Frequently Asked Questions

  What is DomCop?
DomCop is an expired domain search tool. You can find domains based on Ahrefs Domain Rating, Moz Rank, Domain Authority, Majestic Trust & Citation Flows, Similar Web Rank, Alexa Rank, SEMRush Rank and Traffic Data, Domain Scope Traffic data and Social Statistics.  
We import data from domain auctions, pending delete, public drop lists and our private drop lists and find relevant information for those domains. We check whether the domains have been banned by google and show up in the google search. We also gather metrics from other third parties like Ahrefs, Moz, Majestic, SEMRush, Similar Web, Compete, SEMrush, Domain Scope and Social Networks to validate the domains.

Apart from pending delete and auction domains, we also have a personal expired domains crawler that lets you scrape websites in bulk to find domains that are available to be registered and have amazing backlinks.  
SEOs purchase expired domains for their backlinks. Everyday 200,000+ domains expire. It is virtually impossible for any SEO to go through the backlinks for each of these domains. What DomCop does for you, is show you a list of all these domains along with important metrics for every domain. These metrics will help you reduce the size of the daily list from 200,000+ to just a handful of the very best domains. What would take you hours, now will take you literally seconds to do.

Each of the third party that we integrate with (e.g. Ahrefs, Moz, Majestic), charge for getting the metrics for a domain. DomCop uses their API to get this data for you and you therefore do not need to purchase a separate account to get these metrics. As new players enter the market, we integrate with them so that you always have the best and most comprehensive set of metrics to help you decide which domain to buy, spending as little time and money as you can.  
Moz is an independent company that comes out with metrics for a large number of websites. The various metrics are given below
MozRank: MozRank is akin to Page Rank. It's a link popularity score - which goes from 1 to 10. Domains/Pages earn MozRank based on the quality and number of other pages that link to them. An average MozRank is about 3.
MozRank (www): This is the MozRank for the www subdomain
Combined MozRank: This is the MozRank of all the pages on the root domain combined into a single value
Combined MozRank (www): This is the MozRank of all the pages on the www subdomain combined into a single value
MozTrust: MozTrust is Moz's global link trust score, that measures the value of links recieved from trustworthy websites. It goes from 1 to 10.
MozTrust (www): This is the MozTrust for the www subdomain
Domain Authority: DA shows how well a domain will perform in search engine rankings. It can be used to compare one domain to another and is therefore a better metric than MozRank when valuing domains. The metric is scored from 0 to 100. Because DA is difficult to directly influence it is hard (not impossible) for scammers to fake a high DA.
Page Authority: PA shows how well a given webpage will perform in search engine rankings. Since PA predicts the probability for a single page, it is not as useful as DA when it comes to expired domains. Like DA this metric is scored from 0 to 100.
Total Domains: This is the total number of domains with back links to the root domain
Total Domains (www): This is the total number of domains with back links to the www subdomain
Total Back Links: This is the total number of back links that Moz has found.
Total Back Links (E): This is the total number of back links which pass equity to the root domain.
Total Back Links to Sub Domain(E): This is the total number of back links which pass equity to the www subdomain.
 
Majestic has one of the largest public indexes of the entire web (42 billion +). The metrics given for the root and the www subdomain are different. At DomCop, we figure out if the original website was run at the root or at the www subdomain and accordingly give the correct metrics.
The various metrics are given below
Trust Flow: TF is a metric between 0 and 100 that measures the trustworthiness of the domain based on which websites link to the domain. If the links come from trustworthy sites then this number goes up deeming this domain as trustworthy.
Citation Flow: CF is a metric between 0 and 100 that predicts the value of the domain based on the back links to it. This could be used to compare the back link data between different domains. This would be similar to page rank and Moz domain authority.
Trust Flow/ Citation Flow ratio: The TF/CF ratio is one of the most important numbers to look at. Scammy domains tend to have a very low TF/CF ratio as it is very easy to manipulate CF, while not that easy to manipulate TF. Hence, a domain with a TF/CF that is less than 0.8 should simply be ignored.
Links: Total number of back links to the root or www subdomain.
Domains: Total number of referring domains with back links to the root or www subdomain.
IPs: Total number of unique IPs that have domains with back links to the root or www subdomain.
Subnets: Total number of unique subnets that have domains with back links to the root or www subdomain.
EDU Domains: Total number of EDU domains with back links to the root or www subdomain.
EDU Links: Total number of back links from EDU domains to the root or www subdomain.
GOV Domains: Total number of GOV domains with back links to the root or www subdomain.
GOV Links: Total number of back links from GOV domains to the root or www subdomain.
Topical Trust Flow: Majestic shows the categories for the back links to a domain with the trust flow passed. This is very useful in figuring out what industry the domain lies in based on its back links.
 
