Flippa Blog « Aged Domain Buying and Due Dilligence

Due to the popularity of one of our previous post on Flipping Aged Domains, I thought we’d have a chat to one of the experts, and the man behind DomainFace, Kenny Goodman.

Originally cutting his entrepreneurial teeth dominating the lead-generation side of some of the most hyper-competitive industries around – Finance, Telecommunications, Nightclubs and Skip Rental (Dumpster Rental), two of the businesses Kenny’s created to date have been valued at over $10,000,000.

What Kenny Goodman doesn’t know about aged domains, isn’t worth knowing, so we asked Kenny to share some of his aged domain buying and due diligence advice.

What should people look for in an aged domain and what kind of due diligence can be done before purchasing?

Choosing a domain name is one of the most important tasks when building a website and most people don’t know they can purchase ready made assets in the form of aged domain names.

There’s a huge stack of un-mined gold hitting the market everyday because a lot of aged domains come with hidden benefits attached which gives them a massive head start in terms of traffic and therefore money. I call these ‘Dynamite Domains’.

The trick is to know what these benefits look like and how to find them because it can make the difference between selling a website for $150 and selling it for $1500.

It’s also really important to know what to avoid so you don’t end up buying a big fat expensive dud!

So I’ll list the dos and dont’s as clearly as possible here:

Keywords – As with new domains keywords are also important in aged domains. Websites with keywords in the domain will find it easier to rank in the search engines than comparable websites without keywords in the domain. This means websites with ‘big keywords’ (keywords with lot of searches in Google or/and cost per click in Google AdWords is high) in the domain will usually have more traffic than comparable websites without the keywords and will therefore sell for a lot more

If for example you are targeting the car hire industry and you want to rank for the key phrase “car hire” then you would ideally want the keywords ‘car’ and ‘hire’ in the domain name. There are several options when looking for a domain

• Exact Match: The exact match domain for car hire would be CarHire.com or .net, .org etc. or if you are targeting a country specific niche then the country code domain name of that country – e.g. .co.uk for the UK. As you can see this is an exact match as it contains the words ‘car’ and ‘hire’ in that order and contains no other keywords. This is the ideal scenario when purchasing a domain but these are usually harder to find.
• Phrase Match: If exact match isn’t available then the next best thing is phrase match. An example of a prefix phrase match = MyCarHire.com or a suffix = CarHireOnline.com. As you can see they both contain the keywords car and hire in the right order but they also contain other keywords.
• Broad Match: If you are unable to find a suitable exact match or phrase match then the next best thing would be broad match. An example of a broad match = HirethisCar.com As you can see this contains the keywords ‘car’ and ‘hire’ but in a different order and it also contains the word ‘this’
• Semantic Match: An example of a semantic match domain for the same industry would be JoesAutomobileRentals.com. As you can see the domain is in the same industry and automobile rentals is semantically related to “car hire” but it doesn’t contain the keywords ‘car’ or ‘hire’ anywhere in the domain. This would be less desirable than any of the above if all other things were equal.
• Non Match: An example of a non match domain would be Hertz.com –Although Hertz is a big car hire company it clearly doesn’t have the keywords ‘car’ or ‘hire’ or any semantically related keywords anywhere in the domain and if all other things were equal it would be at a serious disadvantage to any of the above combination.

Domain Usage: What are you using the domain for? This will have a massive affect on your domain choice. If you are creating a review site for the office furniture market and your main key phrase is “office furniture” and you are unable to get the exact match domain then the next best thing would be OfficeFurnitureReviews.com for example.

Age of domain – you can check this manually by looking at the creation date on DomainTools.com. Older domains are better for SEO purposes. [LM: For websites and domain listed on Flippa, we show this in the auction's stats section.]

History – For SEO purposes it’s important the history of the domain is relevant to the niche you are targeting. Worse than a non-relevant domain would be a domain involved in any taboo industries such as adult or gaming – unless of course you are targeting these industries – horses for courses and all that….

You can check the history of most domains at archive.org.

Traffic/Popularity – If you cannot get access to the domain’s analytical data of then the next best thing is the Alexa ranking (Alexa.com). This isn’t very accurate but it does give an indication into the popularity of the domain. Lower numbers are better in this case.

Facebook, for example, has an Alexa ranking of 2 which means according to Alexa it is the 2nd most popular website in the world.

Coca-Cola.com has a ranking of 30,562 meaning it’s the 30,562nd most popular website.

As you can see Alexa also provide other metrics like creation date.

Another place to estimate popularity is Compete.com.

