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How To Find Expired Domains For Cheap: Domain Hunter Gatherer Pro Review

I have been looking for a better way to how to find expired domains for some time already. Saying better I mean cheaper. Paying hundreds of dollars at expired domain auctions is not really my way hehe 🙂 So when Jim, the founder&developer of Domain Hunter Gatherer, contacted me and asked if I want to review his software for finding expired domains, I said – YES! I DO!

Domain Hunter Gatherer Pro Review

Are you among the ones who pay hundreds of dollars for quality aged domains? In fact, that cost is no longer necessary. You can find your own niche related expired domains along with their backlinks, traffic and social shares for the small cost of registering a domain. Domain Hunter Gatherer Pro is there to help you.

I tried the Expired Domain Hunter part of the tool with a functionality that searches domains based on keywords. Overall, I liked the tool and plan to use it for my expired domain hunting needs.

Let’s look at its pros and cons.

Pros

This is a professional software that covers all SEO needs related to getting expired domains. I can write many lines of text listing its features – but I won’t 🙂 I will mention only the features I found the most useful:

• a comprehensive tool that has pretty much everything you need, including:
  • search for expired Web 2.0 domains
  • integration with third-party APIs for domain metrics
• allows a convenient setup based on your needs: column setup, filters, search setup, saving settings, blacklisting domains, etc
• a portable version that needs no installation and can be accessed from anywhere
• the Pro package includes an extra perk:
  • a recovery tool to quickly restore any snapshot of any website archived in Wayback Machine
• a free tier + a trial for the paid tiers + discount on longer-than-a-month subscriptions
• a big library of tutorials and 2 free e-books about aged domains and PBNs
  I always appreciate when tool creators spend extra time to educate their customers!
• great customer service
  I got confused by some functionality and logged a ticket; very quickly Jim replied saying the inconvenience had been solved and I should restart the app to see the update 🙂 Me likey!

Cons

As usual, I cannot avoid writing about the cons – though, I have to admit that there are just a few of them:

• DHG exists only for Windows, no Mac version (or web version)
  I am not a full-time Mac user but I have a Mac laptop I use once in a while especially while traveling. Would be great to be able from it as well.
• A bit intimidating for beginners
  The very first tutorial video I watched (the Getting Started one) revealed I need to learn about some advanced topics first – proxies.
• It’s a big tool and while the majority of the functionality is well organized, some parts might be more obscure
  It may take some time to learn all the features of the software in order to use if effectively. However, you do not need much to start using the tool; personally, I only needed to figure out the proxies thingy  and that’s it.

Getting Started With Domain Hunter Gatherer Pro

I won’t go into full details about how to setup the tool – Jim has already prepared a comprehensive tutorial video about that.

I will only write about my tips & hints; if it is your first time using a domain crawling tool, the chances are you will need them 😎

Now watch the tutorial:

Use the portable version

I recommend to use the portable version and set it up in your DropBox. In this case, you will have access to it from any place and any computer! As long as that computer has Windows OS installed, of course.

In my case, I usually need access to my niche websites stuff from two different places: home and the office. In the office, I of course do the office stuff (namely, working) but occasionally at lunch time I may peek in my business things. Being able to access the tool from there is very convenient for me.

Be not afraid of proxies

Proxies! You may have already heard of them in SEO context. And you may be wondering what the hell it is – exactly like I did!

Don’t get intimidated by the term; the concept is easy to understand.

Let’s see.

Domain Hunter-Gatherer queries and searches a lot of URLs at once and search engines may not like it.

In order to prevent abuse, the search engines put a limit on each IP address in terms of the number of queries executed during a certain period of time. Maybe, 10 a minute. Or even less. If you follow the limit, you would never ever be able to get any results because the process would be super slow. You need something like 100 queries a minute or more.

If you try to exceed the limit, the search engines will simply ban your IP address. This means you won’t be able even to google for funny pictures of cats for your personal use! Horrible.

That’s where proxies come in handy. Proxies act as a middleman between you and the search engines.

When using proxies, the queries will be run from many different IPs. This will make everything look normal and your personal IP address won’t get a ban.

In other words…

You can read more details in this example post about Google proxies on multiip.net.

Domain Hunter Gatherer does not come with built-in proxies. This is something you need to buy separately.

The tool creator guessed that the tool users may not be so familiar with where to get proxies 🙂 So he built in a link to a page with proxies deals into the tool itself. Just click on it and you will be redirected to the page. That’s what I did – and then purchased 10 proxies from SquidProxies.com.

Hunting-gathering & analyzing

This is pretty straightforward – watch a tutorial video how to do it:

Here’s my 2 cents.

Don’t get scared when the search is nearly finished and you still see 0 available domains.

After the search is done, the tool will execute the second pass (called Total Work Progress). It analyses the search result and will find available domains. Jim actually mentions it in the tutorial video.

After getting a list of domains, you can get the detailed metrics by running an analysis from the Analyze Domains section.

