Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Best Way to Get Great Domain Names - Part 2

Tropical storm Ernesto is drizzling down on us. There are a few heavy showers, but nothing to write home about. We thank God for that.

If you're mining old, expired domain names to use for their "reputation", you need a source. In my comments on my last post, I mentioned 1expired.com, and there are others out there that sell lists of expired domain names.

I used these for a bit, but because they place them in tables, (even though they show things like PR and backlinks), it was too hard to cut and paste them into the Domain Grave Digger.

So, somehow, (not even sure how I found this site), I came upon SeguinHost.com. Seguin is great because they offer the domain lists free, and separate them by dot com, net and org. The lists are published each day, and all you have to do is copy them right off the web page.
http://www.seguinhost.com/expired-domains-list.php

But the complete expired list is much too big for the Domain Grave Digger to handle. You'll need a file splitter to split the files into manageable chunks. For this I use the free tool called The File Splitter. After I copy and paste the entire dot com list into notepad, I'll feed that into File Splitter. I'll select "Custom" size for the output (it defaults to a floppy size), and make 20k the size of my files. That's about right.

Next, all you do is open the text files it creates, one by one, and feed them into the Domain Grave Digger. This script works well on most servers that allow PHP, but according to the creator, it has had problems on some servers. You can find the script here:
http://www.myinstantsupport.com/expired_domain.zip

I can't help you if the script does not work for you. The PHP is pretty straightforward. I did put my own Google API key in my version, but it appeared to work without modifications as well. One thing I did find is that the script won't work when archive.org is down for maintenance - and there is no error from the script. It simply says all the domain names are bad (failed).

Once I have good domain names, I check them out at iWebTool.com.

So, there you go - a great way to get nice domain names that people and companies have let expire for one reason or another.

Tuesday, August 29, 2006

The Best Way to Get Great Domain Names

I'm finishing up the last details on a family DVD I'm making from our adventure in Grand Cayman last month. The Mac is just an excellent tool for this, and iMovie makes it SO easy and fun. What we did differently this time was to use the small, digital camera to make a few AVI movies as well. Compiling them with the HD video camera makes the movie look even more like a documentary.

On the Windows PC, I am running a few Firefox browsers with a PHP script that checks for great expired domains. All you do is load in around 200 expired domain names and it does the rest. It checks to see if the domain is registered. If not, then it checks to see if there are any pages in the Internet Archive. If there are, then it makes one more check, and that's to see if there are pages indexed in Google.

If the domain name passed the test, when the script ends, it lists the names for you.

What I do further is check in archive.org to see if the domain was used as a Google AdSense Spam site. You don't want to be associated with that, so even if you see your new found name has 100 backlinks and a PR of 6, skip it. Everything linked to that name will most likely be flagged and banned.

Checking two days worth of expired dot com's, (not dot nets and orgs, which are good, as well), I found around 25 PR 3's, 15 PR 4's, 8 PR 5's and even a nice PR 6!

Why do we want these parameters?

Mainly, because of the reputation of the domain name. Many of the "PR" (page rank) domains have been around a long while. I found through archive.org that most were dropped because the company simply had a new domain name and didn't need the old one. Secondly, Google favors what is already indexed. What you add to that domain will get indexed in short time.

Backlinks are a great way to get anything you add to that domain, indexed as well. And old backlinks will take a while to die out, mainly because people don't keep them up to date.

In my next post, I'll tell you where I register most of my domain names and why. And if you're interested in the PHP script, I'll be posting the link to that as well.