Expired Directory Domains: How I Found Them for Building New Directories

Finding a good domain name can be a real headache. I'm not a professional coder – more of a "vibe coder" who knows enough to get by and definitely knows when to call in a real developer for anything production-ready. But I've been looking into something interesting: using expired directory domains. These are domains that used to host actual directories or resource lists, and they often come with some existing history and backlinks. I figured they'd be a solid starting point for building new directory sites. Here's how I went about finding them, with a lot of help from the Gemini CLI.

Step 1: Finding the Right Data to Start With

Most people might think about manually searching for expired domains, but that's a huge time sink. I prefer to start with data that's already out there.

For example, I used a Kaggle dataset that listed products from Product Hunt. While Product Hunt has all sorts of products, many of those products are directories themselves – like lists of tools, resources, or startups. This dataset gave me thousands of products, and importantly, their associated websites. This approach, handled efficiently by the Gemini CLI, saved me a ton of time on initial data collection.

Step 2: Getting Just the Domain Name

Once I had the raw data, the next step was to pull out just the clean domain names from all those URLs. The websites column in the dataset often had URLs mixed in with other text, so I needed a way to get just example.com from something like https://www.example.com/blog/post.

The Gemini CLI helped me use this Python function for that:

import re
from urllib.parse import urlparse

def get_clean_domain(url_string):
    """Extracts the clean domain name from a URL."""
    try:
        match = re.search(r"https?://[^\s,']+", url_string)
        if not match:
            return None
        parsed_url = urlparse(match.group(0))
        domain = parsed_url.netloc
        if domain.startswith('www.'):
            domain = domain[4:]
        return domain
    except:
        return None

Step 3: Checking WHOIS for Expiration

My first check for whether a domain was expired involved looking at its WHOIS record. The Gemini CLI handled running these lookups for me.

If a domain's WHOIS record didn't show an expiration date, or if the lookup failed completely, I considered it potentially available. This was a good first sign that the domain might be expired or never fully registered.

However, I learned that a missing WHOIS record isn't always the full story. Sometimes, active websites use privacy services that hide their WHOIS data, or the WHOIS server might just be having issues. So, I knew I needed another step to be sure.

Step 4: Making Sure the Site Isn't Actually Live

This was a really important step to avoid wasting time on domains that looked expired but were still active. Just because the WHOIS data was unclear didn't mean the site was truly gone.

For any domain that seemed potentially available from the WHOIS check, the Gemini CLI performed two more quick checks:

1. DNS Resolution: It tried to see if the domain still pointed to an IP address. If it's didn't, that was a strong indicator it wasn't active anymore.
2. HTTP Request: It then tried to make a quick request to the domain. If a live website responded, even if the WHOIS data was ambiguous, I knew to skip that domain.

import socket
import requests

def is_website_live(domain):
    """Checks if a domain has a live website."""
    try:
        # First, check if the domain has a valid IP address
        socket.gethostbyname(domain)

        # Second, try to make a quick request to the website
        # We use a short timeout to speed things up
        response = requests.head(f"http://{domain}", timeout=5, allow_redirects=True)

        # If we get a successful status code (like 200 OK), the site is live
        if response.status_code < 400:
            return True
    except (socket.gaierror, requests.exceptions.RequestException):
        # If either check fails, the site is likely not live
        return False
    return False

Only domains that failed both of these checks were considered truly available. This thorough process, largely automated by the Gemini CLI, helped me get a reliable list of genuinely expired domains.

The Result: A List of Expired Directory Domains

After all those checks, what I ended up with, thanks to the Gemini CLI's efficient work, was a list of promising expired directory domains. These aren't just random names; they're domains that have some history. I can now use them to:

• Start new directories with a bit of a head start in terms of SEO.
• Build niche directories that might already have some authority in a specific area.
• Potentially get some backlinks without having to build them from scratch, especially from sites that linked to the old directory.

It's a pretty systematic way to find these, and honestly, having the Gemini CLI handle the heavy lifting made it a lot easier to get this list for my next directory project.