Screening Expired Domains in Bulk: 500 Domains From Paste to Shortlist — Steps, Time and Cost
Drop lists come in hundreds and thousands; checking them by hand is not realistic. Using a 500-domain example: how to order the checks, what each step removes, how long it takes, what it costs, and what to do with the results.
Drop lists come in hundreds and thousands; checking them by hand is not realistic. Using a 500-domain example: how to order the checks, what each step removes, how long it takes, what it costs, and what to do with the results.
Drop-catchers, network builders and 301 buyers face hundreds of thousands of deleting domains every day, of which a handful are worth having. The hard part is not checking one domain; it is cutting hundreds down to the few dozen worth a look, on a time and money budget.
1. Cut the list with free filters first
Drop lists usually filter by ending, length and registration year; remove the obvious misses there (say .com/.net only, 12 characters or fewer). Copy what is left, one per line, and check it in bulk. The check’s rules can limit endings too: others are dropped on submission, free of charge.
2. The pipeline: cheap steps first, expensive steps last
| Step | What it checks | What it typically removes |
|---|---|---|
| History | Homepage title per year over the last ten years: banned content, first-seen year, stable-title years | Most domains (banned content, no archive, too young) |
| Index | Baidu site: results on page one | Domains with nothing indexed |
| Backlinks | Referring domains, spam score | Too few referring domains or too spammy |
Each domain stops at the first step it fails; later steps never run for it. Of 500 domains, usually only a small share reaches the backlink step, so the data cost goes to the domains worth looking at.
3. How long it takes
History is the slow step. The Wayback Machine publishes no limits and has been stricter about automated traffic since 2026; go too fast and it refuses connections outright (it did so to our server). So we pace requests about three seconds apart and read each year’s homepage from Common Crawl (an open web crawl dataset) first, going to the archive only for the years it lacks. A long-lived site then needs three or four archive requests, about ten seconds, so 500 such sites take about an hour and a half. Expired domains usually have fewer archived years and go faster. The page estimates the time before you start and the time left while it runs.
Close the page once it starts; Telegram tells you when it is done (link it in your account). The archive itself goes down now and then (it returned 503s several times in 2026); the check then pauses and resumes on its own, with no retry needed and no extra charge.
4. What it costs
Per domain: $0.02 for every domain that enters the check, wherever it stops. 500 domains cost $10. Domains dropped by ending and failed checks are free; you see the price before starting, get prompted to top up if the balance is short, and are charged once when the batch finishes. If you screen a list now and then, there is no month-long subscription to pay for.
5. After the results arrive
- Filter by clean / questionable / rejected and use "Copy" to copy every domain under the filter into a registrar or backorder site.
- Export CSV: domain, verdict, reason, first-seen year, stable-title years, Baidu results, referring domains, spam score — sort further in a spreadsheet.
- Open a row for the yearly title evidence; for $0.05 per domain you can list its top 100 referring domains (free to view again within the same check).
- "Add clean to assets": put the clean domains into My assets; once you own them, due dates are looked up and renewals reminded.
Start a bulk check
Up to 5,000 domains per check; $0.02 each, failed checks free; Telegram tells you when it is done.