“bad” domains sold for big bucks — Why these
Editor’s note: When you see a nonsensical expired domain sell for lots of money, it’s likely that the buyer purchased it for the SEO value instead of the domain itself. Following a long absence, I’m excited to have Sean Markey back to cover these domains and other SEO-related topics. Leave a comment if you have questions for Sean.
NameJet and SnapNames just released their June sales, and I’m going through them to see why they sold for what they did through an SEO lens, instead of only looking at the ones that sold since they were good domain investments (which is something Andrew covers).
Since I’m writing this three months following the sales happened, I can look at why the site sold for what it did and what it’s been up to since then. Was it a good purchase, and how has the rebuild been handled? You can get a sense for what people do with these SEO domains.
At the end of this post, there’s a list of all the names that have some SEO value. A few names, like Cirro.com (which went for $34,556), were clearly sold for the domain itself, as the SEO value is low. The more a domain’s price doesn’t correlate with its name value, the more likely it was purchased for SEO.
I’ve picked the most interesting names from the list to drill down on. Here we go:
ComicShopLocator .com sold for $24,001 at SnapNames
Honestly, a good showing. The DR has stayed the same (no significant fresh links built), but the traffic has gone up from 450 to 12,000 monthly organic visitors.
You can also see that, in the last three months, the site has grown its AI SEO footprint, earning hundreds and hundreds of mentions.
What the site used to be:
A very robust comic shop directory that also covered newsy things within the comic book world. But in 2025, parent firm Diamond Comic Distributors went through bankruptcy and asset liquidations. The longtime site went offline around May 18th, 2026, and came back online between June 10th and June 20th.
What the site is now:
If you look at the site now, it’s chock-full of comic book-related things, but also includes anime and esports. From there, it’s a very simple jump to “games”>> casino games.
The winning bidder of this site, like the winning bidder of MOST high-priced domains at auction that used to be real businesses, is most likely an iGaming affiliate. Just like how the best analysts of our generation went to work at Facebook to make you .07% more addicted to The Feed, so did the best SEOs go to work for, or start their own casino affiliate portfolio.
This site follows my checklist on valuing these sites perfectly:
- used to be a real business with a known brand
- was ranking for keywords at the time it shut down
- has real links from authoritative sources
- can get a site up and running ASAP
That’s why it went for as much as it did. Though it’s doing 12k/mo organic right now, SimilarWeb states it’s getting just under 100k total visitors per month from all sources.
Money well spent!
FIPA .org sold for $3,800 at NameJet
This one is surprising, and I feel like some SEOs were asleep at the wheel.
This site used to be for the Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents.
With how big AI is, and how (relatively) fresh the industry is, not to mention how much money is being thrown around like parade candy, it’s positively shocking that this domain
- was purchased for only $3.8k, and
- is being used as a Norwegian Casino page that ranks for nothing
While physical agents aren’t the same as Clawbot or whatever the fresh agents attached to everybody’s Mac mini are called, the backlink history here is absolutely stuffed with referring domains that could rank an AI brand:
- wikipedia
- github
- w3
- springer
- sourceforge
- gitlab
- MIT and Stanford
- frontiersin
- huggingface
- unity
- go.dev
- oreilly
This one is a bit less valuable since it wasn’t ranking for any keywords when it expired, which is a negative signal, but the stacked AI-focused backlink profile overcomes that and is worth a flyer.
I predict this site will continue to rank for nothing as a part of an iGaming scheme, and when it is eventually 301 redirected to whatever the next site in the network is, it’ll provide some non-niche-related authority to try and rank for whatever lucrative casino keyword will bring in some churn and burn money ahead of moving on.
SkinTour.com sold for $3,015 at SnapNames
This one was bringing in regarding 800 visitors per month of organic traffic when it started to go through the expiration process, so that makes it a pretty solid buy.
Unlike ComicShopLocator, organic traffic hasn’t returned to this site yet.
There is a live site here; it looks like an archive.org rebuild. Poorly done. The site takes a full 2 minutes to load, which is an SEO (and LLM, I assume) death warrant.
It’s a DR 36 with a history of organic rankings and even AI citations (which are dropping quickly). There is not a continuous history with Archive.org, which is… odd, and the site has a lot of negative signals, like:
- linking to stale or nonexistent social media profiles
- wrong year in the footer
- sign up button goes to a dead page on Constant Contact:
Someone paid $3k for really powerful, mostly niche-relevant backlinks from places like CNN, Healthline, Fresha, Allure, and Glam.com. But they haven’t done much with the site aside from rebuilding it from a stale Archive.org capture.
3dmekanlar .com sold for $5,001 at NameJet
All right, this one is in Turkish, so you gotta cut me a little slack. It’s a site for an app (?) that looks at some historical sites in 3D, I think.
This is an example of a strong signal: the site was doing regarding 4.5k organic visits per month ahead of expiring, and it looks like someone just put the old site back up 1:1 (which I don’t recommend, FYI, since that’s technically stealing and karmically fraught), and it’s doing well!
Look:
Organic traffic and AI responses are going up.
The content is very outdated though:
You know what they say regarding doing SEO in non-English language regions… it’s way, way easier!
So this site was unchanged for 8 years or so, and then it expired, and someone put it back online, and it ranks for things. That’s why people pay money for these domains.
At least it’s not a casino…
RallyLights.com sold for $2,477 at SnapNames
Speaking of casinos… 🙄
Let’s talk regarding RallyLights .com!
What it used to be: a headlight ecommerce brand going back to 2001!
