There is big time money in the domain buying business and thats for sure. I know a few people making lucrative money off buying and selling domains. The idea is to buy them low, and sell them high. If you grab good domains you will have no problem selling them. Which there is several things to look for when you buy a domain, so lets cover some tips.

1. Age, Age is a vital factor in domains. Buy domains that are old, when you buy old domains the links that you build into them get counted more then what a new domain would. For example all of our clients that buy our contextual links I’ve notice even my self out of all the websites that get brought through here the old domains always rank better with fewer links. I’ve seen old domains shoot up with just a few hundred links on competitive terms, but then I see a new domains trying to rank for competitive terms and it takes 1000’s of links, so old domains are very powerful of course.
2. Registry, Always check the register of the domain using a domain whois tool. Don’t ever buy a domain off any one unless you check the registry to see if its legit, or I should say to make sure the person who is trying to sell it is being honest. I’ve had a quite of few people try to fib to me by telling me there domain is older then what it is, but then I check the registry settings and its not even close.
3. Search Engine Listings, Always make sure the domain is indexed by the search engines. If its not indexed then don’t buy it. Thats my tip on that. If its not listed its for a reason if your looking at a 1996 domain, but its not listen on Google then why buy it? It has probably been penalized, or banned.
4. Easy To Remember, Try to buy domains that are easy to remember just something short and sweet. Something that you can brand very well.
5. Relevant Domain, Buy a domain that is relevant to yours, do not go buying a domain that is irrelevant such as real estate, but your in the web design business.
6. Keyword Domains, Do not get all caught up on buying keyword domains. Buy a domain thats is brandable, and short. Something easy to remember. Forget the keywords in the domain names, just build good links and you’ll have great rankings.
7. Page Rank and Links, Try to buy a domain that has some links going into it and is carry page rank. It don’t have to be a page 7, or anything like that just try to buy a domain that has links because it looks more established with the search engines.
8. Don’t spend to high, Don’t spend 50k on a domain that someone is telling you thats worths 50k. When it hardly has any establishment what so ever. The other day I was talking to a guy and he was trying to get us to buy a domain for our car audio business, and he was trying to sell it for 20k I mean all these domains the guy had pratically had no value to them what so ever some of them were old, but he was just pricing them way to high, and I know of other places to get old valued domains for 10 times cheaper, so it was not worth my time eventually we got into an argument with the guy because he tried telling me that old domains had nothing to do with rankings in the search engines.
9. Ranking, If it does have page rank and links ask the owner what type of keywords its ranking for. You have to really pay close attention to this type of stuff cause you never know the domain could still have its page rank and look 200 percent legit, but its not ranking for anything.

Just do lots of research when buying domains. Once you get the hang of all the terms and more famaliar with search engines you’ll start to understand a bit more about buying domains. Just go over the following above, and make sure the criteria is met. If you do not know much about buying domains and plan on investing some major cash I would suggest hiring a good domain broker, or a SEO to take care of it because the chances are they could spot a lot of things out that you would just over look.

You can purchase domains at numerous places, but if I was you I would start looking in forums and the social part of the web. Get to know people find out who’s brokering domains, and who’s trust worthy. If you find someone you can buy domains off that does it for a living and there trusty worth generally they’ll review the domains fro you this way you don’t have to hire a broker. That made a lot of sense, a broker buying from a broker, just try to find someone you can trust that will make sure your getting an all around good deal and the domain has value.

Other Resources Located Below

Domain Buying Forums

Digital Point Domain Buying Forum

Webmaster Talk Domain Buying and Selling Forum

Site Point Domain Names For Sale

Domain Whois Tools

Network Solutions (This is the one I use generally)

Whois Source

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 4th, 2007 at 9:13 pm and is filed under Domains. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.