Should I Buy A Brand New Domain Or A “Second Hand” One?

Interesting question, isn’t it ?

Generally speaking, you need a domain to put your blog, sales page, message, or whatever on the internet, don’t you?

Of course you can use a variety of free web 2.0 style websites such as blogger.com, squidoo.com, hubpages.com, etc but to have full control over your content, you really need your own domain.

So what do you do?  You go out and purchase a brand new domain, setup your webhosting, and you’re good to go.  This is pretty well all the common advice given to you, and in fact many people would not realize there is another alternative.

You follow all the “right” ways of doing things, you don’t go too hard on linking, because you don’t want to trigger the “Google Sandbox” where your website does not even appear in the search engine result pages (SERP’s) for sometimes up to a period of months.

And, even if you do avoid the sandbox, you combat Google’s “new domain slowdown” effect where you may not rank well no matter what you do for a few months anyway.

Opinions vary on whether the Google Sandbox, or the “new domain slowdown” (my term) actually exist, in our experience we have seen both happen to various degrees.

But essentially, really what I am saying is you start from scratch, with a brand new domain, no page rank, and no backlinks (links from other websites to yours).

Did you know there is another option?

Buying a “second hand” domain, or an aged domain as they are referred to.

This is a domain that has been registered by another person, and for whatever reason, they have decided not to renew it.  The domain registrars (Godaddy, etc) offer these “soon to expire” domains for sale to people like you and me (if you know where to look).

There is a complete business in buying and selling these domains, and buying and selling aged domains often go for staggering amounts of money, but I am not talking about the business of buying and selling domains here.

I’m talking about buying aged domains to be useful from an Internet Marketing angle. e.g. Great rankings in the search engines, etc.

At the cheaper end, you can buy a “soon to expire” domain for around $5 (plus the normal cost of 12 months registration, around $10).   These websites offer you simple tools to search to find bargains, but you have no easy way to find the age of the domain, or if it has any existing page rank. In other words the searches are not what I call “Internet Marketers” searches, they dont really give us the level of detail we need.

Why would you want to buy an aged domain?

Well the advantages to an aged domain are the disadvantages of a new domain.

You get no problems with the Google Sandbox because the domain itself is not a new one, and no “new domain slowdown” for that matter either, for the same reason.

But the positives are many and include: -

* Often you get a headstart with your linking strategy, because sometimes the domains have backlinks already (from the previous owners efforts).

* Sometimes the aged domains come with instant traffic!

* Sometimes the aged domains have existing pagerank (4+) !

Yes for $5, can you believe it?

And, usually, in our experience the page rank sticks, I can tell you this for sure, since we been actively buying and using aged domains for the past 8-9 months.

Want to know the other great thing?

In general these aged domains (particularly if you find an domain 5+6 years of age or older) rank better and quicker than a brand new domain. Now imagine how that would make a difference in your Internet Marketing efforts?

Just by spending a few minutes selecting an aged domain, you can put yourself in a better position that competitors who don’t know about aged domains.  This could make all the difference in getting you ranking quicker in the SERP’s.

So hopefully now, I’ve sold you on the idea of Aged domains, the next problem you will face is not where to buy them from (Godaddy is a good start) but how to pick the good from the bad.

Godaddy does not show you the age of the domain, or the page rank, etc so you have to manually sift through thousands of domains to find the gems (and they are there).

So you could select a domain, paste it into a site like dnscoop.com which will give you this information.  That’s what we initially did.

After about my 20th domain, being a geek, I setup a simple “cheap and nasty” script that worked for me, where it grabbed these cheap domains and one by one went through them finding the age and page rank.

Armed with this information, I would go out and purchase a domain according to the criteria I had set.

Since them, we have grabbed and used hundreds of domains like this, including a domain that was 9 years old, and another that had a page rank of 5 ! For $5 (plus registration).

These cheap domains (Godaddy refers to them as closeouts) seem to be avoided by most of the “buy and sell” domain marketers, so it makes it easy pickings to find a suitable domain.  And for only $5!

Recently, we took my “cheap and nasty” script and re-engineered it and added a new spiffy interface that allows you to quickly find aged domains without being a geek.

You can search by keywords, price, etc to find a range of aged domains that have your keywords in them (These rank better, as you will find out in our New Web Traffic & Marketing Formula or via our numerous videos, etc on this site.

Once you have a list of domains your interested in, just click a button on the website and get the page rank and age shown to you (note that this takes a little time to generate, because it has to do all sorta of fancy geek stuff to get this data, but it does work!).

After finding the domain you want, just click it, and you can buy it instantly direct from the registrar.  How easy is that?

Keep in mind with buying aged domains, that it’s not an instant process as it is for new domains.  It can take a few days for the domain to get transferred over to you.  This is normal, as there is a period of time between when you buy and before ownership is transferred over to you where the original owner can pay a large fee to get their domain back.

I’ve actually never had this happen to me, but it is possible.  In any event there are hundreds or thousands of new domains becoming available each day.  Just make sure you choose the $5 ones that are “buy now” domains, and not domains where you are just placing a bid or an offer.

The FREE website domain service we have developed makes this simple for you, just checkout

Aged Domain Finder

Give it a go, we would love to hear your comments on it.

Shortly we will be posting details of our aged domain strategy for you to use in conjunction with aged domains.  Only full members of the Page One Total Control Formula will get the full strategy but we will be giving away parts of it to subscribers of our email.

If you would like to receive a copy of this, subscribe to our mailing list here.  We promise no spam, selling of your email address, or general Internet Marketing bad stuff!

Enjoy the new website!

Cheers

Tim