I have been a customer at DomCop for the past several months, using it to find all kinds of expired domains. In my view, this is by far the best expired domain finder available, and they have built an amazing product – you can tell a lot of work has gone into it. With a great product and excellent support, I very much recommend DomCop to find expired domains if you know what you’re doing. The following is my DomCop review for 2020 outlining why I like it.
Note that this review is 100% uncompensated and I am not using any affiliate links where I get a commission if you sign up to DomCop, and I have zero affiliation with DomCop. Therefore, what I’m writing here is my real experience with it.
Here’s a screenshot proving I use DomCop (I am subscribed to the “Power Plan”):
UPDATE July 2020: I continued to use DomCop extensively through the first few months of 2020, but have now (temporarily or maybe permanently) canceled it, since I am no longer in the business of buying expired domains. That’s has nothing to do with the quality of DomCop (it’s still a great service), just that I don’t have a use for it anymore.
What is DomCop?
DomCop is a service used to find expired domains that may have great SEO value. DomCop looks at millions of domains that are expired each month and gives you important metrics on them, allowing you to find valuable domains that you can register. With this service you can narrow down the millions of expired domains in all kinds of ways, from looking at Domain Authority (DA) and Page Authority (PA) from Moz (the most common method), Alexa rank, language, domain extension, domain age and more. It’s awesome the number of filters they have built in – here’s all of them:
Say you are looking for a .com domain with a DA above 25 which doesn’t have dashes or digits in it, which was in English, wasn’t known for any spammy activity, and is priced less than $500 (or any arbitrary amount). You can add all those filters in and a list pops back. There are 3 different tabs, one for Expiring domains (those that haven’t yet expired but will shortly – DomCop of course tells you how long till a domain expires), Expired domains (domains that expired within the last 10 days), and Archived domains (domains that have expired beyond 10 days ago). There is no other expired domain finding service, free or paid, that has anywhere close to the metrics that DomCop has, and if you are serious about finding great expired domains it’s mandatory that you join, in my opinion.
Beyond being an excellent product, it’s worth mentioning that the support I had at DomCop was fantastic too – the support representative (Kevin) always replied within 24 hours and was knowledgeable and took the time to solve the issue I had (an issue with paying, not related to DomCop itself but the specific payment processor they were using).
Limitations of DomCop
The one annoyance with DomCop is that they don’t include Ahrefs metrics on top of Moz metrics (not through a lack of trying — Ahrefs simply refused to let DomCop continue using its API). As I personally love Ahrefs and find its Domain Rating (DR) score to be an extremely valuable filter, this is a bit limiting. Many domains will have a good Moz score but rubbish Ahrefs DR, and most of these are ones you won’t want. Therefore, for every search I do with DomCop, if I find a domain that looks like it might be worth investigating, I always have to manually look it up on Ahrefs. Not having Ahrefs metrics therefore slows you down a lot.
I also want to stress that you really need to know what you’re doing if you are going to find great domains with DomCop. That means having an intimate knowledge of SEO and what to look for in a great domain, which is not trivial. You need to be able to separate the trash from the treasure, and that means doing research on each domain you’re thinking of buying that DomCop finds. That means looking it up on archive.org, looking into its backlinks, checking its history and everything else. There are, without questions, some real diamonds in the rough domains that you can pick up if you know how to use DomCop to its full capabilities, and that takes time and expertise.
If you’re using DomCop to find domains for your PBN (Private Blog Network), you should read their guide on running a PBN here.
DomCop’s power plan is currently $98/month: well worth it if you know what you’re doing, but a waste if you don’t know how to use it. And to be honest, as getting value out of expired domains and setting up a PBN is hard, I would suspect a huge portion of people using DomCop are not getting their moneys worth.
What to use if you don’t have $98/month to spare
Expireddomains.net has many of the features of DomCop and is free (you just have to sign up), and I recommend using that if you don’t want to pay for DomCop. I previously asked DomCop what the differences are between expireddomains.net and their service, and the primarily difference (beyond DomCop definitely having more features and metrics) is that DomCop has way more domains. See the DomCop stats here.
Are expired domains still worth buying for link & SEO purposes?
On June 2020 we published a piece compiling responses from SEO experts on whether PBN’s (where you buy expired domains and use them to boost search engine rankings) are still worth using. I recommend having a read through that:
The consensus there is that PBN’s these days are highly risky, but are highly effective only if you do everything right – and that’s no small task. So again, we have to emphasize that using DomCop to find expired domains for SEO experts is not for beginners.