What it is now: a 301 redirect to a Thai casino built on bonnevilleracing.com…
BonnevilleRacing .com sold for $3,220
It appears the same buyer took (at least) two names in roughly the same niche from the list, 301’d one to the other, and built a Thai casino site:
^ Bonneville Racing, apparently.
It used to rank for cool things like “salt flat races” and “Bonneville salt flat speed record,” and still does for now, alongside Thai casino terms. But those will fade as Google bot visits the site and gets the most negative signals imaginable. Another genuinely cool domain lost to casino spam.
This, from all my years spent watching expired domain auctions, is the most common endgame of sites that sell on these lists. Less common are sites like the comic site, which are purchased and rebuilt with something resembling what they used to be. If you’re an aspiring SEO nerd, that’s a good one to watch to see how it goes.
The Full Picture of SEO Domains From NameJet and SnapNames From June
Specifically, these are names with a DR of 15 or higher.
| Domain | Sale price | DR June 30 | Current DR | Current ranking keywords |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| unspsc.org | $7,755 | 70 | 70 | 5 |
| comicshoplocator.com | $24,001 | 69 | 69 | 649 |
| stayinthewoods.com | $2,900 | 27 | 68 | 52 |
| vietnamwar50th.com | $7,760 | 65 | 65 | 78 |
| internationalinvestment.net | $6,500 | 64 | 64 | 0 |
| saalt.org | $10,044 | 61 | 61 | 0 |
| gwynniebee.com | $4,121 | 59 | 58 | 15 |
| fipa.org | $3,800 | 49 | 55 | 1 |
| rallylights.com | $2,477 | 40 | 55 | 2 |
| sundancecatalog.com | $11,700 | 56 | 55 | 10 |
| 3dmekanlar.com | $5,001 | 54 | 54 | 327 |
| ahfsdruginformation.com | $4,811 | 51 | 54 | 2 |
| wendyshow.com | $8,350 | 54 | 54 | 7 |
| jobstar.org | $4,300 | 52 | 53 | 4 |
| proudtoserveagain.com | $2,500 | 54 | 53 | 0 |
| mydd.com | $2,500 | 52 | 52 | 0 |
| lavernecox.com | $7,105 | 51 | 51 | 21 |
| outcomes-umassmed.org | $3,211 | 48 | 50 | 0 |
| idealog.com | $3,306 | 50 | 49 | 0 |
| asscat-hepatitis.org | $7,760 | 43 | 47 | 64 |
| eurora.com | $3,429 | 54 | 47 | 0 |
| mchip.net | $3,700 | 45 | 47 | 875 |
| fremontmischief.com | $4,555 | 29 | 45 | 31 |
| responsiblemetrics.org | $2,701 | 40 | 43 | 0 |
| thinktwice.com | $11,500 | 40 | 43 | 0 |
| humanflow.com | $4,510 | 42 | 42 | 0 |
| meadowsinthemountains.com | $2,222 | 41 | 42 | 7 |
| englishgrammar101.com | $2,655 | 41 | 41 | 2 |
| centeronnationalsecurity.org | $6,260 | 40 | 40 | 0 |
| astronomytechnologytoday.com | $2,401 | 38 | 39 | 17 |
| localnetchoice.org | $4,001 | 30 | 38 | 0 |
| bonnevilleracing.com | $3,220 | 26 | 37 | 40 |
| llivia.org | $5,250 | 34 | 37 | 0 |
| exoticpetvet.net | $3,100 | 36 | 36 | 0 |
| skintour.com | $3,015 | 36 | 36 | 3 |
| gynocine.com | $2,300 | 32 | 35 | 4 |
| idrink.com | $5,511 | 33 | 35 | 0 |
| gardentheatre.org | $4,100 | 34 | 34 | 1 |
| prismjournal.org | $2,251 | 31 | 33 | 1 |
| aceacps.org | $4,100 | 33 | 32 | 1 |
| appliedmicrophone.com | $2,700 | 33 | 32 | 7 |
| skylinedriveinnyc.com | $5,750 | 32 | 32 | 8 |
| ilhunger.org | $2,611 | 29 | 31 | 7 |
| ludlowandprime.com | $3,100 | 29 | 30 | 0 |
| egyptjustice.com | $2,251 | 31 | 29 | 0 |
| nehealth.com | $2,150 | 31 | 29 | 1 |
| gulfplaceon30a.com | $3,900 | 27 | 28 | 7 |
| seiki.com | $3,701 | 28 | 28 | 0 |
| empowordjournalism.com | $2,935 | 30 | 27 | 7 |
| wakefieldnh.com | $2,849 | 29 | 27 | 10 |
| cirro.com | $34,556 | 17 | 26 | 0 |
| gelstonhouse.com | $3,100 | 27 | 26 | 23 |
| bidhannagarcollege.org | $2,018 | 18 | 25 | 0 |
| carpinteriacoast.com | $2,013 | 24 | 25 | 1 |
| gotolanea.com | $2,511 | 23 | 24 | 1 |
| hypergrid.com | $5,330 | 25 | 23 | 0 |
| vibepay.com | $3,100 | 23 | 23 | 0 |
| westcorkpodcast.com | $2,811 | 25 | 23 | 4 |
| perthbluewings.com | $2,600 | 22 | 22 | 0 |
| unlockingthetruthband.com | $3,600 | 22 | 22 | 0 |
| interakt.com | $5,011 | 16 | 16 | 0 |
If you have any questions regarding these domains, hit me in the comments; I’ll keep an eye out and help where I can.
