Choosing a domain name can be a time-consuming process, and promoting it even more so. But there's not always a need to do all the work yourself: a pre-owned domain name can boost your efforts considerably.

Every day, thousands of pre-owned domain names go back on the market, as people forget or no longer wish to renew their domain names. Many of these names will be worthwhile investments because they have already built up some interest online: bookmarks, links, reviews and so on. None of these links will resolve now; people attempting to visit the sites will be met with an error page. Of course, if you then register one of these domain names and use it for your own website, you will have instant traffic from the returning visitors and links that the previous owner has built up.

Pre-owned domains can have all sorts of benefits. Domain owners might have participated in linking schemes, meaning that links to their – and now your – website are all over the internet, often on related sites, especially if the domain name is keyword-rich. Strong descriptive Domain Names can also have high page rankings in search engines, and the site may have been submitted to Yahoo or DMOZ with a description relevant to your site. Another benefit is that you have a chance of grabbing a very strong domain name in this way. It can often feel like "all the good names are gone", but hunting for a pre-owned one, or one that is about to expire, can lead to much better names. There are lots of sites online which specialise in pre-owned domain names, and lists of names which are about to expire.

There are, however, some issues to be aware of when considering registering a pre-owned domain. The first is copyright infringement: make sure that you will not be registering a domain name that was accidentally lost and which the original owner can make a legitimate claim to. If you register spludgy.com after Spludgy Inc. forgets to renew their domain, they could well sue you to get it back, and win. It's not worth getting taken to court!

Another is the reputation of the domain you're buying into. It's a good idea to check using Alexa.com or Archive.org to find out the nature of the site at previous times and to work out whether the domain is "tainted" in any way, and whether it is appropriate to your site's theme or business. Domain names get abandoned for all sorts of reasons; it could be that the owner just forgot to renew it, but other possibilities are that they were receiving an excess of spam, or even that some people angry with content of the site or the individual who owned it were attacking with email bombs or denial-of-service attacks.

Domain names may have reputations that you don't know about. An innocent-sounding acronym could have stood for something obscene or politically contentious. It is very important that you make sure you'll be getting the right kind of traffic from your new domain. Irrelevant domain names will be worthless and may even damage your page rank by making it look as if you are link-spamming. A domain may also have been banned for spamming the search engines by using black-hat search engine optimisation techniques. Have a good look at any potential purchases on Archive.org (using the WayBack Machine) and see exactly what you're buying into. DomainsBot.com has a free and paid service with extensive lists of high-traffic expired domains. Pool.com and DirectNic.com offer similar free services.

By Natalie Catchpole