Domain Auctions for Buying and Selling Website URLs

Domain auction sites are where you would typically buy or sell a currently registered or expired domain. 

I have listed them in two main sections; the larger, more well known sites and the the less well known web sites for selling and profiting from domaining.

• Business.com resold for $350 million in July 2007
• Business.com for $7.5 million in December 1999
• AsSeenOnTv.com for $5.1 million in January 2000
• Altavista.com for $3.3 million in August 1998
• Wine.com for $2.9 million in September 1999
• CreditCards.com for $2.75 million in July 2004
• Autos.com for $2.2 million in December 1999
• Sex.com for $13 million
• Toys.com Toys 'R' Us by auction for $5.1 million in 2009

Google Page Rank

Try to find pages with a Page Rank (PR), if you can. Always verify that the Page Rank is real, as these can be faked.

Expired domains with traffic

Many of expiring domains have traffic because expiration occurred fairly recently. If you buy these domains and build a website on them quickly, then you can capitalize on pre-existing traffic.

A domain with backlinks (inbound links)

Domains which have good backlinks, especially a lot of them from different sites (not all the same site), are always preferred.

Domains listed in directories like DMOZ, BOTW, and Yahoo are especially valuable, as DMOZ is very difficult to get a site listed these days, and Yahoo and BOTW typically require payment to be listed.

Domain Age

Older domain (listed in webarchive.org), then its very easy to recover content and design which have existed in past. Try to copy and past that content into your new site. You can use 301 redirects to point to your new pages of your site.

Old domains registered before 2000 have much higher authority level (ie Page Rank) than domains that are only 2 years old.

Keywords

Domains will have keywords associated with them. If the keywords are valuable, and the site ranks well for them, then they could fetch a very high resell value.