GoDaddy Auctions
Auctions and “closeout” listings of domains that expired and were not renewed. About a million listings a day; the opening bid is usually $1–12.
Method
How we find, vet and score expired domains
Every step a domain goes through to make the list is here. We spell out what we check and what we can't check; the decision is yours.
1. Scanning
Every day we pull all six sources in full; together that comes to more than two million listings a day.
DropCatch
About 650,000 domains that have entered the deletion process (PendingDelete) and will drop within a few days, plus DropCatch's own auctions.
Park.io
Domains that are about to drop in country-code extensions such as .io, .co and .me, and their auctions.
SnapNames
The daily list of about 500,000 domains that are about to be deleted in .com, .net, .org, .info and .uk.
Sedo
Seven-day auctions of expiring domains; about 18,000 listings a day.
.se and .nu registry
Open data from the Swedish registry: domains about to be released and their dates. No auction; on release day they can be registered at the normal price.
2. Vetting
This is the real work. A domain goes through three stages; each stage costs more than the one before it, so the cheap one runs first.
Authority pre-filter
We check Trust Flow, referring domains, the TF/CF ratio, the extension, the price and the structure of the name (names with many hyphens, many digits or excessive length). Out of millions of domains, about a thousand remain.
Link networks and blacklists
Clusters of domains that share the same referring domain count are part of a single link network and are rejected. Domains on the Spamhaus DBL and SURBL blacklists are rejected too. Then we look up Ahrefs DR; anything below the threshold is dropped.
Archive history
For every domain that remains, we read the Wayback Machine captures spread across the years: the first year, the periods in between and the last two years. In each capture we look at the page title, the script it is written in and its content.
What we reject
Gambling, pharma and adult spam (including Thai, Chinese, Japanese and Korean); spam patterns in the archived URLs; sites whose script and topic changed together, meaning they were taken over by someone else; and domains with almost no content in the archive.
3. Hunter score
Every domain that passes vetting gets a score from 0 to 100. If a metric is missing for a domain, its weight is spread across the others, so a domain with a missing metric is not penalized unfairly.
| Component | Weight |
|---|---|
| Ahrefs Domain Rating DR 50 and above gets full points. | 20 |
| Majestic Trust Flow TF 40 and above gets full points. | 20 |
| Referring domains Logarithmic scale; 1,000 different domains gets full points. | 20 |
| Archive history How many different years it has captures for in Wayback and how many different pages were archived. | 20 |
| Semrush Authority Score AS 30 and above gets full points. | 10 |
| Open PageRank A value from 0 to 10 calculated from Common Crawl data. | 10 |
| Price The lower the current bid, the higher the score. | 10 |
| Age 15 years and above gets full points. | 5 |
| Risk flag | Penalty |
|---|---|
| Language change | −15 |
| Topic change | −12 |
| Inflated DR | −12 |
| Parked period | −8 |
| Trademark risk | −8 |
| Not in Google | −8 |
| Archive gap | −5 |
A domain with a total penalty of 10 points or more is marked “risky” but still published; we leave the decision to you. Domains that score below 45 are not published.
What do the risk flags mean?
A flag is a finding that is not enough to reject the domain but that you should know about.
DR is too high for the number of referring domains; it may be inflated by a few strong links or sitewide links.
The archive shows a parked or for-sale page for a period; the site was not live during that time.
The site's topic changed over the course of the archive; the domain may have been used for a different purpose for a while.
The script the content is written in changed over the course of the archive.
There is a break of more than three years in the Wayback captures.
The name contains a known brand. The brand owner may claim the domain (UDRP); run a trademark search before you buy.
No indexed pages were found in Google for this domain. The site may have been down for a long time, or the domain may have been removed from the index.
Most backlinks carry anchor text in a non-Latin script; the link profile may not match the site's topic.
No findings: the topic and language are the same throughout the archive, there is no parked period or long gap, and DR is in line with the number of referring domains.
What we can't check
Knowing the limits of a tool tells you how far to trust it. Before you buy, you should verify these yourself:
- Google penalties. We check whether the domain still has pages indexed in Google (the “Not in Google” flag), but a manual action or an algorithmic penalty cannot be seen from outside. After you get the domain, verify it in Search Console.
- Anchor texts of the backlinks. We show the number of referring domains and the strongest referring sites; for the anchor text distribution, check Ahrefs or Majestic.
- Trademark registration. We flag domains whose name contains a known brand with “Trademark risk”, but that is not a trademark search. A brand that isn't on our list can still make a claim; if in doubt, look it up in TMview or USPTO.
- Periods the archive did not see. We read the history from samples spread across the years. A short spam period may have fallen between the samples; browse the calendar yourself using the Wayback link in the report.
About prices
The price you see on GoDaddy auctions is the current bid; for a good domain it rises fast in the final hours. Domains in the PendingDelete stage have no price: the moment one drops, whoever registers it first gets it, which is why most people use a backorder service.
Domain Rating data is provided by Ahrefs. Trust Flow and Citation Flow are Majestic metrics, and Authority Score is a Semrush metric.
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