How to Buy Expired Domains: A Worked Example, Not a Checklist
Most guides to this give you a list of things to check and leave you to figure out what a good answer looks like. We would rather show you one domain, all the way through, with the numbers pulled today instead of screenshotted once and left to go stale.
The domain is kellycanovaphotos.com. It is not a great buy. We picked it because its numbers are public, repeatable, and printed in the guide we sell, so you can check every claim on this page against the source data yourself rather than trusting us.
Where a candidate comes from
You can generate candidates two ways. The slow way is to watch domain drop lists and pull names by hand, one auction at a time, most of them worthless. Most people quit here. The fast way is to start from a list somebody has already screened, which is what our €23 file does with 3,412 domains that survived 15 checks, and 45% of what came in did not. Either way, screening starts the same instant: does anything real link to this name at all.
Count the referring domains
kellycanovaphotos.com carries 163 qualified referring domains, checked on 2026-09-07. That clears our floor of 20 by a wide margin, so there is something here worth a closer look; a domain below that line would already be finished.
Read who is linking, not just how many
A count on its own cannot tell a real audience from a link farm that traded mentions with itself. Pull the actual list from the free checker before you spend another minute on a candidate; if it is dominated by one network of unrelated spam sites, the count you liked a moment ago stops meaning anything.
Confirm it is available right now
kellycanovaphotos.com is unregistered as of 2026-09-07, checked live rather than screenshotted once. Registration status can change within a day, so this is the step to redo immediately before you bid, not the morning after.
Check what it actually was
This is the step a referring-domain count cannot do for you at any price. Pull the archived pages and read what the site used to be: a working business that earned its links honestly, or a farm that bought them. This is the single most common reason a domain with a healthy count still turns out to be a bad buy.
Decide against the median, not the headline number
Weigh the count against what a typical qualifying domain actually carries, not against the outlier story that got you into this in the first place. A domain sitting comfortably above the middle of the pack, with a clean history, beats a huge count riding on a link farm every time.
What the free tool showed, and what it left unanswered
Run kellycanovaphotos.com through the checker below and you get exactly what steps one and two above describe: a count and a list, computed from the public Common Crawl web graph, no account required. What you do not get is step four. A referring-domain count is a shape, not a story; it cannot tell you whether a site earned its links selling something useful or renting them from a network that got deindexed. That gap is the entire reason the file next to this tool exists: 3,412 candidates, each with the archived page attached, so the "what was this" question is already answered instead of left for you to dig up one Wayback Machine query at a time.
What a paid data source charges for the count alone
| Who | What you get | Price | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ahrefs (Lite) | Backlink and referring-domain data in Site Explorer | €119.00/month | source, read 2026-09-07 |
| WhoisFreaks (50k credits) | WHOIS, DNS, SSL and ASN lookups - explicitly NOT backlink data | $75.00/month | source, read 2026-09-07 |
| Majestic (Lite) | Referring domains and referring IPs, Fresh Index (last 120 days) | €46.99/month | source, read 2026-09-07 |
Every price above was read on the vendor's own pricing page on the date shown, not copied from a summary somewhere else. That is the same rule `attrezzi_confronto` enforces on the tool pages, because a price without a source and a date is exactly how a wrong number (WhoisFreaks at "$59 a month") stayed on a page we sell for weeks.
Questions
Is a domain with more referring domains always the better buy?
No, and this is the mistake the worked example above is built to head off. A smaller count from a genuine niche of related sites is worth more than a large count inflated by a link farm. Read the list before you compare the number.
How fast does registration status change?
Fast enough that a count you screened last week can point at a name somebody already registered again. That is why the registration check is step three and not step one: no point confirming availability on a hundred names before you have narrowed the list down to the handful worth wanting.
Do you sell the domains themselves?
No. We sell a file that lists 3,412 already-screened candidates with their history attached, and you register the ones you want through a normal registrar. We take no cut of that purchase and have no relationship with any registrar.
We sell a €23 file on this: The Expired Domain Field Guide: 15 Checks That Rejected 45%. This page does not need you to buy it. Everything above works whether you do or not, and the file exists for the one thing the free numbers cannot tell you: what a domain was before it expired, not just how many places still point at it.
More guides
Same rule as the tools next to them: every number sourced, dated, and rechecked on a schedule instead of frozen the day it was written.