Expired domains vs deleted domains?

First, I'd make sure these sites have thousands of legit backlinks, not just several. Unless we're talking about backlinks from PR9 sites, a couple of good ones won't justify a PR4/5 and that page rank will likely drop off.

Second, understand the difference between expired and deleted domains. When someone doesn't pay the registration on a domain, it goes through a rather lengthy process before it becomes available for someone else to register. The current registrant has a period of time even after the domain has expired to register the domain.

So buying an expired domain might mean that you are buying a domain that is currently expired but could still be registered by the existing registrant, in which case your funds would be returned. These are often sold through auction methods.

A deleted domain is one that has not only expired, but is now available for anybody to simply re-register like it was a new domain. Instead of buying at auction, you simply pay the registration fee. However, most good domains never get deleted because someone buys them during the expiration phase. So finding good deleted domains is not always possible, at the very least it takes a lot of work.

IF you can find a good deleted domain, then snatch it up. But more likely than not you'll have to buy an expired domain and pay a bit of a premium.

It's still possible to get really good dropped domains that are 8+ years old for nothing, apart from the registration fee of $10 or whatever it is. Before Snapnames or Namejet came along, when domains were dropped or deleted, thats it, they were gone, but they still exist and still have backlinks pointing to them. It's just a matter of finding them.

Do a search in Google for something like allinurl:links, change the results dates to custom dates, like 1995 to 2005, then any results you have will have pages with lots of links on them that have not been updated in at least 8 years. I can guarantee you, if you check that page for "broken links" or links that "don't resolve to a host", you will find some of them have been dropped and are available.

If you do the same thing in scrapebox with a custom google search engine, except do a page rank check on each of the results. Then remove anything thats a PR of 5 or less, any domain that it links to is guaranteed to be a minimum of PR3. So you will have a minimum PR3 thats at least 8 years old....for free.

If you do this for an hour or two, you can dig up dozens of them easily.