Every day tens of thousands of domains 'expire beyond repair' and are put back into the pool of available domains that anyone can register, in minutes. They can be very valuable if you are seeking a quality domain for your online business, or if you want to re-sell them for profit. There is another advantage to a domain that was previously owned -- Instant Traffic! As I said above, expired domains have been owned by someone in the past. Many of the previous owners built these domains, advertised them, registered them with search engines, and even exchanged links with other sites. All translating into traffic to that domain name.

Now, why would someone who took the time to do all that work let the domain expire? It could be one of several reasons:

• the author simply lost interest or forgot to renew
• an online venture ran out of funding, very common, and they didn't even realize their potential online
• poor management of the domain - again potential was not realized
• they couldn't afford the fees - overages can get us all!

Whatever the reason, it happens. And you can reclaim some of the wasted traffic and use it to your advantage. You can either point it to your existing site or use it to jumpstart
and add value to a new site.

How do you know if an expired domain has traffic?
While there is no way to gauge the actual amount of traffic going to an expired domain, you can find out its link popularity in the major search engines. This will tell you
the number of Web pages listed in a particular search engine that link to that domain. The more links, the higher link popularity and the more traffic that domain is getting (in
some search engines, the higher ranking, too).