Domain Names and...

The Alexa Traffic rank tool
A nice way to pick up expired domains with traffic is to look at a domains Alexa Popularity ranking. Alexa is one of the foremost authorities when it comes to determining website and domain name activity levels.

Alexa monitors several domain metrics, but the one we will be using primarily is called Alexa traffic rank tool. Basically the tool rank domains in a relative system where the most visited domain is number 1, the second most visited is ranked number 2 and so forth, all the way to up to the 30 million mark or so. Alexa monitors global rankings but also national rankings. This way you can see which domain is the most popular in your country.

Since it is a relative scale you won’t know for certain what a ranking says about the actual traffic numbers a domain receives.  Often domains with very similar rankings will have extremely different actual traffic numbers. This is because of the way that Alexa creates the rankings. Basically it is done by monitoring activity by visitors that use the Alexa toolbar. The toolbar is usually installed by webmasters and people with technical insight, therefore the traffic numbers are also somewhat skewed. Websites and domains that fall into the interest realms of Alexa toolbar users are ranked higher than domains that do not. Even so it is one of the most reliable and used ways of determining whether an expired domain still has traffic or not. This is because Alexa actually also tracks traffic to expired domains. This Means that domain requests will still be tracked even though the domain is not live.

Determining which domains have potential traffic
As mentioned it is impossible to say exactly how many visitors a domain has based on its Alexa popularity. But you can use it to gauge the activity level and how much the activity has fallen since the domain has been dropped. In general you will never find a domain with much traffic that has a ranking over 10 million. That being said, it is possible to for a domain to be quite an earner even with very little traffic. That is determined by the domain keyword/subject area. This article focus on finding domains with a decent amount of traffic though. Please note that you can not transfer these observations to buying established sites with Alexa rank. The Alexa rank is easiely faked, so never take Alexa stats as a buy argument when you have possible access to actual server stats.

I won’t go into how to create your list of expired domains with Alexa rank in this article, look elsewhere on DNand to get tips on that. Once you have your list ready it should only contain domains with a traffic ranking of 10 million or lower. Be sure you do not include domains with fake Alexa ranking. To check if a domains Alexa ranking is fake just do a lookup on Alexa.com under the domain name and check if the Alexa article points to the correct domain. Any redirected domains will share the “end domain’s” ranking and link status. If you discover an expired domain with a global Alexa ranking of 100.000 or below the ranking is almost certainly fake.