Scraping Expired domains

Nargil said:

Not much of a point in scraping these days. Everything that could have been scraped, has been scraped a thousand times over (literally) years ago.

Whatever domains drop, get dropcaught and go to auctions. If they don't get dropcaught, then they are most likely shite. If they aren't shite, then they get picked apart within seconds through Expireddomains.net

Your overall best bet is to target auction domains on Godaddy for minimal bid of $25. Here and there you can get a decent domain for $50 (including renewal fees).

Another good bet is backordering through Dropcatch, Namejet, etc. and sometimes you can get a decent domain for $60 - $70.

Bottom line, scraping for domains that could actually move a needle, whether like money sites or PBNs won't happen. And even if, then definitely not in any reasonable scale.

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GrowthJson said:

Thanks bro!, The problem I'm having is that I work with .fr tld and I can't find in any of thoose , they mostly sell .com or .net ...

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GrowthJson said:

Thanks bro!, The problem I'm having is that I work with .fr tld and I can't find in any of thoose , they mostly sell .com or .net ...

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jimbobo2779 said:

I actually disagree with the general sentiment here. It is true that you are unlikely to find domains worth $1000s when scraping in 2024 but if you want domains with links from your competitor, you aren't finding that on an auction site or dropping domain list. You can target general niche with these sites but finding domains that have links within your niche takes a lot more work than just searching for a given keyword or crawling a site.

If I were buying and selling domains or looking for any strong domain to build a website on, then auctions and dropping domains is a good place to start as you can find the better domains out of everything coming available there. However, if you are in a tough niche and want a specific type of domain, perhaps with links from a competitor or authority, then scraping the site is the most reliable method (or using a host of third party services to get the outbound links, split to domains, check for availability for example).

I suppose the decision is to either spend more for a, generally, more powerful domain from auction that is in a similar general niche to yours, or get a very cheap expired domain with links from the big guys in your niche. The latter will likely have much lower stats but will be way more relevant. I can't say the latter is necessarily better but you can get many expired domains for the price of a single auction domain as well and they could be really targeted to your niche.

Full disclosure: I am owner of Domain Hunter Gatherer so obviously I am biased but I believe my post on this is factual. This is just my 2c.

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Perb said:

I partially agree, but your service is nearly $100 per month, which buys a lot of SEO domains, which can be bought for a reg fee or as low as 10-50 USD in GD closeout.

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jimbobo2779 said:

Yeah, it costs quite a lot to provide access to 50k Moz stats and 50k Majestic stats per account per month, social stats for domains also cost us. You can check the costs on the Moz and Majestic API, it'll give you an idea of why it can't be much cheaper and remain sustainable. We also have a constant 20% off for BHW members and regularly offer more than that. I only mentioned my tool for disclosure, so people reading my view knew that I was affiliated and to take it for what it is. Not everyone on here makes it clear how they are biased in what they say.

For clarity; I am not making any accusations by what I said above. I am just pointing out that almost nobody mentions their background that would explain their opinion somewhat. It may make me more informed as I've been doing this for years, or it could mean that I am unreliable because I have a vested interest. Either way, I think people deserve to know. I have no issue if a mod would like to remove it.

There are other ways of crawling a site and checking availability, you don't have to use a tool like DHG. For example, before DHG the main way to crawl was to use something like screaming frog to find all the broken external links across a whole site. Then you have a shortlist of potentially available domains, then you can run these through a bulk checker on a domain registrars website, pull the available domains. Then take those domains and run them through your suite of checks to decide if it is worthy of buying.

The above is still a perfectly valid way of finding domains with links from specific sites and generally it can be done for free. That is, right up until you want to start getting 3rd party stats for lots of domains, then the cost of a software becomes easier to justify.

And to go back to your point about costs. Are you finding many highly targeted domains with links from specific websites for those $10-$50 closeouts? Is that so different that paying ~$70/m to find domains in your niche for reg fee only. It's different. Is it better? Is it worse? In my opinion it is different and there is no obvious better. I generally am looking to promote a few specific websites, I would generally be looking for relevant domains but still will want specific powerful domains that I will tend to get at auction. In my opinion it isn't one or the other

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Perb said:

There is Domain Name Analyser and Scrapebox to name a few that have yielded some results especially combined with ExpiredDomains

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