!
2025 brought with it a new (and improved? No, I don’t think so) Google update and these always shake up the rankings for us webmasters. Luckily this doesn’t seem to have affected the fact that a powerful domain is by far the best way to get a head start in ranking your website. With so much emphasis, in the SERPs, being put on a domain’s external factors, mainly links, it has never been more beneficial to get into expired and aged domains.
What Tools can help find Expired Domains?
There are a few individual tools that can be used together to make some of the harder tasks more simple and one that bundles all of these tools into one package. Of course, one tool stands head and shoulders above the rest; Domain Hunter Gatherer Pro.
Domain Hunter Gatherer Pro has all of the tools needed to search domains, crawl websites, check availability and even help you to decide what domains are the best of what is available.
To find expired domains we first need to know what sort of domains we are looking to register as this will determine how we find them.
The main types of domains are:
- Domains with niche related backlinks
- Keyword-Containing Domains
- Domains with Competitors / Authority site Backlinks
Domains with links from ranking sites
When building a PBN, you need to be using quality domains with a clean history, but more so than that, you also need lots of backlinks from websites that are currently ranking for keywords in the niche that you are wanting to dominate. If a website is ranking for your keywords then you know that, at least, Google considers it to be a quality site and therefore a backlink can only be beneficial.
If you want to find domains with links from websites that are ranking, the best way is to first search for those keywords and make a note of the results. Taking the top few hundred results will give you a rundown of what Google thinks are the most relevant and powerful websites in your niche. From here you need to crawl all of those sites looking for all of the domains that it links out to.
Manually this would be unreasonably laborious but with the help of the Expired Domain Hunter tools in Domain Hunter Gatherer it can be really simple.
Be sure to have plenty of proxies if you are using this approach as search engines, Google especially, are very quick to block Ip addresses that perform lots of searches.
As can be seen below, to have DHG take on this task for you, is as simple as clicking a couple of options, enter your keywords and hit go. Minutes later you will have your domains and you can filter to your hearts content till you find the diamond in the rough.
With Domain Hunter Gatherer Pro you can simply enter in your keyword and it will perform all tasks for you, if you want it will even get important stats, such as Moz, Majestic and Social Stats automatically for you. These stats are provided via the included (in DHG Pro) DomDetailer credits.
Keyword Expired Domains
Keyword Expired Domains are domains that contain your valuable keyword. The keyword itself may not bring your domain much of a boost in the search rankings but coupled with some backlink history they can bring extra authority and a brandable and potentially more memorable domain name.
If you are looking to build out a long term business, then a keyword domain with some backlinks could be the best bet. This is often chosen by many as it can help you get off the ground running.
Using other tools it is not simple to just find these types of domains and check their availability but Domain Hunter Gatherer Pro includes access to Easy Expired Domains, a database of over 110 million expired domains.
With this access it is very easy to find thousands of expired domains for most niches and single keywords.
In the gif above DHG Pro is searching for thousands of domains that contain the entered keyword, checking the availability for them all and then getting the stats for the domains that are available. This gives quick access to our entire database of domains.
In the past this sort of task would have been impossible to do within a week but in 2025, this is as simple as checking a couple of checkboxes and filling in your keywords. DHG does it all for you.
Domains with Competitor BackLinks
In 2025, and beyond, the trend is very much that backlinks are still king. Getting a great backlink once you are trying to build out your web properties is not easy. But, it is easy to crawl all of your competitors and look for domains that they link out to.
Simply by entering your competitors, or even authority websites, into DHG will have it go off and crawl those sites looking for available domains that they link out to.
The domains returned from this tool can be registered, without having to engage in any kind of auction process, and under your control within the day. With this tool you can find domains that are linked directly from competitors and authority websites within any niche.
What could be better than owning a domain with a backlink from one of your competitors websites?
With Domain Hunter Gatherer you can just enter a list of your competitors and have it do all of the crawling, hunting, availability checking and stats checking for you.
See how easy it can be to start finding these precious domains that could give you a leg up on your competition. With just a few inputs DHG will keep crawling the required websites until it has done the whole site or you decide you’ve found enough domains.
