How to pick expired domain

I'm going to be starting a YMYL site and understand that I should buy an expired domain otherwise I risk being in the sandbox for a few months. This is the first time I'm buying a expired domain and I'm unsure about exactly what I'm looking for. Obviously, I went plenty of good quality traffic as soon as possible.

I'm browsing for domains on expireddomains.net. The values I can see are:

Number of characters in domain name, Majestic external backlinks, SEOkicks domain pop - numbers of backlinks from different domains, birth year of domain from whois creation date, birth year of domain from first found date on archive.org, number of crawl results, majestic million global rank, status of the domain in dmoz.org, numbers of TLDs the domain name is registered, various statuses of domain name, number of related domains in com/net/biz/org/info, number of links from wikipedia, status including price.

I'm thinking the values i'm looking at should be:

1. Price
2. Domain name not being too wild (very long domain name or unusual domain suffix)
3. Number of backlinks (though i'm not sure whether the majestic backlinks or the SEOkicks backlinks is the value I should be looking at?)

Is this right?

Also, when I buy the site, do I need to make sure that I set up a page that has the same name as where external links are currently pointing to retain domain authority?

Buying an expired domain doesn't guarantee you won't be sandboxed in the future.

Also, not all new sites and domains are sandboxed.

malayan said:

Buying an expired domain doesn't guarantee you won't be sandboxed in the future.

Also, not all new sites and domains are sandboxed.

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Does buying an expired domain help you not get sandboxed?

d0sa said:

Does buying an expired domain help you not get sandboxed?

Click to expand...

Depends... Google knows if a site has been parked and if it's in an entirely different server range, niche, etc etc...

The age of the domain is very important and also checking if the site has had any previous penalties. Also, when checking backlinks, anchor text and referring domains should tell you a lot about the value of the profile. Check if the links are related to the niche with a strong profile, the site has had some previous traffic and still has some indexed pages.

DA moz 15+
TF majestic 10+
backlink domains from 50
age of domain from 5 year
backlinks without spam
from 1 page in google index is better

Go through this checklist I wrote last year, it's still fairly up to date - https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/what-is-your-checklist-for-domains-for-pbn.1342695/#post-14514468

Expireddomains.net is not sufficient for... anything really. If you want to use domains as money sites, you will need money to invest.

Domains that you can get for registration cost only will not get you anywhere anymore. Even if you find something that has not been spammed or abused to death.
Without having a few hundred bucks to invest in a good money site, I would start fresh.
Otherwise you risk working on a domain that's lame (because you can't check it properly) and will bring you just trouble for no benefit, because 10 referring domains won't get you anywhere.

Domcop is a decent aggregator for domains, both auction and scraped/expired, costs around $50 a month. You can start there + that checklist I sent you.
You will also need tools. Ahrefs, Majestic, Semrush (some of them at least), etc. Without those, there's no point even starting any SEO campaign. As there's no point in starting it without substantial budget.

Considering that I woke up and chose violence today, I will address the other posts in this thread:

- There's no sandbox. Websites age and prove themselves as they get older. As they get older, they get "bumps" and start ranking better, they become more trusted in the Google's eyes.
You simply start at 0 and as your site (website age, not domain age!) ages, it gets positive points if you are doing everything right. If not, then you are "stuck in sandbox".
To simply translate what "Stuck in Sandbox" means, it's basically "I failed miserably and I have no idea what I am doing."

Read posts from @splishsplash in these threads:
https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/a...money-sites-on-expired-domains.1090579/page-3https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/why-most-sites-never-make-much-money-in-seo.1251081/
- Domain age, as in when was the domain first registered, is not, never was, never will be a factor. Even if it is, it's so miniscule, that it's not worth mentioning in the grand scheme of things.
You can easily filter out advice from people purely based on this. 90% of people claiming that domain age matters wouldn't rank for their domain brand name if their life depended on it.

Domain History: Once you've identified some expired domain names, you should check the domain name's history to determine if there are any potential issues. This includes checking to see if the domain was used for any malicious activities.

Domain Link Profile: Analyze the domain's link profile. You should look at the number of links pointing to the domain as well as the quality of those links.

Domain Age: Another important factor to consider is the age of the domain. Generally, the longer a domain has been registered, the more likely it is to be a quality domain.

d0sa said:

Does buying an expired domain help you not get sandboxed?

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It's quicker and more cost effective to order from @Nargil for money site domains.

Ahrefs Domain Rating -> Min 15
Domain History -> Check web.archive.org
Backlink Type & Count

There are some good replies already to this topic like @Nargil so look out for those.

My advice and what worked for me, is to look for a domain which has a backlink profile and content history of the same topic that you want to publish.

Cheers for the info so far everyone. I'm real new to these forums so can't PM but will fire @Nargil one over once I hit 15 posts