Expired Domains For PBNs (2019) - What Metrics Should I Look At?

Do you want to buy expired domains, but don't know which metrics you should look at?
Are you confused whether to see Ahrefs, Majestic, Moz, Semrush, SimilarWeb or Alexa metrics for a domain?
Is there so much noise out there regarding these metrics, that you don't know which one is the right one for your business?
This video will tell you about the different metrics that are used by professionals to evaluate expired domains for their business.
There are three types of people who buy expired domains
SEO - SEOs buy expired domains purely for the value of their backlinks. The metrics that are important to SEOs are therefore the metrics provided by the top backlink data providers - namely Ahrefs, Majestic and Moz.
Domain Flippers - Domain Flippers purchase expired domains for either the intrinsic value of a domain name.
Domain Parkers - Domain Parkers purchase expired domains to make money by parking domains that have some organic traffic. They make money off ads served to this traffic.
Let’s start with SEOs.
Ahrefs Domain Rating (DR) - DR is measured on a logarithmic scale from 1 to 100 and shows the strength of a given domain's overall backlink profile. Ahrefs also provides the Ahrefs Rank. However, this number is found by simply sorting all domains based on the DR number and ranking them. We therefore look only at the DR when comparing between two domains.
Majestic Trust Flow (TF) - TF is a score based on quality, that scales from 0 100. Majestic created a list of trusted seed sites and then calculated this score based on how closely linked each domain is to this core set of trusted websites. High authority websites seem to have a high TF whereas domains with questionable backlinks tend to have a low TF.
Moz Domain Authority (DA) - DA is the most widely known metric of the lot. However, in recent years it has lost some favor with SEOs since Ahrefs and Majestic seem to have a much larger crawl set. That said, it is still one of the top metrics that every SEO should look at before buying an expired domain. DA like the other metrics ranges from one to 100, and predicts the ability of a website to rank. Since it is not based only on the backlink profile, we prefer looking at DR and TF for their metrics as long as DA is above a certain threshold.
Now, onto our second group of users - Domain Flippers.
Estibot value - Estibot is the top automated domain appraisal service. It assigns a dollar amount to every domain name and is a good estimation of real world value.
Adwords metrics - At DomCop we provide the monthly search volume and cost per click for the exact match keywords in the domain name. A high volume and high CPC for a .com domain would translate into a high real world value.
Our third group of users are Domain Parkers.
SimilarWeb - Similar Web is a company that provides estimations for traffic to any website. It does this by purchasing and collating click stream data from multiple third party providers. What this means is that you can get an estimate of how much traffic a domain gets, and whether this traffic comes from referrals, search engines or is direct traffic. Based on these numbers, you could create a rough estimate of how much revenue the domain will make if it is parked.
Semrush - Semrush provides estimations for search engine specific traffic for all websites. It does this by scraping Google’s search result pages. You only get the search engine traffic here - but this is much more accurate than the estimation for search engine traffic made by SimilarWeb.
We do have a bunch of other metrics we provide at DomCop. Some of the metrics that are not that popular but can be useful are the
DomainScope metrics - these are metrics based on the DNS traffic to the domain.
Social metrics that tells you how often the website was shared at the top social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
The Wayback Archive metrics that tells you how long back the website was initially crawled by the Wayback Archive as well as how many times it has been crawled since then. This tells you how often the website was updated when the domain was live.
The WhoIs data - this tells you when the domain was last purchased, modified and when it expired.