Sean Markey looks at expired domains that sold in August and are now

Back with the August sales numbers from NameJet and SnapNames, with a particular look at why names sold for so much when they weren’t even good domain names.

This feels more like writing the obituaries section for a business newspaper than talking about domain sales, but that’s why people love the SEO industry so much. We’re the fungus of the business world, creating beautiful casino pages from the corpses of more legitimate businesses. Let’s see which businesses crossed the rainbow bridge and what has become of their SEO-juiced-up domains.

Here’s a fun stat and a bit of a preview: of the 44 names on the August list with a DR of 15 or higher, at least 13 are now gambling-related (either directly or through a redirect). Almost 30%!

The Parents Television Council was the absolute aura-less, rizz-lacking group of the 2000s filing complaints at the FCC every time anything on TV became a little too interesting. For 30 years, it was the loudest “won’t somebody think of the children!!!” voice in American media. In 2021, it was renamed the Parents Television and Media Council and then, four years later, filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy.

Even on its way through the expiration process, the site clung to some rankings and traffic, making this a worthwhile pickup for some SEO team (organic traffic is the highest signal an expiring domain can give–more important than DR or anything else, as long as the stuff it’s ranking for is valuable or niche relevant).

If this was 2018 and you visited a hypothetical just-expired-and-rebuilt ParentsTV.org, you’d be looking at an Amazon affiliate site trying to get you to click on its dubiously sourced TV reviews (no, they didn’t buy all of those TVs) so it could get a percentage of your entire Amazon order.

Today, though:

Canadian casino.

Wait, I mean it redirects to a Canadian casino. It doesn’t even get its own site.

It used to be a Mount Sinai-associated organization called the National Palliative Care Research Center, and if you’re thinking, wow, I bet the backlinks to this site are ginormous, yes, obviously they are:

And if you’re thinking surely, surely! there’s no way somebody bought this and put up a casino si–

Yes, yes, of course they did:

Another Canadian casino site.

Somebody rebuilt the whole old site as a static copy, about 500 pages of it. It still has the NPCRC header and navigation and a “© 2013” footer, and the homepage now reads “Best Online Casinos in Canada in 2026.” The clinical PDFs are still there, and the old contact page still lists the center’s staff.

Last month I wrote about GoodwoodBrewing .com, a brewery domain that ranked number one for Turkish betting searches for one month and then fell off a cliff. One month of 500,000 organic visitors, I said, was probably worth the $6,000 it cost to acquire the domain.

August has the sequel, and this time it lasted about a week.

Mande’s is a breakfast and lunch place in Mandeville, Louisiana, and it’s still open. It now takes orders through Toast, and the .com expired.

The domain’s registration record changed on August 17. On August 18, Turkish betting pages on subdomains like tr.west.mandesrestaurant .com and menu.mandesrestaurant .com started ranking, and Ahrefs’ daily estimate went from about 129 monthly visits to a run rate of roughly 590,000 by August 24.

For a breakfast place in Louisiana.

Here’s what it ranked for on August 31, all in Turkey:

“Deneme bonusu” means trial bonus, the free credit betting sites give new players, and it’s the same family of searches Goodwood ranked for.

On August 26, it collapsed to about 36,000, and it’s around 1,300 now. Every URL I tried on the domain, subdomains included, returns an empty 404, the same thing GoodwoodBrewing .com returns today.

So is a week worth $4,000? Probably. Ahrefs’ August average for the domain comes out to about 138,000 estimated monthly visits, nearly all of it from that one week, on searches where every click is a potential new depositor for somebody’s bonus offer. My guess is that the people running this treat each domain as something to burn through, and when one stops ranking, they move the links and start on the next. That’s why they call it churn-and-burn.

Thomas Nast is the 19th-century cartoonist who helped take down Boss Tweed and gave the Republican Party its elephant. On August 31, his domain was still ranking number one for “thomas nast political cartoons.”

It was also ranking number one in the US for “situs slot,” which is Indonesian for “slot site,” from a subdomain called journal.thomasnast .com.

If you visit the Thomas Nast site today, it ends up on the former site for Daylight Donuts, a Chesterfield, MO donut shop. It now has casino content.

You may also find this interesting:

Google’s own documentation says Googlebot follows up to 10 redirect hops, so whatever Elmhurst’s links are worth probably never reaches the end.

This is a lot of money to pay for a site that isn’t ranking for anything.

Yes, the backlinks are a who’s who of who you’d want in your link profile, but they mean nothing if the site isn’t ranking.

There are some risks to buying a site like this with no rankings:

• maybe it has a penalty you cannot see
• maybe it was redirected to another site, and all of its SEO authority was taken vampire styles from a 301 redirect
• some other terrible thing happened that’s not visible to you

Will it ever rank again? Who knows!

What the site used to be:

NIC Technologies was a government web contractor, and for years NICTUSA .com hosted the Federal Election Commission’s scanned campaign filings and filing search, on subdomains like images.nictusa .com and query.nictusa .com. It also ran Michigan’s campaign finance search.

Every time a reporter wrote about a super PAC donor or a candidate’s fundraising and linked to the actual filing, they linked to this domain. The FEC moved its records onto its own site years ago, and Michigan launched a new system in 2025, so the domain had no organic traffic left by the time it dropped. All it had was links.

Now it’s a people-search site with the headline “Look Up Anyone in the U.S. by Name,” offering addresses, phone numbers, emails and relatives.

But they are doing some things wrong with their build-out that could be contributing to the poor performance. It’s hard to say why.

Every old URL and subdomain redirects to the new homepage. Sending every old filing URL to the homepage is the kind of mass redirect Google tends to treat as a soft 404, so a lot of those links probably count for less than they could. Pointing the old filing paths at relevant search pages would’ve been more work and more value.

A great link profile with no traffic isn’t worth much, unless you’re doing some tricky background redirect stuff I couldn’t really sniff out, or selling links to dummies who don’t care that a domain has no traffic (and thus no value).

Historical DR is measured on August 31, 2026, rather than an unverified auction or expiration date. Current DR and keyword figures were retrieved October 1, 2026. Keyword totals use Ahrefs Site Explorer across all countries and subdomains, counting rankings in the top 100 organic results. The table includes every August sale with a current DR of 15 or higher.

If you’ve got questions about any of these names, I’ll be hanging out in the comments, just holler.