It has been all over the net. They promise you that all your traffic problems will be solved if you just buy a few domain names with existing traffic.

The logic is perfect - a webmaster with lots of traffic abandons his site, leaving behind him a domain that has lots of backlinks, pagerank, and most important - traffic!
Maybe hundreds of people had that site bookmarked, and they’ll be checking it out every day?

Unfortunately, the truth is not that bright.
As stated this grate article domain name do not become available to the general public the moment their owner forgets to pay.
Actually, the domain is put on hold for 40 days, during which only the original owner can renew the domain for the original fee.
When these 40 days pass, another 30 days the domain is in it’s redemption period, during which still, only the owner can renew the domain, but for a much higher price then before.
After that the deletion process takes place, during which nobody can register the domain. The deletion process takes 5 days, and then, anywhere between 11 pm to 2am PST, the domain will become available to the general public.
During all this time the domain will be inactive(A.K.A. will not show any web page).

That’s 75 days, 2 and a half months of domain inactivity.
99% of people who had the domain bookmarked will remove the bookmark till then.
Most back linkers will already see that the site is down, and will remove their back links.
Search Engine Spiders will see more then once that the page does not exist, and will mark it as such.

And most important of all - Google deletes a domain’s PageRank the moment the domain is deleted. So even if 10 minutes before domain deletion it had PR6, after the deletion the PR will be 0.
Actually, that’s not true.
You will still see that the PR is 6, since the Pagerank does not update every day, but after a few weeks, your PR will drop to 0, and what then?

P.S.
I’m not saying that looking through expired domain lists is not worthwhile. You can find very rare domains that are deleted every day, and the only way to grab them is to backorder (A.K.A. tell the registrant that you want this domain, and the registrant will try to grab it the moment it’s released to the general public).
What I’m saying is, that you can not build massive traffic through expired domain names.

Related Reading:

• Expired Domain Fortunes
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