Frequently asked questions

DomCop is an expired domain search tool. It lists every expiring, expired and dropped domain it can find and lets you filter them by Ahrefs Domain Rating, Moz Domain and Page Authority, Majestic Trust and Citation Flow, SEMrush rank and traffic data, Estibot appraisals, Open PageRank, age and dozens of other metrics.

We import listings from domain auctions, pending-delete lists, public drop lists and our private drop lists, then gather metrics for every name from third parties such as Ahrefs, Moz, Majestic, SEMrush and Estibot. We also check whether a domain is still available and flag names or backlink profiles that look spammy.

SEOs buy expired domains for their backlinks. Every day 200,000+ domains expire and it is impossible to go through the backlinks of each one. DomCop shows you the whole list with the important metrics next to every domain, so the daily list shrinks from 200,000+ to a handful of the very best names. What would take hours takes seconds.

Each third party we integrate with (Ahrefs, Moz, Majestic and the others) charges for its metrics. DomCop uses their APIs to get the data for you, so you do not need separate accounts. As new providers appear, we integrate them so that you always have the most comprehensive set of metrics.

Moz is an independent company that publishes link metrics for a large number of websites.

• Domain Authority (DA): how well a domain is likely to perform in search rankings, scored 0 to 100. DA is hard to fake, which makes it a good metric for valuing domains. We also show the DA trend over the last 12 and 36 months.
• Page Authority (PA): the same prediction for a single page, 0 to 100. Less useful than DA for expired domains.
• Spam Score: Moz's estimate of how spammy the backlink profile looks.
• Referring domains: the number of domains linking to the root domain (and separately to the www subdomain).
• Backlinks: the total links Moz has found, with separate counts for links that pass equity to the root and to the www subdomain.
• Top anchor texts: the ten most common anchor texts of the backlinks.

Majestic has one of the largest public indexes of the web. Metrics differ between the root and the www subdomain; DomCop works out where the original website ran and shows the matching values.

• Trust Flow (TF): 0 to 100, how trustworthy the linking sites are.
• Citation Flow (CF): 0 to 100, how much link volume the domain has, comparable to Domain Authority.
• TF/CF ratio: one of the most important numbers. CF is easy to manipulate and TF is not, so spammy domains have a low ratio; a domain with TF/CF below 0.8 is usually best ignored.
• Links, domains, IPs, subnets: backlink counts and the number of unique referring domains, IPs and subnets.
• EDU and GOV domains and links: backlinks from educational and government sites.
• Topical Trust Flow: the categories of the linking sites with the trust flow passed, which tells you which industry a domain belongs to.
• Majestic Million: the domain's rank in Majestic's list of the top million sites, globally and within its extension.

SEMrush shows which keywords a domain ranks for and what that traffic is worth.

• SEMrush rank: the domain's rank among all domains by the searches it ranks for.
• Keywords: the number of keywords the domain ranks for.
• Monthly organic traffic: estimated visits per month from search rankings.
• Cost of traffic: what that traffic would cost through paid search.

A domain without rankings shows blank SEMrush columns rather than zeros.

Domain Rating (DR), 0 to 100, measures the strength of a domain's backlink profile and is shown for every domain. Ahrefs backlink, referring domain, IP and subnet counts and the Ahrefs rank are available when you link your own Ahrefs subscription from the account page; the calls then use a small share of your Ahrefs units each day.

None of the metrics is infallible; all of them can be manipulated, but it is much harder to manipulate all of them at once. Use them together. If a domain has a high Trust Flow but a low Domain Authority, or a high DA but a low Ahrefs DR, research it some more. SEMrush data is only meaningful for domains that still have organic traffic.

Metrics are fetched when a domain enters the system and refreshed while it is listed. Ahrefs, Majestic and Moz metrics change daily, so you may see small differences between DomCop and the provider's own site; for good domains the numbers rarely move much unless the domain is rapidly losing backlinks. Each provider column shows when it was last checked.

Sometimes the verification email ends up in your junk or spam folder. If it is not there, your mail server may have blocked it: email us at support@domcop.com and we will verify your account manually. Adding our address to your contacts prevents future mails from being blocked.

Reply to the verification email or write to support@domcop.com and we will verify the account for you.

We do not sell domains. The domains in our lists are available to buy at an auction or to register directly at a registrar; no purchase happens on DomCop.

The domains page has three lists: Live (auctions, buy-now and pending-delete names still open, ending soonest first), Expired (listings that ended recently) and the Archive (available names with metrics worth keeping). Every list has the same filters:

• range sliders for every metric: Moz DA and PA, Majestic TF and CF, Ahrefs DR, backlink and referring domain counts, SEMrush traffic, Estibot value, Open PageRank, age, length, price, bids;
• keyword and pattern search on the name, with negative keywords;
• extension, listing type, marketplace, industry and language;
• time to expiry or time since expiry, and when the domain was added;
• options such as no dashes, no digits, available only, hide spam warnings and hide names on your watchlist.

The common searches menu holds ready-made searches (high Trust Flow, high Domain Authority and so on) for anyone unsure where to start.

• Auction: an expiring domain currently in an auction.
• Closeout: a GoDaddy auction that got no bids and now goes through a five-day reverse auction from about $11 down to $5.
• Buy now: can be bought immediately at the seller's price.
• Pending delete: a domain that is about to drop and can be back-ordered or registered when it does.
• Bargain bin: went through the GoDaddy closeout and is available at the lowest price.
• Offer / counter offer: a domain in an auction that is not expiring; the seller does not have to sell unless a bid suits them.

