One Way to Find Old Domains

So you want to start up a new online venture which means you need a domain.  The bad thing about starting any new online venture is that not only are you fighting stiff competition, but also the need to get traffic to your website quickly. 

Doesn’t the prospect of avoiding any search engine sandbox sound nice?

If that is your goal an established domain with some linking history might be just what you need.

Established domains can offer faster rankings if you have carefully screened it.  The domain could offer nice relevant links if you focus on finding one in the same niche as your new venture.  If you could find a domain that was previously used and promoted in the same niche it would allow you to take advantage of that previous marketing.

The question is.  How do you find those domains?

Here is one pretty easy way to get it done fairly quickly.

Take a trip to DMOZ and navigate down to the niche you are starting your new venture in.  For my example I want to start a gallery.  So I find my way down to an appropriate category to find numerous sites already listed there. 

Now is the one part of this process which can be a little tedious, except in this case.  Click on the first link called Alcala Gallery and voila!  It is a dead link pointing to bauerart.com. 

You don’t always get this lucky this quickly.  Sometimes it can take ten or fifteen sites depending on the category until you find a dead page or one that has clearly not been updated in some time.

In our case bauerart.com is also showing a nice page rank of 2.  Not a bad start at all and a .com which is fairly brandable to boot.

The next thing to do is look into its history a little at the web archive - There we find a nice history going back to 1999 and up through the latter part of 2007.

Now we have a site and know something about its history, but what about the present? 

Let’s do a quick check into its backlinks by running it through Yahoo site explorer where we find 310 links that are highly relevant to the niche with some edu domains.  An old relevant domain with a good history and relevant backlinks is really not a bad start.  Probably a little traffic too which could be nice to build from.

Now you just need to go to Who Is and search the domain.  A quick search gives us an email address we can use to send an email and start negotiations.

I am not starting a gallery, but if you are this was just a quick demonstration and that domain was still available when I wrote this.