What does the Pending Delete status on a domain mean?
When an individual decides to purchase a domain name and then have it not renew or forgets about the expiration, it is often placed in an auction prior to the registrar they first bought the domain name’s registration at releases it back to the the registry they got it from. Once with the registry, they generally will hold it for a decent period time. Depending on the domain name’s extention, time can vary on how long it waits at the registry. This all is determined by the registry though, they can carry the domain name for a good amount of time.
Typically on .com and .net names you will find that Verisign keeps the domain name for a good amount of time and then drops it publically roughly 90 calendar days after the domain’s expiry date.
Commonly within 5 days of being released, Verisign will mark the domain name as “Pending Delete”.
A couple things to think about with pending delete domains.
Almost all domain names purchased after the pending delete period will keep little to no pagerank because they have been sitting for 90 days with plenty of 404 results from any established backlinks.
Pending Delete domains should be purchased for their likeability, projected opportunity, and nothing else.
More common than not domains that had previous page rank from Google will be targetted by domain resellers to try and either make a easy profit off of.
Typically this is assisted directly with the use of a domain name backorder. Our Phoenix Web Design company has success in catching all our pending delete domains through the use of custom scripts that we have written
Most keyword domains are re-registered in aution houses like Sedo, TDNAM, Snapnames, Namejet and Pool, but very commonly some high end keyword domain names get let go directly to the registry to wait it out and/or pass through auction without being bid on. When filtering through loads of high quality domains we use Namesaurus to obtain a quick pre-filtered geo+business.com or .net list which can be very useful in helping our customers target directly their competitive keywords.
Some things to note about pending delete domain names can be they commonly have little pagerank from Google left proceeding the 90 days of expiring and throwing a 404 error or parked landing page when Google observes the domain. If the domain name is a perfect fit though, it is still a great name to lock up.
We on Geographical based domains because of the keywords businesses target.
It is extremely easy to discover great domains with the websites out there like the above mentioned Pending Delete Domains lists from Namesaurus.