Google PageRank (PR) – Google award every web page on their index with a rank ranging from 0-10 with 10 being the highest and most authoritative – CNN.com for example has a PageRank of 10.

Each ranking is 10 times higher than the next so a PageRank 3 is ten times higher than a PageRank 2 and so on…

Although the data published by Google isn’t very accurate it still does give an indication and does affect the monetary value of a domain on resale so if you can get a domain with a PR4 and then add a website to it, you will get much more than if you built the website on a brand new domain with no PageRank.

SEO extensions for Google Chrome and Firefox provide this data.

Fake PageRank – One of the ways a PageRank can be faked is by redirecting a domain to a different domain with a higher PageRank.

The best way to manually check if this has occurred is to type into Google the following: info:www.insertdomainname.com and if a different domain name appears in the search results then it usually means the domain name has been redirected.

See example of fake PageRank 8 for a domain currently for sale on GoDaddy auctions – it has redirected its domain to a big web 2.0 site:

Back Links – If a domain has back links from niche specific authority news, educational or/and high PageRank sites, this will be a good indication of the authority of the domain.

You can check the back links of a domain by going to Yahoo and typing in: link:www.insertdomainname.com

For example MySpace.com has over 33 million back links:

You can do the same in Google but you will get less information back as they publish less.

Pages Indexed – The number of pages indexed in the search engines will again be another indicator of how much authority the domain has. The more pages indexed the better.

The number will be different for each search engine but the process is the same. So to check manually how many pages a domain has indexed with Google you would type in site:www.insertdomainname.com and then check the number of results produced.

Facebook.com has about 813 million pages indexed by Google:

DMOZ and Yahoo Listings – Both DMOZ and Yahoo have high-end directories and to get listed in these directories you need to jump through quite a few hoops so Google places high trust in them and therefore a listing will give a domain added authority.

To check whether a domain is DMOZ listed go to DMOZ.org and to check whether is Yahoo directory listed go to Search.Yahoo.com/dir.

Brand Ability –  You may actually want to create a brand and don’t particularly bother about SEO. If this is the case then look for snappy, catchy and short (where possible) .com domain names. Facebook and Twitter for example don’t contain the keywords “social networking” but they have been able to create strong empires with good short and snappy domain names. Flippa is another example.

Trademarks – You’ve all probably heard of cyber squatting right? Well this basically means that someone has registered a domain name with a company trademark keyword in it. For example if I registered Microsoft.net or MicrosoftSoftware.info there is a strong chance that Microsoft would be able to claim the domain name from me and if I contested then they would probably have me pay their legal fees as well!

This is not a good place to be as it wastes time, energy and money so it’s always worth doing a trademark check before you buy a domain.

It’s very unlikely that generic keywords have been trademarked but it’s worth a quick check if you are unsure.

There’s different trademark directories for each country and the one for the US is tess2.uspto.gov.

If you are looking to do business in another country then do a search in the local Google typing in “trademark search”.

Choosing the right domain does take a good level of patience as the right domain may not be available on the Monday but the market may deliver it on the Tuesday.

[LM: For websites and domain listed on Flippa, we show many of the metrics Kenny has mention in the auctions stats area.]

Do you have any bidding strategies for domain auctions?

I only ever bid in the last 6 minutes of the auction. The more bids a domain has the more attention it will bring and will therefore become more attractive and will therefore attract more bidders creating a snowball affect – the less attention the domain gets early doors the better!

The big auction sites, including Flippa, have addressed this last second sniping by extending the auction if there are bids in the last 5 minutes, so in this case there’s no point bidding within this time period

What are some tactics/best practices when setting up a site on an aged domain?

• Host the domain in the country you are looking to target.
• Add an address for that country in the contact page or Terms and Conditions.
• Add content as fast as possible and this content should be relevant to the history of the domain.
• Check pages indexed and then re-create these pages with relevant content. If you don’t have time to do this then redirect the pages to the home page for now.

There are thousands of awesome dynamite domains hitting the market everyday and we are still very much at the beginning of a very immature, untapped market so now is the time to mine this gold because it coincides with a world wide recession meaning there are heaps of under valued domains in the marketplace right now.

On top of this, the majority of professional domainers out there don’t care about most of the SEO factors mentioned above and they don’t care about building high value sites – they just trade in domains. Some of them are sitting on awesome Dynamite Domains allowing them to sit in the parking lot gathering dust.

I call these “Old School Domainers”.

People like you and me want to renovate and invigorate these domains by building fully functioning, traffic generating high value websites with much bigger profit margins.

We are “IM Domainers” (Internet Marketing Domainers) – The New School!

Happy IM Domaining.