Where to source expired domain name data?
- Thread starter Muneevv
- Start date
88interactive
Junior Member
- Jun 18, 2019
- 101
- 31
The best free tool is expireddomain. It is a website where you can find hundreds of expired domains with up to date. You have many filters and options to get the best domain. It is totally a free website to check the expired domains.
Make sure to apply filters and you can also buy premium domains but they are priced at peaks. Basically, they are premium and already bought by others & selling by them through medium like Godaddy or Sedo or any other.
Expired domains are good at SEO and they can also be bad if the domain has a bad history, Make sure to check the domain health and previous history of the domain.
TomTheCat
Elite Member
- Oct 27, 2019
- 2,372
- 2,763
Zone files.
- May 17, 2013
- 3,391
- 21,402
Private bots and crawlers, who runs 24/7. There are multiple sources. For example, this one (closed last year): DomainScope.com (by VeriSign)
- Aug 24, 2021
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I had the same question sometime ago. So I went downt the domain hunting rabbit hole and trust me, there's so much work put into acquiring this data that it will take several threads to explain it properly.
In brief, these are the most common techniques:
Zonefile Hunting
Every Top Level Domain (like .com, .net, .xyz etc) is maintained by a company. This company's responsibility is to keep what is called a "zonefile". The zonefile contains a list of all domain names under that TLD that are online on a particular day and it is updated every 24hrs.
So, if you have the .COM zonefile (which is maintained by Verisign), you can get all the domains which have a site associated to then today.
By comparing these zonefiles across several days, you can get a good picture of how many domain names a TLD has. .COM is the largest, I have access to that zonefile and as of today, the file is about 23 gigs large and has roughly 200 million sites. You can then get whois records of all these sites and see when the lease expires. And check on the expiration date again if the domain was renewed or not.
Backlink Profile Scanning
Seo services like Ahrefs and Majestic have crawlers for backlinks. By checking the DNS probe status of outgoing backlinks of popular sites, you can see which have expired.
Private Crawlers
Same as above, but instead of using seo backlink data. You setup your own crawlers to analyse large websites. This is usually done only when you want domains that have backlinks from certain sites.
Serp hunting
There will be serps (often of forums or message boards) mentioning old, now expired websites. By scraping serps for these mentions you can find some expired domains.
Social media mentions
Just like the above, but instead of searching in serps. You search social media sites and filter for 404s.
Auction and Registrar Lists
Several registrars auction domain names as soon as it reaches the pending delete status. You can get these lists from their APIs and stuff.
Insider Info
In the end, there's insider Info that only registrars and big-name Domainers inside the industry know.
Thanks for the detailed info. Have you been able to get much use out of the zone file data ?
- Aug 24, 2021
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I got access to it for an academic reason. It has fulfilled its purpose.
I’ve been trying to find somewhere to access it but it seems you need to be a registrar or some governing body to gain access.
I was hoping to categorize the expiring domains to buy out some good ones.
- Aug 24, 2021
- 1,647
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You don't need to be a registrar to get access to the zonefiles for several gTLDs, ccTLDs are difficult to get access to and for that you might need to be a registrar.
Request access at https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/czds-2014-03-03-en
I got access because I was affiliated to an academic project which involved scanning the zonefiles. Stating commerical reasons might not work.