ExpiredDomains.net is my favorite tool for finding expiring domains, closeouts, pending releases and just about every domain name that is for sale (in some form or another) on a marketplace.
For some, the learning curve is a little steep, but it is worth every waking minute spent learning how to use their platform. If you don’t already have an account, I highly recommend you sign up asap (you can set one up here).
Step One
I personally always start setting my filters in the “Marketplace Domains” tab since I don’t really seek out deleted/reg-fee names. First things first, click on that tab!
Step Two
In order to access the filter panel, you need click on a marketplace tab. For simplicity, click on the first one titled “GoDaddy Closeouts”
Step Three
From here, you’ll want to click the “Show Filter” link to open up the filter panel.
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Introducing the Filters
Now it’s time for the fun to begin. This is what the filter panel looks like when you first open it. Epic right? And there are 3 pages of filters to help narrow down your search!
I will start on the first tab titled “Common” and cover everything on the page before moving on to the next page. To help you follow along, I have numbered every filter type on the Common tab, as I will be referencing them in the tutorial.
Common Filter #1: Domain Name Whitelist
The Domain Name Whitelist filter allows you three different areas where you can whitelist keywords. For instance, if you’d like the domain name to start with the word “The” you would enter it into the “Starts with” text field.
- Starts With: This allows you to select a keyword or keywords that the domain name will start with. It can be as simple as “the” or really narrow it down to something specific like “attorney”. So if you entered Attorney into this field, your results would only be: Attorney+Keyword
- Contains: The same thing, however, the word will show up no matter where it’s located. So if you typed in “The” your results may include: The+Keyword, Keyword+The, Keyword+The+Keyword, or even words like Fathering.com
- Ends with: Same concept here, except the results will only produce domain names that end with your chosen keyword. So if you typed in “The” your results may include: Keyword+The or even a word like Bathe.
But that is not all, my favorite part of these filters, you can enter multiple keywords! For instance, if you wanted to find every domain name that starts with the keywords “Attorney”, “Lawyer”, “Turtle”, or “Mouse”, all you have to do is enter the keywords and separate them with a space. Side note, I use quotation marks for my examples, but you do NOT need to use them in the filters.
Common Filter #2: Domain Name Blacklist
The Domain Name Blacklist is exactly like the whitelist, except here, you tell the filters to filter OUT these keywords so you do NOT seem them in your search results!
- Starts Not With: This allows you to select a keyword or keywords that the domain name will NOT start with. For example, if you wanted to exclude the words “Bank” and “Money” from the starting words, you’d enter: Bank Money
- Contains Not: Again, much like the whitelist, except here the filter will seek out the word or words you use in any part of the domain name and NOT display them in the search results.
- Ends Not with: Same as Starts Not With, except the words are excluded from the end of the domains in the search results!
Common Filter #3: Domain Name Contains AND
This filter lets you add additional keywords to your search results. It takes your whitelist allows you an “AND” feature. For instance if you want your domain name to start with “The”, you can use Domain Name Contains AND to add “Media” “Company” “Race” and your search results will include all of the domain names that start with “The” AND have one of those keywords in it somewhere! Great feature.
Common Filter #4: Domain Name Wanted and Unwanted Characters
This is for you letter and number seekers! This filter allows you to enter characters that you want whitelisted or blacklisted in your results. For instance, if you do not want any vowels in your search results, you would blacklist like: AEIOU, and not a single one of the search result domain names will have a vowel in it! Same goes for whitelist, if you only want search results to show you domain names with vowels and certain numbers, you could whitelist: AEIOU9876, and your search results would only show you domain names that have those characters in them.
[alert type=”danger” close=”false” heading=”Quick Tip”] You should be testing each of these filters out as we go so you can get a real feel for them! [/alert]
Common Filter #5: Domain Name Settings
The Domain Name Settings filter is my most used filter, it really lets me narrow down the foundational aspect of the domain names I am seeking.
No Number: No domain names with numbers allowed
No Characters: No domain names with letters/characters allowed
No Hyphens: The best filter ever 😉
No Consecutive Hyphens: What I said above.
Only Numbers: Shows you domain names that only use numbers
Only Characters: Shows you domain names that only use letters/characters
Min and Max Filters: You can set a minimum and maximum filters here. For instance, if you are only looking for 5-7 letter/number domain names, you can set “5” to minimum and “7” to maximum in the length fields. And so on down the line, these are pretty straight forward.
Common Filter #6: Domain Name Pattern
Domain name pattern whitelist and blacklist is an incredibly useful feature. I spent a few hours using just this filter to find some of my best brandable domain names. You can search for just about every pattern, and, you can include your own letters and numbers in there.
Some example patterns:
CVCV = Teso
CVVC = Toot
CvxC = LVXP
9NNCVC = 976RAK
See where this is going? All the letters you want to of your own, just place in lower case. So if you are looking to create something like ZOVANI, then you can use = CovVCi
Consonant O V Vowel Consonant I, really useful if you want to get super creative!
Common Filter #7: PageRank
Don’t know what PageRank is? ExpiredDomains.net explains it very well in this post. After you’ve read it, come back here.
