The Expired Domain Glossary: 60 Terms Explained
The short answer: Expired domain jargon splits into five buckets: lifecycle stages, industry players, buying and selling, vetting metrics and SEO risk. The 60 definitions below cover every term a buyer meets in practice.
Every niche builds a private language, and expired domains built two at once: registry jargon inherited from ICANN and SEO jargon inherited from twenty years of link building. This glossary defines the 60 terms you will actually meet, grouped so related ideas sit together. Every definition is written to stand alone, so you can lift any single entry and it still makes sense. Figures are verified as of mid-2026.
The lifecycle: from missed renewal to the drop
- 1. Expired domain: a registered name whose owner missed the renewal date. It is not available yet; it enters a chain of grace stages lasting roughly 65-80 days for a typical .com. Our foundation guide walks the whole chain.
- 2. Grace period: the registrar-controlled window after expiry, anywhere from 0 to 45 days, when the owner can still renew at the normal price.
- 3. autoRenewPeriod: the EPP status showing the registry has provisionally renewed a lapsed name and is waiting to see whether anyone pays.
- 4. Expiry auction: an auction for a domain that expired but was never deleted. The winner takes over the existing registration, keeping its age.
- 5. Redemption period: the 30-day registry stage after deletion during which only the original registrant can rescue the name.
- 6. Restore fee: the price of that rescue, typically $80-200 on top of the renewal itself.
- 7. pendingDelete: the final 5-day status. Nothing can stop deletion now, which is why backorders must already be in place.
- 8. The drop: the moment the registry releases a deleting name. .com and .net names release daily starting around 2:00 pm US Eastern.
- 9. Dropped domain: a name that completed deletion and returned to the open pool. Anyone can register it, but its registration history and age reset to zero.
- 10. Domain age: time since the current registration began. It survives an expiry-auction purchase and resets after a drop.
- 11. EPP status codes: the standardized flags in WHOIS and RDAP that reveal exactly where a name sits in its lifecycle, all documented by ICANN.
- 12. clientHold and serverHold: statuses that pull a domain out of DNS while it stays registered, a common sign of expiry or a compliance problem.
Registry vocabulary goes deeper than most buyers ever need. When it matters, the plain-English EPP status code glossary at Deleted Domains covers every code in one page.
The players and the plumbing
- 13. Registry: the organization running a TLD's master database, such as Verisign for .com and .net.
- 14. Registrar: the retailer that sells and renews registrations: GoDaddy, Namecheap, Dynadot and hundreds more.
- 15. Registrant: the person or company holding the registration, the owner in everyday speech.
- 16. Zone file: a registry's published list of active domains. Names vanishing between daily files reveal deletions.
- 17. WHOIS: the classic lookup protocol for registration data, expiry dates and status codes.
- 18. RDAP: the structured successor to WHOIS, returning the same facts in machine-readable form.
- 19. Drop catcher: a service that fires registration requests the instant names delete. DropCatch maintains 1,200+ registrar accreditations for exactly this.
- 20. Backorder: a standing order for a catcher to chase a name: $13-59 at DropCatch, $69-79 minimum at NameJet and SnapNames, $99 at park.io.
- 21. Registrar accreditation: permission to submit registration commands to a registry. Catchers stockpile accreditations to multiply their odds at the drop.
- 22. Contested catch: a drop chased by multiple parties. Even top services land an estimated 30-50% of contested names, and winners among their own clients are settled by private auction.
- 23. Drop list: the daily list of names entering pendingDelete or deleting, the raw feed every hunter filters.
- 24. Auction aggregator: a platform merging auction-house and drop streams into one filterable screen. DomCop is the best-known paid example, attaching Majestic and Moz metrics to every row.
Buying and selling
- 25. Aftermarket: everything that happens to a domain between owners: expiry auctions, marketplaces, brokered sales.
- 26. Hand registration: registering an available name yourself at the standard fee, the cheapest possible acquisition.
- 27. Closeout: fixed-price clearance after an expiry auction draws no bids. GoDaddy closeouts start around $5; Dynadot's ladder steps down roughly $30, $15, then $5.
- 28. Soft close: an auction rule extending the deadline whenever a late bid lands, which kills sniping. GoDaddy Auctions uses it.
- 29. Reserve price: the hidden minimum a seller will accept before a sale becomes binding.
- 30. Buy It Now: a fixed take-it price that bypasses bidding entirely.
- 31. Seller commission: the marketplace's cut of a sale: commonly 15-25% at GoDaddy and Afternic, 10-20% at Sedo, around 15% at NameJet.
- 32. Auth code: the transfer password (also called an EPP code) required to move a name between registrars.
- 33. Push: moving a domain between two accounts at the same registrar, faster than a full transfer.
- 34. Escrow: a neutral third party holding the money until the domain changes hands, standard for larger private sales.
- 35. Lease to own: paying for a domain in installments while already using it. Afternic absorbed this model from Dan.com in 2025.
- 36. Sell-through rate: the share of a portfolio that sells each year. Industry consensus sits around 1-2%, the single most sobering number in domain investing.
Metrics and vetting
- 37. Trust Flow (TF): Majestic's 0-100 score for link quality, based on distance from trusted seed sites.
- 38. Citation Flow (CF): Majestic's score for raw link volume, power with no quality judgment attached.
- 39. TF:CF ratio: the quick health test. A ratio below roughly 0.3 is a red flag for spam-heavy link profiles.
- 40. Topical Trust Flow: Majestic's category view showing which topics a domain's links actually come from.
- 41. Domain Authority (DA): Moz's 0-100 ranking-potential score, refreshed roughly monthly.
- 42. Domain Rating (DR): the Ahrefs 0-100 backlink-strength score, refreshed about every 12 hours.
- 43. Moz Spam Score: the share of spam flags a domain trips. Under 10% is generally treated as clean.
- 44. SZ Spam Score: SpamZilla's proprietary spam signal, built from anchor, backlink and redirect analysis across roughly 300,000 domains a day.
- 45. Referring domains: the count of unique websites linking in, much harder to inflate than raw backlink totals.
- 46. Anchor text: the clickable words inside links. Profiles stuffed with commercial or foreign-language anchors are a classic manipulation tell.
- 47. Backlink profile: the full picture of who links to a domain and how. It survives expiry until link owners edit their pages, as our guide to whether expired domains keep their backlinks explains.
- 48. Wayback Machine: the Internet Archive's snapshot library, the primary free tool for checking what a domain used to be.
The four headline scores, side by side:
| Metric | Vendor | What it scores | Quick rule |
|---|---|---|---|
| Trust Flow | Majestic | Link quality via trusted-seed distance | Read it against CF, never alone |
| Citation Flow | Majestic | Raw link volume | High CF with low TF is a spam pattern |
| Domain Authority | Moz | Ranking potential, refreshed roughly monthly | Compare within a niche, not across niches |
| Domain Rating | Ahrefs | Backlink strength, refreshed about every 12 hours | Fast refresh also reflects fresh link spam fast |
Cross-tool disagreement is normal: authority scores for the same site differ by about 26 points on average, which is why serious buyers corroborate across vendors instead of trusting one number.
SEO strategy and risk
- 49. Link equity: the ranking value that links pass along, the asset expired-domain buyers are really bidding on.
- 50. 301 redirect: a permanent redirect. Pointing an old domain at a new site is the shortcut Google's spam policies watch most closely.
- 51. Rebuild: restoring a genuine site, often from archived content, on an expired name. Explicitly fine under Google policy when it serves users.
- 52. Aged domain: a name continuously registered for years, typically bought from curated marketplaces rather than caught at the drop. See aged vs expired domains for the buying decision.
- 53. PBN: private blog network: sites built on expired domains to link to a money site. Carries deindexing risk from shared footprints.
- 54. Footprint: any repeated pattern across sites (hosting, templates, registration details) that lets Google connect a network.
- 55. Deindexing: removal from search results, the standard fate of a discovered PBN.
- 56. Expired domain abuse: Google's spam classification, live since March 5, 2024, for repurposing an expired name primarily to manipulate rankings.
- 57. Site reputation abuse: the sibling policy, expanded in November 2024, against third-party content parasiting a strong host's signals.
- 58. UDRP: the dispute process trademark holders use to take infringing names, and expiry offers no protection from it.
- 59. Domain parking: monetizing an idle name with ads. Without real traffic it typically earns $3-5 a month per domain.
- 60. Premium renewal: a registry-set renewal far above the standard fee that recurs every single year, the classic carrying-cost trap.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between an expired domain and a dropped domain?
An expired domain missed its renewal but still exists, with its age and history intact, and may be renewed, restored or sold at auction. A dropped domain finished the whole deletion chain and returned to the open pool, with its registration age reset to zero.
Which EPP status codes actually matter for buyers?
Three: autoRenewPeriod means the owner can still pay, redemptionPeriod means only the owner can rescue it, and pendingDelete means deletion is 5 days away and unstoppable. Everything else is supporting detail.
What is a good TF:CF ratio?
Anything below roughly 0.3 is a red flag, and healthy profiles sit closer to balanced. Treat the ratio as a triage filter rather than a verdict, and confirm with anchor text and Wayback snapshots before buying.
Why do different tools give the same domain different scores?
Each vendor runs its own crawler, index and math, so disagreement is structural: about 26 points on average between authority tools. Quote scores with the vendor's name attached and corroborate anything that drives a bid.