SEMrush is an independent company that shows which keywords that the domains rank for, the total number of searches done per month, cost of traffic. The various metrics are given below
SEMrush Rank: This is a rank of all the domains in the internet based on total searches that the domain ranks for
Keywords: The total keywords that the domain ranks for
Monthly Organic Traffic: Total traffic coming to the domain every month based on the SERP rankings
Cost of traffic: The total cost of traffic coming to the website - this is based on total traffic, cost per click for the keyword and location of the user.
Keyword data: We list the top 5 keywords that the domain ranks for along with it's position, the search volume, cpc, competition and the url that ranks for that keyword.  
Alexa Internet Inc provides alexa rankings for websites based on the data collected from it's toolbars. Since the data is collected from a sample subset of the population that has the toolbar installed, it may not be very accurate. The various metrics are given below
Alexa Rank: This is the current rank that the domain has based on the last three months of data
Top Rank: This is the highest rank that the domain has ever reached
Rank Delta: This is the change in rank from the previous rank (from three months ago). A negative number means that the rank has increased from before.
Country Rank: If the domain is popular in a particular country then Alexa gives the ranking for the domain in that country
Back Links: The total back links to the domain based on Alexa data
Address Information: The registration address and details
Related Sites: List of sites related to the domain  
None of the metrics are infallible. They can all be manipulated. However, it's tougher to manipulate them all. So the ideal way is to use all the metrics together. If a domain has a high Trust Flo, but a low Domain Authority, you should research some more into it. The same goes with Ahrefs Domain Rating. The SEMrush Rank & SimilarWeb metrics should be used only for domains with organic traffic.  
Sometimes our verification email ends up in your Junk or Spam folder. If you do not find it here, it means that the email was blocked by your mail server. In this case please email us at support@domcop.com and we will manually verify your account. You could also add our email address to your contact list so that future emails are not blocked.  
We do not sell domains. The domains in our list are available to purchase either via an auction or can be registered directly through a domain registrar. However, no purchases happen on DomCop.  
The Copy button uses Flash for it's functionality. Recently, browsers have been disabling flash on websites by default. You will therefore need to enable Flash for DomCop in your browser.

To do this, click on the "secure" link next to the SSL lock icon. A popup will open. Here next to "Flash" select "Always allow on this site".

Once done, refresh the page and the Copy button will start working again.  
In case the verification link is not working, you can simply reply back to the email or email us at support@domcop.com  
Domain metrics are updated multiple times in the life-cycle of a domain. We currently update the metrics of every domain at the following times.
  • - When the domain is imported into our system
  • - Ahrefs, Majestic, Moz & Alexa metrics are updated once every 7 days
Ahrefs, Majestic and Moz metrics change on a daily basis. Due to this there may be a mismatch that you see between the metrics shown on the DomCop website and the metrics shown on the Majestic provider's website. However, for most domains these numbers should not change much unless the domain rapidly loses it's backlinks

 
  How do I search for domains?

DomCop has Three types of searches - Common Search, Simple Search and Advanced Search

Using the Common Search:
This is the search used by those who are new to finding expired domains. We have created a set of common searches that we show to you via a drop down list. If you are unsure of what metrics to search on, this would be a good place to start. Common searches are searches for finding domains with high trust flow, high domain authority, etc
When you want more control over your searches you can use the Simple or the Advanced Search.

Using the Simple Search:
The Simple search allows you to search on the most commonly searched on metrics. Although it is simple to use, it is a powerful search tool. You can use sliders to search for a range on various metrics

  • - Moz Rank, Domain and Page Authority
  • - Majestic Citation and Trust Flows
  • - Domain Age
  • - Domain Length
  • - Moz and Majestic Links
  • - Open Page Rank
  • - Time to expire or Time since expiration
  • - Domain Price
  • - Domain Industry
  • - Listing Type
  • - Domain Extensions
  • - Keyword and Pattern Search
  • - Domain Source
  • - Miscellaneous Options

Using the Advanced Search:
Like its name, the Advanced search lets advanced users search on every possible metrics that we offer. These include

  • - Domain Age
  • - Domain Bids
  • - Domain Price
  • - Domain Length
  • - All Moz Metrics
  • - All Majestic Metrics
  • - All Alexa Metrics
  • - All SEMrush Metrics
  • - All Social Metrics
  • - Open Page Rank
  • - Time to expire or Time since expiration
  • - Domain Industry
  • - Listing Type
  • - Domain Extensions
  • - Keyword and Pattern Search
  • - Domain Source
  • - Miscellaneous Options

Selecting Type of Domain Listing:
If you are interested in only seeing domains that have expired or domains that are going to expire or domains on auctions or premium buy now domains, you need to set the "Listing Type" search metric.

