Why do people buy Expired domains?

Sorry if I sound a bit thick, I've just read someone's blog about how they paid $369 for an expired domain.

They seemed to go through a lot of trouble for it, and waited a long time.

Why do people buy them ( outside of keeping their business name)

Cheers

 

Expired domain may allready have traffic, pagerank and so forth

 

A lot of people do not really consider renewing their domain names worthwhile. That is why quality names expire.

So why bother? Because the chance of a huge sale (x,xxx USD) in relation to the normal purchase price (xx USD) is very tempting and a bit like gambling. And we know why gambling is "quite" popular!

So in short: PROFIT

Hope this helps.

Fabian

 

Cheers for both your replies.

So how long before an expired domain loses it's PR?

Is it within 6 months, or does it depend on who's linking, how long the links ( if paid for) last.

 

The chance that an expired domain will retain its PR on the next update is low.

If the previous site owner paid for any links, he would have cancelled them when he decided to drop the domain ( unless the links paid for were permanent)

Secondly, nobody would really like their site to link to an empty page. So if the domain expired, there are good chances that their links will disappear too. This is of course subject to the usual exceptions ( Incase the site which links to it has an owner who does not care about whether or not the site is linking to an active website). Also if you end up creating something totally different after buying the domain, people who were linking to the older version would stop linking to you.

 

You could also buy names via tdnam that has pagerank and won't drop before ownership is transferred to you.

I build a site to collect the pagerank and a little other info for domains.

You can see it here: Vintage Domain Names.

 

if it keeps at least some of its backlinks and u add some quality backlinks yourself there is high possibility the PR wont drop.

 

I have seen some domains that lose their PR and they retain it after few months.

 

Most of the expiring names are bought for traffic and/or resale value. Any name with traffic generally is snatched up and thrown onto PPC or equiv. All a big numbers game. Only needs to earn 2 cents a day to be worth renewing.

 

Looking for expired domains is really a way to narrow the field. These are domains that someone paid for once. This means that someone found value there. As others have said, these domains can have pagerank and can retain traffic from the previous use.