--- title: "How It Works: Finding and Scoring Expired Domains" description: "Which sources we scan, how we vet domains, how the Hunter score is calculated and what the risk flags mean." url: https://hunter.domains/how-it-works language: en --- 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. ### 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. ### 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 | | Archive gap | −5 | | Not in Google | −3 | 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. Inflated DR DR is too high for the number of referring domains; it may be inflated by a few strong links or sitewide links. Parked The archive shows a parked or for-sale page for a period; the site was not live during that time. Topic changed The site's topic changed over the course of the archive; the domain may have been used for a different purpose for a while. Language changed The script the content is written in changed over the course of the archive. Archive gap There is a break of more than three years in the Wayback captures. Trademark risk The name contains a known brand. The brand owner may claim the domain (UDRP); run a trademark search before you buy. Not in Google Google shows no indexed pages for this domain right now. That is common once a site has been offline for a while and is not proof of a penalty on its own; verify it in Search Console after you buy. Foreign anchor texts Most backlinks carry anchor text in a non-Latin script; the link profile may not match the site's topic. No flags 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. ## Don't miss the next good domain. Set your rule and leave the rest to us. You hear the moment a matching domain is found. [Get started free](https://hunter.domains/register)