  • - Auction: Domain is on Auction at a website
  • - Pending Delete: The domain is either going to expire (Expiring Section) or has already expired (Expired/Archived Section)
  • - Buy Now: The domain can be purchased immediately from the Seller
  • - Closeout/BargainBin: These are specific to GoDaddy. They are all domains that can be immediately purchased for between $5 to $10
  • - Offer/Counter Offer: These are domains that the sellers have put up for sales, but at not obligated to sell

 

You can save your searches so that you do not need to change the search parameters more than once

To create a saved search, first execute a Simple or Advanced search within any of the three lists. Click the "Save Search" button. Enter a "Name" for the search and select whether you would like a daily email with a list of domains that match the search parameters. Saved searches show up in the drop down at the top of your page. To execute any Saved Search, you simply select it from the drop down.

Save Search

 
To modify a search, you first need to select it from the "Saved Searches" drop down list at the top of the page. Once selected the Modify and Delete links will be shown next to the drop down.  
Email notifications are tied into Saved Searches. When you save/modify a search you have an option for "Daily Email". Setting this to Yes will enable a daily email to be sent to your email address with domains matching the search criteria. To avoid duplication of domains, only domains that have 2 days before the expiry date (or before auction ends) are matched and for this reason this option is only enabled for searches saved in the Expiring section.  

You can monitor domains by adding them to your watchlist. To save a domain to your WatchList you can click on the or select it and click the "Add to watchlist" button.

These domains will show up in your watchlist and will be there as long as you want them

Reasons to use the watchlist:

  • - Quick access to domains you have bid on or interested in buying
  • - Domains that are no longer available (of after auction ends) are removed from the DomCop lists. Saving this to your watchlist means that these domains and their metrics are accessible by you

    •  
Please visit our help page on exporting data.  
You can export upto 1000 records in a single export file. There are no limitations to the number of files that you can export in a day.  
You can customize the columns that you see in the data table. Please visit our help page for instructions on setting this up.  
Everyday we process between 250,000 to 300,000 domains. You can check the total domains in our system here  
We have three separate age metrics for every domain

1. Domain Age (WayBack) - This is the age taken from the Wayback Archive. The Wayback Archive gives the age based on when it first crawled any pages on the domain. From an SEO perspective, the age from Wayback Archive is more relevant since its more likely that the search engines would use a similar measure.

2. Domain Age (WhoIs) - This is the age taken from the WhoIs data. The WhoIs data gives the age based on when the domain was initially purchased. If a domain drops and is then registered, the WhoIs date will reset.

3. Website Age (WayBack) - This is the age of the last website that was on the domain. To understand this let us take an example of a domain that was registered in 2005 and had a website running on it till 2010. Then the domain was abandoned till 2012, when a new website was placed on the domain till 2015 (present time). Our systems will find out the break of 2 years and will therefore calculate the Website Age to be only 3 years (While the Domain Age shown above will be 5 years).  
We flag a domain if any of the three conditions are met
1. No pages are indexed by Google. This is checked by issuing a "site: domain" query to Google and flagged if no results are returned
2. Google has no info on the site. This is checked by issuing a "info: domain" query to Google and flagged if no results come up or if a different domain shows up.
3. If the Moz Spam Score is greater than 5.
 
The domains get checked for availability at the following times -
1. When the domain enters the system.
2. When the domain drops.
3. Two days after the domain drops.
4. Six days after the domain drops.
5. 30 days after the domain drops. (before it gets moved to the archive)
6. Once in the archive, the availability is checked every 10 days. (Due to the size of the archive)  
The different types of Listing Types are given below
Auction: These are expiring domain that are currently in auctions.
Closeout domain: These are auctions specific to GoDaddy that have not received any bids till the end of the Auction. These domains go through a 5 day reverse auction process where they can be purchased from $10 to $5.
Buy Now: These are domains that can be purchased immediately for a price set by the Seller.
Pending Delete: These are domains that will be Expiring soon.
Bargain Bin: These are domains that have gone through the GoDaddy closeout process and are currently available for $5.
Offer/Counter Offer: These are domains in Auctions that are not expiring domains. The seller has an option to not sell the domain unless he receives a bid he wants.
 
There are three different ways in which you can hide certain domains
  1. In the My Account page you have a setting called “Hide domains in my watchlist from showing in the other lists”. Selecting this checkbox will hide all the domains that have been added to your watchlist from appearing in any of the domain lists
  2. In the My Account page you also have a text box called “Hide domains in my watchlist from showing in the other lists”. Here, you can enter the “negative keywords” i.e. keywords that the domains in your list should not match.
  3. and Finally, under each domain you will notice a new blue colored cross icon – this can be used to exclude single domains from the domain lists. These excluded domains can be found at the page “My Excluded Domains“, where they can be included back.
 
