Every day thousands of expired domain names come back onto the market. This is due to the owner not extending their registration. The reason for non registration of domains can be for a simple a reason that the owner forgot of no longer has any interest of funds to continue with the registration of their domain.
Once failure to re-register their domain it becomes an expired domain. If you are new to expired domains then this article on expired domains will tell you all you need to know.
Now there are several reasons you may want to register an expired domain. Two good reasons to do so are that all of the current domains you have searched for are already taken. Or that the expired domain names already have a good link popularity in the search engines which means that for a time you will get lots of free traffic.
The first step to finding an expired domain is to search for it. There are several sites available that offer expired domain searches. You can find many by searching on Google. Here are a couple of expired domain search engines I have found useful, you can try Deleted Domains or DomainsBot.
Once you have found some domains that are about to expire or have just expired then you will need to back order them to give yourself a chance of getting your hands on the expired domains that you have found. Backordering a domain can be done through many of the domain registration sites, however if you want to increase your chances of getting the domain name here is what you do.
The registry for com and net names gives each registrar a limited amount of bandwidth to attempt to register an expired domain name. Each registrar has a certain amount of affiliates; some have 1 affiliate whilst others have several. To increase your chance of successfully registering the domain you want you need to backorder with a service that has a greater number of affiliates.
To find out who has the most affiliates you can look at this whois search. This is a list of affiliates for each registrar, by choosing registrars with the most affiliates this increases your chance of winning your back order. For example Pool currently has the most affiliates so registering with them will give you a better chance of succeeding than someone who went with Godaddy.
This technique by no means guarantees you will get the domain you are after, but it will improve your chances over someone else who has registered with fewer registers. However you will increase your chances of winning by having the greater amount of back orders with different registrars. This is something many people do not realise when they back order expired domains.
