If you are looking for a good domain name and have some free time on your hands, then I suggest searching for an pre-owned, expired domain. There are many places on the internet where you can find deleted domains including www.deleteddomains.com . The process of finding a deleted domain can be fun and exiting. It's kind of like mining for gold. It takes a long time, and is hard work, but when you find the gold nugget, it makes it all worth it. :

If you're into SEO then you'll want to check and see if the site is already in google's main index. If it is, you can save yourself a lot of time when optimizing your site. You can determine this by typing into google "allinurl: www.domainname.com". Another way is to look at the 'cached snapshot' of the page, provided by google's toolbar. If there is no cached snapshot, or nothing comes up with the allinurl command, then it's not indexed. Chances are, the domain you're searching for won't be indexed. If it is indexed, it will have little or no page rank (but that can be changed) making it look unappealing. In my experience, most of the deleted domains were never fully developed, never used, or only used to point at other sites. Many webmasters buy several domain names, optimize them for key prhases, and point them at their main site. These are called doorway pages. * Please be awawre that some of these pages might have been banned from google due to participation in spam schemes.*

If you do see results come up for the domain your searching for, be careful that it's not a supplemental result. A supplemental result is a page that comes from a separate index that google uses. Results from this index are only used for strange or obscure search requests and are excluded from the main index. I actually made the mistake of purchasing a deleted domain thinking it was indexed, when really it only was providing supplemental results. The site is getting pretty old now, and I feel like it will never be crawled by google again. Only three pages come up as being indexed in the site, and they are all very, very old.

It's rare that you'll find a lot of good domain names that were deleted, and even rarer that you'll find one already in google's index. Chances are, if the domain name is a good one, then someone has already renewed it. However, keep searching and you never know when you'll stumble across the golden domain name.

Todd Going is the Vice President of Site Tutor.com. He specializes in Search Engine Optimization, Web Development, Internet Marketing, Photoshop and Webmaster Resources. Please visit http://www.sitetutor.com for Tutorials, Information and help with your website.

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