How to find Expired Domains and Backlinks with Traffic

Avatar of Alex Dro, SEO article writer and solo entrepreneur
Written by
|
Last updated 2025-04-30

Expired domains play a big role in online promotion. Some of them have authority, backlinks, and even real web traffic. These SEO metrics help your site get higher in Google search results.

Just find expired domains with traffic and redirect them to your site.

Sounds easy, right? But in reality, there are a few problems.

Like how to check expired domain traffic, or how to pick expired domains with traffic that actually help your SEO.

Let me explain everything step by step.

How web traffic improves Google Ranking

But only if the traffic is relevant to your niche. I’ve seen cases where people bought random expired domains with traffic and redirected them to their main site — only to see their rankings drop.

For example, if your website is about tech, but the expired domain is about cooking or cars, that traffic doesn’t help.

In fact, it can hurt your SEO.

Dashboard with SEO behavior metrics like bounce rate and visit durationBecause of SEO behavior metrics like:

  • Average visit duration. The time users stay on your website. The longer they stay, the better.
  • Bounce rate. How quickly people leave your site. Lower is better.

If people land on your site and leave in 5 seconds, Google thinks your site is not useful. That’s why you need relevant expired domain traffic.

Backlinks are like votes. If someone likes your content, they link to it. This tells Google your content is useful.

So when an expired domain has backlinks, and you redirect it to your site, part of that authority passes to you.

But make sure the backlinks come from trusted and related websites. If the backlinks come from spammy sites or adult content pages, Google might punish you instead.

When you’re buying expired domains for SEO and traffic, backlinks are key.

Here are some examples of referring pages with high authority—commonly referred to as a high Domain Rating.

Better indexing with Expired Domains

Trusted backlinks also help your site get indexed faster.

When a strong website links to your page, Google crawls it more often.

This means your content shows up in search results faster.

So, when you analyze traffic of expired domains, also look at backlink sources.

How to pick the right Expired Domains with traffic

Before you buy, make sure the domain is actually valuable.

Here are steps to verify traffic of expired domains:

1. Domain Authority

The higher the authority of a site linking to you, the more SEO value (or 'link juice') it passes to your site.

How to check domain authority using free backlink checker by AhrefsYou can use free backlink checker by Ahrefs to check any domain’s authority or domain rating, as it's commonly called.

2. Backlinks

Choose domains with solid backlinks.

Avoid spammy ones.

Links should be from trusted and related websites.

How to check domain backlinks, they should be from trusted and related websites.3. Anchor Text

Check the anchor text of backlinks.

It should match your niche.

That helps Google understand your content better.

ow to check the anchor text of backlinks and expired domains

4. Domain History

Look at the content the domain had before. If it was about the same topic as your site — that’s great.

When you buy expired domains with traffic, always check the content and traffic language.

If all traffic comes from a country or language you don’t target, it might not be useful.

Use tools like WebArchive.

How to check the history and content of an expired domain to ensure it aligns with your niche

Where to find Expired Domains with real traffic

To find expired domains with relevant traffic, you can go to popular websites and manually look for outgoing links or backlinks. Then, you need to check the domain’s availability, rating, backlinks, history, and content. That can take a lot of time, yes.

But there’s an easier way. You can search for expired domains with traffic on GoneDomains.

This platform automates the biggest part of the work and saves you a lot of time and energy.

First, GoneDomains crawls high-authority, popular websites to find already expired domains. This means the expired domains it finds usually have strong and trusted backlinks the kind Google likes.

GoneDomains also has a convenient filter that helps you find high-authority expired domains with traffic in just a few clicks.

Plus, it has a built-in WebArchive feature that lets you check a domain’s history and past content, so you only get expired domains with relevant traffic.

Keep checking your traffic

After setting up redirects, don’t forget to check the results.

Here’s how to check traffic of expired domains:

  • Once a month, see if the traffic is helping your SEO.
  • If average visit duration is under 1 minute or bounce rate is too high — it’s a bad sign.
  • In that case, remove the redirect. Don’t let bad traffic hurt your main site.

The dashboard shows which traffic is not relevant and how to identify itA table with data on normal values for average visit duration on websitesSo always check expired domain traffic and also check traffic language to be sure it matches your visitors.

You may also like: