Spending your hard earned money to register an expired domain name will help you enhance the visibility of your web site and direct useful traffic and inbound links to add more value to the expired domain. However, with over 50 millions of expired domains up for immediate sale, it could be a tremendous task to find a good domain that can form a viable business asset to you. How do you know that the expired domain that you purchase is the right one for your domain name trading business? The most important issues that you must consider before buying are:

A) The amount of traffic that the site receives

B) The type and quality of traffic

When you have this basic information and details, you can try and buy a suitable expired domain name by paying a reasonably good price. Professional domain traders use a number of tools and techniques to guess at the most probable traffic attached to the expired domain. When you get empowered with the required knowledge and skills, you can easily predict, as a guesstimate, the amount of money that a given expired domain can make and derive.

You can make a fair estimate of traffic attached with an expired domain name by using the following three processes or methods:

Tracking traffic: The easiest way to know the amount of traffic is by contacting the owner. Though, the statistics provided by the owner is difficult to believe, you can cross check the owner's claim by using some of the well known methods like traffic counting scripts and software tools. You can buy one of the well-known traffic finding scripts and tools to asses the commercial viability of the expired domain. Most of these tracking software tools allow you to find additional information like past referral, the quality of visitors and their geographical distribution. Parked domains may provide you an idea of the traffic statistics related to the domain. You may just need to go though the domain sales listing page given on the parking web portal.

Predicting traffic: There are a number of indirect methods that will provide you a fair estimate of traffic. Alexa web portal provides you a comprehensive report on the web performance statistics. High ranking domains receive Alexa ranking just from the type-in type of traffic. A general thumb rule suggests that an Alexa ranking of less than 10, 00,000 for a basic web portal is a good sign and such web portals always receive some amount of traffic. Alexa could be a general guideline and you may need to use the statistics in a general sense.

Likewise, the Overture tool will also provide you a general idea of a web portal's link popularity and inbound traffic. If a domain contains maximum searched keyword, you may safely assume that it has some significant amount of traffic associated with it. Overture keyword search results can be employed as a general predictor or indicator for whether or not a given domain name received traffic. On the other hand, search engine listing also provides a fair idea of the popularity of an expired domain name. Higher the search engine ranking means better traffic and inbound popular links.

However, an expired domain may not be listed in the search engine pages. A domain appraisal report will provide you the past traffic statistics of the expired domain name. Link popularity tools provide you a fair estimate of the volume of the traffic and their overall quality. A solitary link emanating from a major web site may signify thousands of other links from minor and inconsequential web sites. Directory listing will also mean a stable type of traffic that is ongoing and continuous.