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. The Alexa Traffic rank tool 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. Read the full article here