Smart Ask

Picking up pre-drop domains is a great way to start new sites with both traffic and search legacies. One of the issues that many buyers discover is that the old site is no longer cached — Google et. al. have picked up the parking page — and the site isn’t indexed in Archive.org.

Site History

Whenever buying a previously-used domain you want to check the background and history of past sites that domain hosted. Picking up the wrong domains can lead to painful loses, and while serious spam is usually easy to spot (check for massive link footprints from spam sites), sometimes light search engine infringements are difficult to spot with third party tools. This is compounded when the domain now points to a parking lot.

Something Most People Overlook

For various reasons webmasters rarely buy domains and hosting at the same time. Modern hosting allows users to host multiple sites, so you just buy another domain and add it to your current hosting. Many webmasters also own multiple domains/sites, so hosting is usually maintained for those other sites.

So when a webmaster fails to renew a domain they rarely delete the hosting account for that domain. The registrar will normally override the owner’s DNS settings to point requests to a parking page once the domain reaches redemption.

Here’s the trick If you can find the host server IP you can quickly access the old site to review the content.

Server IPs

You can use a paid service like DomainTools to view historic DNS settings, or you can go the cheapskate route and simply search Google:
[+%domain.tld% DNS]
If you drop in your target domain (instead of “%domain.tld%”) and the term “DNS” you’ll likely get a SERP full of pages from various domain info sites. Assuming your target domain was active within the previous weeks/months you should be able to find the IP address of the host machine. You can also use Google’s caches of these domain info pages to see older info (Google wont crawl many of these sites as regularly).

Overriding DNS

Once you’ve got the IP the rest is simple. If you’re on a Windows machine you simply need to find and edit the “hosts” file (usually found in C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\). Once you find this file you need to add a new line:

# Copyright (c) 1993-2009 Microsoft Corp.
#
# This is a sample HOSTS file used by Microsoft TCP/IP for Windows.
#
# This file contains the mappings of IP addresses to host names. Each
# entry should be kept on an individual line. The IP address should
# be placed in the first column followed by the corresponding host name.
# The IP address and the host name should be separated by at least one
# space.
#
# Additionally, comments (such as these) may be inserted on individual
# lines or following the machine name denoted by a '#' symbol.
#
# For example:
#
# 102.54.94.97 rhino.acme.com # source server
# 38.25.63.10 x.acme.com # x client host
# localhost name resolution is handled within DNS itself.
# 127.0.0.1 localhost
# ::1 localhost
127.0.0.1 localhost127.0.0.1 localhost
xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx www.domain.tld

Swap out:

• “xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx” for host server IP address, followed by a single tab
• “www.domain.tld” for the target domain

Save the file, and the next time you access “www.domain.tld” from that machine the hosts file will override the DNS lookup. If you have the right server IP up should pop your target site. You’ll be bale to navigate around the site as if it were still live, and take a mirror for your records.

Maintaining Order – Making The Most Of Legacy Content

The reason you should mirror the old site is two-fold. If the domain receives traffic from links you will want to maintain or redirect the original architecture to retain the juice from those legacy deeplinks. You also want to ensure that visitors landing on your new pages receive relevant content, so knowing what was there historically is very useful.

It certainly beats the heck out of Archive.org!

Domainface is a kick-ass domaining tool that helps you search and audit domain names at auction from the top auction sites — Godaddy, Snap, Namejet, Sedo, Flippa and Pool.

Enough of the Intro… Show Me The Money

Best way to explain what Domainface is to show you a couple of screens. At its most basic Domainface is a search engine that finds recently dropped or currently at auction domains. Simply enter your keyword/s and hit search:

Running a search lands you on the result page which displays some really neat metrics to help you audit available options:

Here’s where the first bit of magic appears. The most important columns (for me anyway) are:

