Expired Domains With Wikipedia Links In 2026?

Some time back (I mean, I started here in 2009, so a long time back!), I used to sell expired domains that people created PBNs. I mostly did this by creating my own custom crawler that went through popular sites, found outbound links to expired domains, then ran a bunch of metrics on them. I used them personally and also sold a bunch of domains on the marketplace here. Eventually I moved onto other projects and wound down the expired domains business.

I can see in the marketplace now, there are still sellers selling "expired" domains, but typically these domains are picked up as soon as they dropped rather than being expired for ~6 months for example.

So my first question is, is it pretty much a requirement now to pick up the expired domain "immediately", or is a domain that's been expired for say ~3 months still OK to pick up? (Even if it takes a little longer for it to start gaining some juice).

The second question was, and showing my age a little, are Wikipedia links still valuable in their own right? Back in the day they were super powerful and even with nofollow, it showed a lot of trust to Google. But I don't really see many people talking about it again.

I've more or less booted up my app that found the domains, so screenshot below is expired domains, with several Wikipedia links, fetching AHrefs/Moz metrics etc. But it feels like so many domains are absolutely slammed with spam content and I'm not even sure if the Wikipedia angle is even worth it any more and I should instead find another source rather than working my way through Wikipedia.

Not only that, I'm not even sure if there are a million other bots ready to pick up these domains the second they drop, and so anything that isn't previously used for slots/gambling/pharma would be picked up in a flash anyway.

You backorder the domain that is pending for deletion

There are still ways to find good domains... i found one recently that has many links from wikipedia and is a killer ...make a python bot to scrape all external links from a big database of Wikipedia Links (scraped from google) . Scan those domains ..i get even 30-60k unique domains sometimes on a big scan...you will find few big ass domains just sitting there unused.

Just found one about 2 and half weeks ago and I already put it to work. Has over 40 active pages from wikipedia linking back to different subfolders of the domain before expired.... I remade those subfolders and added thousands of pages each targeting some kws, indexed them and result is more than amazing. These domains are super powerful no matter what others say. I dont know how much will last, but for short terms they can be Big As* money makers..

3 months expired is still workable the auth doesn’t disappear that fast if the backlink profile is solid. the real question is whether the domain got spammed during the expired period.

gmc93 said:

There are still ways to find good domains... i found one recently that has many links from wikipedia and is a killer ...make a python bot to scrape all external links from a big database of Wikipedia Links (scraped from google) . Scan those domains ..i get even 30-60k unique domains sometimes on a big scan...you will find few big ass domains just sitting there unused.

Click to expand...

I currently have close to 2 million domains atm in the DB, slowly working my way through them (Just trying not to piss off AHrefs/WHOIS servers etc).

Definitely an interesting area because the size of Wikipedia means it's probably harder to get through all of them so a higher chance of a diamond in the rough, but also, tonnes of people hammering them I presume.

Along with a wayback scan of the last 5 snapshots checking for gambling, chinese language etc. I also made it start checking backlink profiles. But my question would be, if the wayback scan is clean (Was the original site until expired), I can pretty much always find links from these sites advertising PBN services and on that page they have like 5000 links to different domains. But its weird because the domain itself was not a PBN (Or atleast doesn't look like it to me), so I'm not sure if these sites exist purely to put people off buying the expired domain or what.