Business listing - Article Submission site

As part of a bigger project I need to set up a generic business listing/article submission site. This is more of a learning project to test something, so I can't spend any real money on the domain, but I would like to use a domain with some history. I've been looking at expired domain auction sites and damn they're expensive. Any I've seen that seems a little interesting is thousands of dollars, and when I look at the backlink profile with Moz theres nothing.

I've looked in the forum, but I don't see anyone offering expired domains that I can use for directories. Anyone on here that has domains that could work for a business listing site? Or any ideas where to continue my search?

Search ExpiredDomains(.)net

There is a lot of crazy I-will-win-the-lotto pricing on some of these domains. Business listing sites unless you intend to have a small untouched niche or vast inventory like Thomas Register ime have all been scraped up, chewed up and spit out by Google over the years. Doesn't mean it won't work- and I wish there were more of them like Yahoo used to be. But keeping it open you are simply teaching google what categories of businesses to index above your directory. Outbound links also that is an issue for ranking unless you pay for placement. If I were doing it, I would put up a paywall and block all scraping as their are ton's of bots running around looking for your stuff to copy.

I think you searched badly at auctions or you need a very beautiful short name, they are expensive

There are many inexpensive domains, but not so beautiful

All depends on your budget basically, expired domains net have really good listing but these are gone within seconds, few year backed i have secured a PR7 domain from there for normal fee like 2 usd.