You're Not Buying a Domain. You're Buying a Head Start.
Most people look at a $99 domain and think: "Is this worth a hundred bucks?" Wrong question. The right question is: "What would it cost me to build what this domain already has?" Sometimes the answer is nothing. Sometimes it's thousands of dollars and two years of your life.
Here's how to tell the difference.
1. It Has Backlinks From Sites You Recognize
Pull it into Ahrefs or the free tier of Moz. If it's got 20+ referring domains and a handful are publications you've actually heard of, that's real SEO equity sitting there waiting for you. A single editorial link from a mid-authority site can take months to earn organically. You're buying those months.
2. The Name Matches a High-CPM Keyword
Check Google Keyword Planner. If the exact phrase gets searched 10,000+ times a month and advertisers are paying $5 or more per click, you're holding a monetizable asset before you've written a single line of code. Finance, legal, insurance, SaaS tools pay. A domain like "smallbizloans" something isn't just a name. It's a traffic funnel with the switch still off.
3. It's a Dot-Com Under 12 Characters
Short and memorable, no hyphens, no numbers. Genuinely scarce. Comparable names on Afternic or Sedo regularly sell for $2,000 to $20,000. At $99 on NotRenewing, you're not buying at market. You're buying before the market notices it's there.
4. The Previous Site Had Real Traffic
Use the Wayback Machine to see what lived there. If it was an actual operating business rather than a parked page, run it through Similarweb or SEMrush for historical traffic estimates. A domain with real operating history carries trust signals a brand-new registration will spend years trying to fake.
5. It's Pronounceable Over the Phone
This sounds soft. It isn't. Domains you can say once without spelling it out afterward are worth meaningfully more, and serious buyers in M&A know it better than most founders do. If someone hears it and immediately gets it, brand value is already baked into that string of characters.
Any one of these signals is interesting. Three or more and you're looking at an arbitrage opportunity, not just a domain purchase.