Don’t run the analysis on all the domains you found! The list is probably very big and the analysis will take a lot of time especially if you run it with default settings that include all the checks available. When I did that the tool even froze (I blame my computer.)

First, filter the domains by using the already available stats. And then run the analysis on a smaller subset. It will save you your API calls, too.

To get more info, check out the other tutorial videos in Domain Hunter-Gatherer YouTube channel.

My results of hunting expired domains

My very first search with 3 keywords and default settings yielded me almost 800 domains in about 1.5 hours of passive waiting while the tool was doing hunting out there. Out of 800, I found at least 3 domains I could work with.

I have to say I am very picky when it comes to choosing PBN domains and select only the ones that have a history relevant to Honeybee 🐝 Website’s niche. It happens that its niche is pretty popular and even evergreen so it has a lot of crap available in it. It is not easy to find good expired domains.

After trying Domain Hunter Gatherer Pro, I feel that I will become even pickier 🙂 It makes it much easier to do the analysis and hunt down really precious domains. For cheap 🙂

Tools That Come Along With DHG Pro

DomRecovery

DomRecovery recovers any website from Wayback Machine, a huge archive of the internet that collects and stores the history of all websites. The tool is included in the Domain Hunter Gatherer Pro tier.

Watch the DomRecovery tutorial video to learn more about Wayback Machine and DomRecovery:

When you do a site analysis in Domain Hunter Gatherer, it adds a URL to the latest WayBackMachine archive of the domain to the Notes field. You can pick up the URL from there. If you need to recover a specific snapshot from the past (this is often a case for me), you can find it in Wayback Machine and feed its URL to the tool.

For the proxies, I used the same ones I got for Domain Hunter Gatherer. I figured I won’t run both tools at the same time so why not share them?

Needless to say that restoring existing content is waaay cheaper than creating it from scratch. And having a tool that automatically downloads the content is waaay cheaper than making a VA doing do it 🙂

The tool comes with the Pro tier of Domain Hunter Gatherer.

DomDetailer

DomDetailer (DD) can be used by all users of Domain Hunter Gatherer for checking Moz ad Majestic stats of all domains without having a Moz or Majestic account.

In order to use it, you still have to buy credits. However, the DD credit price seems to be cheaper than paying for accounts directly and it’s not a monthly subscription.

In fact, I had a hard time comparing the prices of DomDetailer with Majestic and Moz. The tool creator says it is cheaper and I tend to believe him. What’s important for me is that DD is not a subscription. I know I underuse my Majestic subscription and it basically results in money being wasted. With DomDetailer, it won’t be the case.

It’s a pay as you go 🙂 The best kind of deal!

Apart from the price, another question is – how fresh are the metrics? If you worked with other tools that provide Majestic/Moz info, you may have been noticed that they serve outdated metrics that are inaccurate. When you start your domain investigation, you would have to re-query the metrics yet again.

DomDetailer executes queries in real time and always serves you fresh info. You do not need to double check the metrics again manually. This is the real time saver!

If you are like me and already have a Majestic account, you can setup the tool to use your account. However, after learning about DomDetailer, I started wondering whether I need a Majestic subscription at all 🙂

Oh, and if you buy the Pro version of Domain Hunter Gatherer, you will also get 50,000 API calls of DomDetailer included.

DHG Prices

Domain Hunter Gatherer has three tiers:

• Free – free!
  This tier helps you with hunting for domains on domain auctions
• Premium – $17 / month with a 7 day trial for $3.50
  Same thing as Free plus hunting for expired Web 2.0 domains
• Professional (the one I reviewed) – $87 / month with a 7 day trial for $17.00
  Same thing as Premium plus mining for expired domains and the domain recovery tool included

If you know you would need DHG Pro for more than one month, you can save money by buying special offers:

• Domain Hunter Gatherer Pro Summer Special with a recurring 20% discount
  Pay $17.00 for the first 7 days, then $137.00 for each 2 months
  
• Domain Hunter Gatherer Pro Special Offer with a recurring 40% discount
  Pay $17.00 for the first 7 days, then $300.00 for each 6 months

Get it here.

To see the special offers, choose any plan and the offers will be presented on the next page.

Conclusion

Automation is a must if you want to get a cost effective and ranking efficient PBN. Domain Hunter Gatherer Pro gives you a convenient way to get the base of a PBN, which is expired domains. The tool is chock-full of features and setting and it will make your life as a PBN master easier. Detailed tutorial videos will help you to ramp up and learn all the features of DHG.

Why did I like it personally? A combination of price & features, first of all. Then, a convenience of use. And the last but not least is a responsiveness of the owner/developer.

I am happy Jim sent me that email and I got a chance to review the tool 🙂

Featured photo: Woodlouse

Disclaimer

I received a payment for writing this post; however, my opinion is not for sale and belongs to me exclusively. Also, some of the links in the post are affiliate ones. I will receive a small fee if you choose to buy after clicking on any of these links. Thank you if you do! 🙂