How to Find Dropped Domains with Ahrefs – [ ANSWERED]

Looking for dropped domains has been in practice for most people for purposes like building a new site, a redirection, or backlinks.

It’s no more difficult to find domains that have expired or dropped. There are several online tools available that will effectively help you find the dropped domains. 

The purpose and role of the dropped domain might be familiar for a few.

On the other hand, for those who are new to the concept, dropped or expired domains are the ones that were once purchased by someone and dropped for some reason when the renewal was required. 

The dropped or expired domain is considered ready for re-allocation when it has been inactive for months. Most of these expired or dropped domains are found in great condition to have higher rankings than the newer domains.

Follow this guide and find your dropped domains with Ahrefs.

Methods to Find Dropped Domains

Finding the used and dropped domains is made easier through tools like Ahrefs. Here is how you can find the best high authority domains using Ahrefs.

Register to Ahrefs

To know whether the domain is dropped or has expired, you must first log in or sign up on the Ahrefs.com website.

You can grab a free trial for 7 days and get your job done.

Then,

The first thing you do after registering is looking for broken links through Ahrefs Site Explorer, which has thousands of external backlinks on its database. These backlinks include many broken links with 404 redirect errors.

The path to reach these links is as follows.

Site Explorer > Pages > Best by links > add 404 error as a filter

Check Domain and Page Authority (DA/PA)

Checking the health of the domain becomes crucial before you register the domain again. This can be done by determining the DA and PA of the page.

DA determines how authoritative the domain or website is, while PA evaluates how authoritative a specific page or URL is.

If you are using Ahrefs, Website SEO checker is the most helpful tool to check DA and PA.

Find Broken Links

Extracting broken links to which your authority website links becomes crucial here to find the expired domains. For this, all you need to do is the following steps. 

• Login to ahrefs.com/site-explorer
• Type the domain of authority website in the box and hit search
• Go to broken links under outgoing links
• Select the type of link – Dofollow

Exporting the Broken Links

When you see the page Export to CSV, select 'Full Export' > 'For Microsoft Excel (UTF 16)' and Start Export.

To open the broken links, you will require access to Microsoft Excel. You can open the broken links results with Excel and when you see the URLs, copy all of them with CTRL + C.

Now,

You must separate domains from URLs, and for this, you will require to go to extract-url-to-domain and paste them all into the box.

Delete the ‘Link URL’ part > check the box ‘Remove Duplicates’ > check the box ‘Convert domain to lowercase > verify you’re not a Robot > Filter.

Bulk Search the Domains

To conclude, you can seek help from Name.com and such other tools like Namebright which allows up to 5000 domains to bulk search the result of the domain.

You can simply go to;

Name.com > click on domains > click on Bulk Search Domain > paste all the domains copied from website SEO checker > hit search.

Finally, you would want to check a few things before you proceed with registering the expired domains.

• Check the DA and PA of the domains
• Check that the domains are not banned 
• Check how the original website for the domain used to look like (before it was dropped)
• Check the Spam status of domains
• Check whether Google can index it well; otherwise, there is no point. Without indexing, there can be no further ranking. If it is disabled, you can request reconsideration through the webmaster’s console.