To find available domains you can select the "Available" checkbox in the Advanced Search box. Note that the Archived Section only contains available domains and therefore the "Available" option does not appear when you search in it.  
Majestic metrics change everyday as Majestic crawls websites. However, we only refresh the Majestic metrics once a week (after the first time that the domains are added to the system). Due to this some Majestic metrics might be off. However, metrics of good domains should not change very often - so if you find a domain that shows different metrics then its likely that the metrics for the domain are volatile (sudden loss of influx of links) and should be avoided.  
The Archive section has old metrics because we re-check all the metrics only once in two months, once the domain has entered the archive. Most domains that enter the archive have their metrics checked one day before entry. There are two reasons that we re-check the metrics only once in two months for the domains in the archive.
  1. Showing the old metrics for a domain gives you a snapshot of the back link profile for the domain at the time of expiration. This is valuable when you can compare it with the current metrics as it would give you an idea of how well the metrics would hold up.
  2. Due to limited resources and API calls, it makes sense to only recheck the metrics once in two months
 
The searches may run slow in the following cases
  • You have mulitple keywords in the search box, especially negative keywords. If so, try removing these keywords and see if the searches are faster.
  • You have too many keywords in the "Exclude Keywords" box in the My Accounts page. If so, you can either disable them for specific lists or remove some to speed up the search.
If the searches are still too slow, then it could be an issue with our server or your browser. Please email us at support@domcop.com and we would be happy to fix the issues.  
Some domains are put on auction by the sellers. These domains are not expired and therefore may have websites that show up when you access them. If you would only like to see the expiring domains, you can do so by unchecking the following from the "Listing Types" search box
  • Auction
  • Buy Now
  • Offer/Counter Offer
 
To hide the domains with penalty - you can check the checkbox "Google Indexed" in the Advanced Search screen.  
A lot of domains on auction are set for rather high prices. You can simply set an upper limit for the Price to filter these domains out.  
  What are the plans you offer?
We currently offer three plans - Newbie plan, Power plan and the Guru plan

The Newbie plan has access to the Expiring section
The Power plan has access to the Expiring, Expired and Archived sections
The Guru plan has access to the Expiring, Expired and Archived sections and has access to the Personal expired domains crawler.  
Go ahead and purchase the plan you want to upgrade or downgrade to and purchase it. When done, email us at support@domcop.com and we will cancel the old subscription and give a pro-rated refund for it  
Sorry - we do not have a free trial. We do have a free 2 day money back guarantee. After purchasing a plan, you can email us within 2 days for a complete money back guarantee  
You can pay using your credit/debit card. We use FastSpring to manage your subscriptions.  
  What do the different auction types mean (auction, closeout, offer/counter offer)?
The different types of auction at Godaddy are given below
10 day public auction: These are the normal expiring domain auctions. The domains go through a 10 day bidding process. The highest bid at the end of it wins.
Closeout domain: If a public auction has not received any bids over the 10 days, it then goes through a 5 day reverse auction process. At this point this is a closeout domain and you can purchase it at any time at a fixed price. The domain starts at $11 for 24 hours. If no one has purchased it, it then falls to $10 for the next 24 hours and so on till it is $5.
Offer/Counter Offer: These are domains that have been listed by the sellers for auction. These are not expiring domains - therefore quite a few of these domains never end up being sold. The seller has an option to not sell unless he receives a bid he wants.
Offer/Counter Offer with a Buy Now: These are offer/counter offer domains where the seller has selected a price at which he has promised to sell the domain. These can be directly purchased by paying the Buy Now price or can be bid upon.  
Some domain auctions are continuously run. These are generally offer / counter offer domain auctions. Since the maximum length of any auction can be 3 months maximum (i.e. 90 days), when the auction expires they are reset to 89 days. Due to a lag in the time between the auction being reset and our servers being updated with the information, you may see an auction that is to expire within a few hours - but the auction has actually been reset to a new three month cycle.  
  I have more questions. Whom can I ask?
You can email us via the Contact page or email us directly at support@domcop.com  
We are glad you asked :)
If you love our software, We would love some free publicity. Please do share the website over twitter and/or facebook.  
We do not have an affiliate program yet. However, we do plan to have this setup soon. If you are interested in being an affiliate please do send us an email at support@domcop.com and we will let you know when the program is live.  
DomCop Customer - Glen Allsopp, Gaps.com

I've tried a number of expired domain finding tools and services but the support from DomCop is second to none. It's in my top two of tools to use, and the best I've used for crawling.

Glen Allsopp, Gaps.com
United States

Start Building your PBN Now!

Find expired domain names with high Moz Domain Authority & Majestic Trust Flow

Buy Expired Domains Now