• Sales Category – this column will tell you where the domain sits in the registration cycle. You can also use filters which I’ll show shortly.
• Available Until – how long you have to try to acquire domain before it drops.
• Age – general rule-of-thumb “the older the better”.
• Reg. – use in conjunction with Age.
• Archived – this is very handy if you want to see the domain history in Archive.org. You can avoid some heartache with a couple of clicks.
• PR (PR icon) – no matter how much you hate to love it, PageRank is still a widely used metric, but you should always make sure backlinks haven’t been deleted. The other handy feature of Domainface is that they check for faked PR and notify you if PR was passed through a redirect.
• Alexa (Alexa icon) – can be useful to see if a site gets a lot of traffic, but obviously caveat-emptor on this easily gamed metric.
• Google indexed (Google icon) – you want to check this manually anyway, but still handy to see what’s been booted from Google’s index.
• Google backlinks (Google Icon) – when you’re familiar with what Google displays to the link: operator this metric can become useful.
• Yahoo (Yahoo! icon) – Sadly soon to die a death, but Site Explorer is a great backlinks tool.
• Majestic SEO – from a pure SEO perspective the number of unique linking domains is a really important factor to consider. It’s worth noting that this is the “Historic” index domain count, and some of these links may no longer be live.

How To Use The Data

I’ll admit that I do use PageRank as an initial indicator to stack-rank domains. My next metric is almost always backlinks, and I check the Google and MajesticSEO link counts to get an idea which domains warrant further research. You can quickly check the data behind each metric by clicking on any value, and being logged into your MajesticSEO account will help you pull more valuable data with a single click (I’m very fond of their Site Explorer tool for quick reccies).

Advanced Features

The basic search and results pages probably wont knock you off your feet, but I think you’ll like the advanced search features of Domainface:

The advanced features allow you to slice-and-dice through results and very quickly find domains that fit your parameters. Some of most useful filters are:

• Domain Name Filters – I like to use “Must contain ANY of” to run and save related keyword searches, but you’ve got virtually every type of text modifier at your disposal. Dictionary and language search is in development currently.
• Directories, Indexes and Backlinks – the two controls I generally use are PageRank and “PageRank must be validated”. With PageRank you can quickly search for high PR domains by simply setting this at your minimum PR and leaving all other filters empty. You can also set sources to further filter high PR domains by auction house etc. The PageRank validation is a handy filter that allows you to show only domains whose PageRank didn’t pass through a redirect. Again, handy to avoid valueless domains.
• Sources & Categories – these controls let you filter by auction house and sale type. There’s a lot of power in both these filters, and you should make use to track down real gems others may never find. I’ll cover each below.
• Sale Type (“Only list domains that are:”) – here you can select what types of sales you want to view in your results. If I’m interested in domains for SEO I generally filter out “No longer registered”. There’s debate over whether Google resets dropped domains, and while I have a feeling not all are dropped domains are reset, I think it’s probably dependent on content amongst other things. You can also filter out “Privately for sale” if you’re only looking for non-renewed domains.
• Auction House (“Only list domains available from:”) – this control allows you to filter by auction house, and where you shop will determine what type of auction you’ll walk into. GoDaddy is probably the best place to start out as you can pick up non-renewed domains for dollars. Snapnames, Namejet and Pool also sell non-renewed inventory but their baseline prices are all higher. Sedo and Flippa (great site to pick up fully developed and money-making sites) both carry inventory for sale rather than non-renewed inventory.
• TLD )”Only list domains ending with:”) – everyone has their own opinions, likes and dislikes. I prefer to go looking for .com, but you can easily filter by your own wants or needs.

When you put these features together you have a very powerful tool at your disposal. My focus is primarily on domain SEO metrics, and you can see that Domainface is built with many SEO metrics in mind. It gets better though…

Saved Searches and Alerts

You can save your searches, so once you’ve set up a search query that pans the gold from the dirt you can save that search for later visits. You can also set up alerts so Domainface will send you a nice list of new domains it finds that match your search. This is a super tool for keeping an eye on things without having to dive in.

Auto Bidding

Here’s where you get a serious uplift. Finding domains is the first battle, but securing them constitutes winning the war. How you bid and counter-bid will often determine your success, and one of the big mistakes people make is showing their hand too early. Basically if you bid on a domain you’re raising a flag to other domainers that you see value, so the best bidders will always wait until the last moments of the auction to avoid flagging others. Domainface offers an auto-bidding tool that will swoop in at the dying moments to place your bids. The bad news is I haven’t tried this out, so I cant really say how well it works. Here’s a screen from the Domainface site:

Try Before You Buy

Domainface offer a free 7-day trial, and it’s well worth a test-drive. It’s definitely the best domain research tool I’ve found, and probably a must-have application if you start getting serious about domain purchases.