You can check three different boxes, No Fake PR’s, no Unsure PR’s and no PageRank -1. You can also set the minimum PageRank and maximum PageRank here.
Some domain investors love acquiring high quality PageRank domain names that they can use to develop, or sell. I personally don’t use this filter unless I am weeding out fake PR’s.
Common Filter #8: Common SEO
If you are searching for investment grade domain names, you don’t really need to worry about most of these settings. The one I use most often is WBY, which is for the Wayback Machine Year (the year of registration). You can set a minimum and maximum year of registration here. I use the maximum and generally set it to around 2004 so the domain names I am seeking are all 10 years or older. The other settings, in my opinion, are for investors seeking domain names to develop or sell to developers. I don’t use them.
Common Filter #9: Listing Settings
The listing settings filter is also one of my favorites. It allows me to really narrow down the “when” and “how much” in my search results.
The “only new in the last” checkboxes will filter out all the domains and only show you the ones that have been listed in the last 12/24 hours, week, or 30 days. You can even select “Watchlist” to only show the domain names you are watching.
You can also get really specific by utilizing the “add date”, “end date”, “Name Ending”, and “Ends in days”. By utilizing these filters, you can narrow down exactly when the domain was listed, or when it’s due to end. Great for the “snipers” looking to pick off last minute domain names.
The “max price” filter is great so you never see results that are over your budget, and if you skip down a couple filters, you’ll see text boxes letting you further narrow down your price ranges. This is great, especially if you are taking on The $20 to a Baller Challenge.
The listing type is straight forward, you can look at either buy it now listings, make offer listings, or auctions (“bid”).
On to the “Bids”, you can find all of the auctions with ZERO bids, that is also great for the snipers. Setting up the filters for the last day, with auctions that have zero bids… can you imagine the possible gems you can find?
Domains per page is simple, how many results do you want to see per result page? I usually set it to 200, because “more is better” right?
Now onto the second tab titled “Additional”. To help you follow along, I have numbered every filter type on the Additional tab.
In the additional tab, you’ll see settings like TLD, Keywords, and other filters that will help you further narrow down your results.
Additional Filters #1&2: TLD’s
Pretty straight forward here! What extensions do you want to include in your search results?
Additional Filters #3: Keywords
Again, another fantastic filter! You can select which language you want the keywords to be! On top of that, you can add a minimum and maximum word count. This is really helpful, especially if you are only seeking, say, a 2 word, english domain!
Additional Filters #4&5: Name in selected TLD is available/registered
Although I have never needed to use them, they are great filters. If you are looking to find a domain name that you also want to register in another specific TLD, you can check the box of the TLD you also want to register, that way your search results will only show you domain names that are available in your other filters, AND available in the specific TLD you check.
Vise versa for the selected TLD is registered. If you are hunting down an in-demand domain name, you can check off the boxes of TLDs that the keyword(s) is registered in. For instance, if you are seeking a .com, and you want to make sure it’s in demand, you can check TLD is registered in: .net, .org, .info and so on. That way, you only see results for domain names that are registered in other TLD’s!
Additional Filters #6: Geo Domains
For you GEO hunters, this is going to be your best friend! You can search for domain names that have specific GEO attributes! Give this one a shot, set it to “Only Geo Domains” and pick a country… look at the results! All of the domain names include a GEO specific keyword (city, town, state, so on) among your other filters.
Now keep in mind, if you check only 100% GEO domains, you may want to remove some of your other filter restrictions. This filter will only show exact match GEO locations. For instance, a city name, a town, a country, a state.. so on. Even though there are a few bugs (really tough to filter out all those domains) but… it works, so if you are seeking the name of a specific place on the map, only 100% GEO Domains is your knight in shining filter.
Additional Filters #7: Social Stats
Another cool feature that I’ve never really had to use. With social media being the main point of contact between businesses and their user base, you may want to consider using this filter for your own acquisitions that you plan to develop. Although most of the generic social media usernames are taken, still worth a shot. You can seek out social media profiles that are connected to the domain name, or you can select whether the username is take or available! Cool filter, but likely won’t be using it much.
Down to the final tab, Adwords & SEO, however, I’ve decided to exclude this tab. Why? Because I don’t use it anymore, and if you want to buy, and flip/sell domain names, then you need not worry about that tab. And I’ll tell you why. So many times, I’ve set search volume and CPC filters only to find that after all my other filters were set too, there were almost no results to weed through. Another reason being that some really good two and three word domain names have low CPC and low search volume. Take, for instance, one of my domain names: SoilToEnergy.com, has absolutely no search volume or CPC. I would have never seen that auction had I placed the SV and CPC filters on it. While it may not be a million dollar domain, it’s still a valuable brand for a future tech/science/green company that specializes in sustainable energy sources from soil. I have many more domains of the like, most of which I would have missed out on by limiting the filters too much.
One more quick tip, you can save your searches! After you apply your filter, click this button:
Once saved, you can access your saved searches from the drop down menu at the top of your screen:
Now that you have filters set you should start exploring! Go through the different marketplaces by clicking their tabs to see your filtered results from every type of marketplace. Good luck!
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