Early release of expired domains is rare

Monday, January 18, 2010, 1:06 PM
Business by John (Article #261)

The last weekend I started compiling data on how expired domain names are handled. Here are the highlights:

1. While a lot of registrars do hold onto higher quality domains, the percentage of total expired domains that scored well in my analysis (respectable in-bound links, domain uses real English words, etc) that the registrars actually held onto themselves was surprisingly low.

2. More domains made it out of the auction period than I would have expected. In fact, of those expired domains with a PageRank of three and at least one inbound link from a ranked website, about two-thirds coasted through auction without a big.

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3. Very, very few domains were released early. Of the approximately 2000 expired domains included in the analysis, only three were released within two days of their expiration.

Now this is all very preliminary. So, don't get married to any of this not-really information. But, I thought it was interesting and worth sharing.

[NOTE: Added on January 19.]

Having tweak my analysis tool quite a bit, I've determined that the quick drop rate is somewhere below five percent.

The one thing I have to say is that the people at various stages of handling the death of a thousand cuts that is an expiring domain are good at what they do. The whole system has that slightly too mysterious quality that any good racket requires. It's hard to determine when a name will drop. Notification of a genuine delete -- the last stage where the name becomes immediately available to be registered anywhere -- held onto until as late as possible.

Based on the domains that are thrown overboard early, the domain registrars know exactly how well any domain performs while in expired status. If a domain drops early, you should take that as evidence that it has nothing -- no link juice, zero visitors, not enough value to even waste the electricity to keep a "this domain may be for sale" pitch up and running on the URL.

What I'm very interested in now is seeing how the better domains (any domain with a PR greater than 3, a single inbound link, or any real traffic besides domainers) move through the pipeline and become honestly deleted.

At some point the damned things do have to drop into the public pool of domains. And even hunting for domains manually, I've found some winners. So, its not so much a cut-throat business as it is a slightly dreadful business amid a tsunami of data.

We'll see.

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Wonder where to start with your web design business?

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Thank you,
John Crawford
Pro Content and Design