Run any search, click Save search, give it a name and choose whether you want a daily email with the new matches. Saved searches appear in the menu at the top of the domains page; select one to run it again.

Open the saved searches page from the menu. Each search can be renamed, re-run, moved to a group, edited (run it, change the filters and save it again) or deleted.

Email notifications are tied to saved searches. When you save or edit a search, switch on Daily email and you get one mail a day covering all your searches with the domains that matched since the last mail. Digests are available for the live and archive lists. A domain mailed to you once is not repeated within a week.

Click the star next to a domain, or select several and use Add to watchlist. The watchlist keeps the domain and its metrics for as long as you like, even after the listing has ended and the name is gone from the lists, and you can sort it into groups.

Run a search and click Export. Choose the separator (comma, tab or semicolon) and the columns; the file is prepared in the background and appears on the exports page (optionally with an email when it is ready). Exported files are kept for 30 days. See the export guide.

There is no limit on the number of exports per day. Each file holds up to 1,000,000 rows.

You can customise the columns of every list: which metrics are shown and in what order. See the columns guide. Click any column header to sort by it.

We process between 200,000 and 300,000 domains a day. The current totals per list, marketplace and extension are on the statistics page.

We show up to three ages:

1. Domain age (Wayback): from the first time the Wayback Machine crawled any page on the domain. From an SEO point of view this is the relevant one, as search engines are likely to use a similar measure.
2. Domain age (WHOIS): from the registration date in WHOIS. When a domain drops and is registered again this date resets.
3. Website age (Wayback): the age of the last website that ran on the domain. A domain registered in 2005 with a site until 2010, abandoned until 2012 and rebuilt until 2015 gets a website age of three years while the domain age is ten.

A domain is flagged when its name matches spammy keywords, when the backlink profile looks unnatural (for example a very low Trust Flow to Citation Flow ratio or links mostly from spammy-language sites) or when Moz reports a high spam score. A flag means "look closer", not "avoid".

• Switch on Hide domains on my watchlist in the search options to keep watched names out of the lists.
• Add negative keywords to your exclude list on the account page; domains matching them are hidden from the lists you choose.
• Use the exclude icon next to a domain to hide that single name; excluded domains are listed on the account page, where they can be brought back.

Tick Available only in the search options. The archive contains only available domains, so the option does not appear there.

Majestic metrics change every day as Majestic crawls the web, while we refresh them at intervals after the domain enters the system. Metrics of good domains do not change much; if a domain shows very different numbers its backlink profile is volatile (a sudden loss or influx of links) and it is better avoided.

Domains enter the archive with the metrics they had the day they expired, which gives you a snapshot of the backlink profile at expiry to compare against the current one. Archive metrics are refreshed less often than live listings because of API limits.

Searches can slow down when you use many keywords, especially negative keywords, in the search box or in the exclude list on the account page. Try removing some, or disable the exclude list for a specific list. If searches are still slow, email support@domcop.com and we will look into it.

Some domains are put up for auction by their owners and have not expired at all. To see only expiring domains, untick Auction, Buy now and Offer / counter offer in the listing type filter.

Set an upper limit on the price filter.

When the domain enters the system, when it drops, two, six and thirty days after the drop, and periodically once it is in the archive.

See the pricing page. The Newbie plan gives access to the live list; Power adds the expired list and the archive; the Guru plans add more capacity for the tools built on top. Every plan includes all metric columns, exports, saved searches, digests and the watchlist.

We do not have a free trial. New customers have a two-day money-back guarantee instead: email us at support@domcop.com within two days of your first purchase for a complete refund. This applies only to your first subscription with us.

Subscriptions are handled by FastSpring, our reseller of record; you can pay by credit or debit card or with PayPal. FastSpring collects VAT, GST or sales tax where your country requires it; entering a valid VAT or GST id usually removes the tax. Your invoices are available from FastSpring, linked on the billing page.

Pick the new plan on the billing page. The change is applied through FastSpring, which prorates the difference; no email needed.

Open the billing page in your account and click Cancel subscription. This stops the recurring payment immediately; you keep access until the end of the paid period.

A subscription is meant for a single person. We tolerate a second person (for example a freelancer helping with the searches), and at most two devices can be logged in at the same time; a third login signs out the oldest session. Accounts shared beyond that, for example through a group-buy service, are closed.

We pay for metrics from several providers because good metrics lead to good domains and save you time. Competitors generally do not carry these metrics, and we also spend a lot of effort on keeping the list of expired domains as complete as possible.

• 10-day public auction: the normal expiring-domain auction; the highest bid at the end wins.
• Closeout: an auction that got no bids goes into a five-day reverse auction at a fixed price that starts around $11 and falls by a dollar a day to $5.
• Offer / counter offer: listed by a seller, not expiring; the seller may refuse every bid.
• Offer / counter offer with buy now: the same, but the seller has set a price at which they promise to sell.

Some auctions, usually offer / counter offer listings, run continuously: when the 90-day maximum ends they are reset to 89 days. Between the reset and our next import you may see the old end time.

Use the contact page or email support@domcop.com directly.

We would love some publicity: share DomCop with your community, on X or on Facebook.

Not yet. If you are interested, email support@domcop.com and we will let you know when one is live.