How Buying Expired Domains with Traffic Can Boost Your Google Rankings
Everybody wants more visitors to their website because traffic directly impacts business. Some of those visitors will eventually become customers.
One simple strategy is using expired domains with traffic. This method can bring you long-term, relevant visitors at a very low cost.
For example, I’ve been getting around 100 unique visitors every month by buying just one expired domain with traffic. It cost me only $36 for a whole year.
Why does this work?
Expired domains often already have backlinks from trusted websites like Forbes or Wikipedia. The previous owners promoted them through articles, blogs, and videos. People still find those old links and click them.
When you buy an expired domain, you can redirect its traffic straight to your own site. This not only brings visitors but also helps with faster page indexing and better Google rankings.
So, if you find an expired domain that still gets traffic, it can become a low-cost, long-term source of visitors for your business.
Getting new visitors to your site boost your Google Rankings
1. Better user engagement on the website
People who come to your site from expired domains might read some text, click links, copy content, or share your pages. Google notices these actions. The more users interact, the better it is for your site. Good engagement shows your content is useful, which helps your website’s SEO and Google ranking.
2. Increase Bounce Rate
When visitors stay on your site for a long time, it improves one of the main metrics called bounce rate. Bounce rate shows how quickly users leave your site after visiting. Your main goal is to keep users on your website as long as possible. Buying expired domains is good for this because they can bring relevant traffic quickly and cheaply.
3. More backlinks, shares and cites
If your content is useful, some visitors might share it with their friends or coworkers. This will bring new visitors.
Also, quality expired domains often have a lot of backlinks, which can bring relevant traffic.
If new visitors leave right away, it won’t help and could even hurt your SEO. It’s more about the quality of traffic than just the numbers.
Relevant traffic is crucial for your website
If your traffic is not relevant, visitors will see your site is not what they want and leave fast.
This hurts two key metrics: Bounce Rate and Visit Duration. Both can affect your Google ranking.
You should always try to make these numbers better.
Bounce Rate shows how many people leave after viewing just one page.
For blogs, a high bounce rate is normal. People often read one post and leave.
For SaaS, tools, or landing pages, aim for less than 60%.
Average Visit Duration shows how long people stay on your site.
If your site is a simple tool or info page, 45 seconds is okay.
If it has more content, you want visitors to stay longer.
So, traffic from expired domains must be relevant.
How to find expired domains with relevant traffic
To find domains with traffic and backlinks, you can use dropped domain platforms, expired domain services, or domain auctions. I personally prefer using GoneDomains expired domains service, because it only crawls high-authority, high-traffic websites like Forbes, Medium, and Product Hunt.
This means it offers high-quality dropped domains with solid backlinks that have a strong chance of still getting traffic. Plus, GoneDomains has helpful filters and data tools that make it easy to find the right domains in just a few clicks.
Also it has AI tips, like “Get appraisal” which help to get domain appraisal, understand it value, business potential and in what kind of business domain can be used and so on. Very useful feature.
When you find a domain you like, the next step is to check its backlinks. The backlinks should be related to your niche—this ensures the traffic is relevant and helps improve key metrics like Bounce Rate and Average Visit Duration.
Improving these metrics has a positive impact on your overall SEO, including faster indexing and better search rankings.
You can use free backlink checker by Ahrefs.
Setting up a right 301 redirect
After when you find liked and suitable domains, you need to buy them and setting up a 301 redirect to your main domain.
It did the same way but in different section in depends of your registrar, I use Cloudflare free redirect feature.
In the URL https://gone.domains?ref=expiredomains.today, the part ?ref=expiredomains.today is called a URL parameter.
So this URL is being used for referral tracking.
It tells the website analytics that the visitor came from expiredomains.today
This is useful for:
- Tracking where traffic is coming from
- Analyzing which marketing channels are working
This parameter is very important for analytics and for keeping track of domains with irrelevant traffic
Regularly check expired domain traffic
Check your domain’s traffic for relevance once a month. If you notice that a traffic source has a very low visit duration (less than 1 minute), it can negatively affect your SEO.
You should identify and remove redirects from these low-quality traffic sources to your main site. Otherwise, they can hurt your SEO and impact your business in the long run.
Calculation how much it cost
It cost me just $36 to buy a bunch of expired domains with traffic for one year.
They bring me 100 visitors per month, or 1,200 per year.
At just $0.03 per visitor, it’s very cost-effective, especially when the traffic is real, organic-looking, and relevant.
Most legitimate paid traffic options are more expensive, unless you’re really good at ad targeting or finding underpriced channels.
