Having dinner with Scott (of Namescores) we were talking about the value in expired domains. I’ve always been skeptical of them, there’s lots of conflicting information out there and a lot of it sounded too risky for me. After telling Scott my first experience with an expired domain he asked me if I’d write up a summary on it as an example.
Writing this is “tricky” because it involves one of my very best earning sites and I certainly don’t want to make some of the details public and risk having my site stats suddenly skewed or manipulated, or worse attracting attention that could lead to any sort of penalty.
So, with that in mind I’m going to disguise my site and details slightly, kind of like writers do when they “change the names of people involved” to protect their anonymity.
My website is about hamsters (it isn’t really, but that’s what we’re going with for this writing). I’ve had it for over 5 years and built it up to a respectable level of monthly traffic and revenue.
I spent a ton of time and money building content and gaining backlinks for the site in the first two years, but since then it’s basically been a passive income source for me. At most I add a posting to it once per month, more often I just update an older posting rather than adding anything new to it, and I haven’t done any link building in over 2 years.
The bottom line is my attention and interest in hamsters waned after a while, the site was earning fair revenue, and so I moved on to spending my time on other projects instead of continuing to grow my hamster site any further.
That said, traffic and earnings had been very level for the past 6 months. the occasional old post update here and there being enough to prevent traffic numbers from falling but it wasn’t growing either.
Then I came across an expired domain related to my site, it was HamsterPhotos.com (again not really, but it was a NICHEphotos.com domain), with dozens of pages still indexed in Google, and a pretty clean history. Checking on Wayback Machine it seemed that someone had run a cute little site full of pictures of hamsters on it for 8 years, and then it looked like the registrar held it for 1 year with a “For Sale” lander on it before letting it drop into the wild.
The DA/DR were each still showing over 30 with various SEO tools, it was listed in DMOZ and even had a Wikipedia link.
I had some hesitations, the idea of using an expired domain and risking some sort of “hit” to my site worried me, but other than the domain holding that “for sale” page for the past year everything about this domain said it was a solid purchase and fit for my existing site.
So, I found a registrar offering a nice promo at the time and was able to register the domain for under $7 with the discount.
I immediately created a new page on my hamster site. I had lots of hamster pictures already available to me that had been used within the tons of postings on the site, so I simply gathered them all on this new page making a gallery of hamster images. It literally took just a few minutes.
Then I went back to the registrar and setup the 301 redirect for my new HamsterPhotos.com domain pointing the entire domain to my gallery page. I probably would have done better to make multiple pages on my hamster site so that I could setup redirects for the top pages that existed in the past on HamsterPhotos.com but I didn’t know if this was going to have any benefit at all or not so I didn’t put in that much effort, my thinking was if I got a few hundred extra visitors over the next year by investing $7 and a few minutes of time that would be great.
Well, without adding any other new content to the site and still not doing any other link building efforts, I surpassed that hope of a few hundred extra visitors in a couple of weeks.
In fact, my overall traffic saw a boost instantly, and my weekly numbers were up by about 4% just 2 weeks after purchasing HamsterPhotos.com and pointing it to my gallery page. Revenue saw a slight uptick as well but with display advertising being the primary income on the site it’s harder to gauge since CPC’s can fluctuate up and down normally.
Now 4% might not sound like much, but remember this site was doing well–if not plateaued–already, so a 4% traffic bump was significant.
Then at just over 4 weeks I noticed the traffic bump more than doubled, I was up around 10% and it wasn’t all coming to my gallery page, it was spread across my entire site, and when I dug in to the Google Search Console I realized suddenly many of the terms I ranked for were climbing in rankings.
My position in the SERPs was boosting for dozens and dozens of keywords. Lots that had been on page 2 for months or even years were now on page 1 in the 6 – 10 spots, terms that had been low on the 1st page were now top 5, and quite a few that had been in the 2nd to 5th spots were now #1 — and they were bringing in more organic visitors daily.
That one expired domain was giving me direct traffic via the backlinks it had in place and had increased the authority of my existing domain boosting tons of search rankings.
This all began with me finding the HamsterPhotos.com domain in September 2024. It’s now May of 2025 as I’m writing this and the boosts have stuck, my hamster site is once again leveled off in traffic and revenue, but it’s about 10% (give or take week to week) over where it was prior to September.
Since then I’ve purchased quite a few more expired domains, none for my hamster site as it’s so niche there’s not a lot of good related domains that drop for it, but for other sites and projects I have and I’m a converted believer, until actual data ever shows me otherwise expired domains are the best way to go.
I hope this example is helpful to anyone considering using expired domains and would appreciate reading thoughts or experiences from others in the comments here.