Following up on my previous post about finding interesting expired domains, I’ve been looking at Domain Research Tool (DRT) for some time now and decided to give it a go and buy it. It is a pricey tool, but offers powerful features and there is a real potential for a quick return of investment. So, what does it do?

It is designed for bulk scanning of huge lists of domains and applying all sorts of useful checks on all domains. For example, you can import the list of all domains that have been dropped today (or even a full zone file!) and check their Google PR, number of backlinks, Alexa traffic, Overture rankings, etc. You can filter the domain list by keywords, domain length, hyphen existence, existence of numbers, etc, but oddly enough you can’t filter a list after a scan without clearing the list. There are several such examples of poor usability throughout the application, which show that it hasn’t yet matured fully.

DRT performs the scans through proxies which means that your IP doesn’t get banned for performing a huge amount of searches. It also supports a “Turbo mode”, which is basically a cache of domain related data resulting in queries made by other DRT users. This cache is stored on the product’s server. The idea is great, but I’m yet to see this turbo in action - running full scans is quite slow and I don’t believe none of the DRT users has never run the same scans as I do.

Apart from searching for domains, DRT can be used for managing your personal domain portfolio and keeping domain watch lists. The weird thing is that these lists are not persisted across sessions, as if I have dozens of domain portfolios or watch lists and need to have them organized in files!?

All in all, the tool is expensive but powerful and useful and can pay itself back relatively quickly. The good thing about it being expensive is that not many people will have it, which puts you ahead of the game. The downside are some usability issues, I hope the author will work on resolving these and making it a joy to use.

Tags: Expired Domains, Domain Tool

Every day thousands of domains expire and are available for anyone to register them. A good portion of these domains were once in use, which means that they have links pointing at them, they might have a Google Pagerank assigned and some might even be included in DMOZ or the Yahoo! Directory. Buying a domain with a previous history means that you might get some traffic to your new domain from the first day, without any marketing effort.

Many domainers buy dropped domains to park them and collect revenue from any visitors they may get. There are expensive tools out there which allow you to find expiring domains with potentially good traffic and such domains are usually bought through one of the drop catchers (SnapNames, Pool.com, etc). If the domain is good and several people have reserved the name there’s an auction involved. As you can see, buying excellent domains requires time and dedication.

However, even with the best dropped domains being cought by professional domain catchers, there’s a lot of domains which remain deleted and are available for buying. So, how do you find these without paying for an expensive tool? Have a look at Free Daily Deleted and Expiring Domains List. The list is organized by days, and you can list domains for each day based on your favourite search criteria, just click on the Google PR, Alexa or another link for today or another day of interest and watch the list of domains appear in front of you. Note that the best domains will already have been re-registered by domain catchers (do a Whois to find out), but there’s always quite a few of them still available. Note that the process is slow, but it’s good enough for the price (free).

Few things to note:

If you are planning on developing a domain (builiding a website for it) be aware that the Google PR might be lost during the next PR update, so IMO it’s better to look for domains with an existing Alexa rating (which indicates existing traffic) and those which are listed in the two major directories.

You have to be careful and know what you want to do with these domains since you shouldn’t expect much revenue from just parking them. More about this in another post. Until then, happy domain hunting

Tags: Domains, Dropped Domains, Expired Domains, Domain Catcher