Taking advantage of expired domains is nothing new in SEO. When done right - and when you manage to find some that are worth buying, they can be yet another way to build relevant links to your website - Or use for other purposes.
We are going to cover ways to find decent domains in New Zealand such as .co.nz and .nz domains that might be useful to use for your SEO and link building campaigns.
Currently, there are not many rules and regulations for buying New Zealand domains. Unlike Australia, you aren't required to provide any proof such as an ABN or anything saying you have a business and require the domain.
Australian websites are a little more tricky. James Gatward who runs a Melbourne web design company says this about Australian Business Numbers:
"It is advised that you have an ABN if you are using your domain for your company or other commercial purposes. This not only helps you to register a .au domain, it also adds to the site's reputation."
So for NZ you can just register the domain from somewhere like OnlyDomains and you are set to go - Great for PBN's as you can just build up an entity with a random address and phone number as well, then create an alias profile to manage the domain. If you're trying to rank an Australian business, you may want to use .com domains as PBN's instead.
When you take the time to do them right, it is a nice way to get some good wins with your rankings in Google - Especially when there isn't that much competition.
If you're relatively new to SEO I suggest treading lightly with these, because if you end up buying the wrong ones or leaving a trail of footprints, it can be quite harmful.
While Google isn't as smart and amazing as many people think, you still need to be careful. There are also those petty people who can't handle the fact that you did a better job at ranking and will attempt to tear you down by reporting anything they can instead of focusing on their own skills.
We call them Nark-E-O's since they aren't considered real SEO's in this game. Negative SEO is nasty and I recommend you avoid going there or you will get burnt pretty bad should someone find out what you're doing. You also never know who you are dealing with, and they may fight back a lot harder for a lot longer when they find out someone has been trying to destroy their business.
I like to use SiteProfiler for this strategy. It gives you a quick and nice overview of the standard DA, PA, CF, TF stats, while showing referring domains and what the top ones are, as well as anchor text info.
Another good thing about it is that it's pretty cheap for what you get. Part of Mangools suite of SEO tools, so you also get many other uses for it - particularly their keyword research tool which is really great.
If you are just getting into this, I'd suggest checking it out. I have been using the Mangools suite of tools for a long time along with the more advanced SEO tools and still recommend it.
When looking at New Zealand domains using this, a pretty average site is a DA of about 15-20 with about 10 referring domains. Most people from the US will laugh at those metrics, and while I agree it isn't much, they can still have their uses - especially for local SEO, but for quite a low cost you can start from scratch and push metrics to a similar amount by just buying some local citations.
I try to aim for a site with a clean anchor text profile - so no spammy words or anything. Relevant backlinks that make sense to be pointing at the site. Ideally some well known sites in the industry are good as well.
30-40+ referring domains isn't too bad, and a DA above 25 is generally where I'll start paying closer attention to a site - Again, this is JUST for NZ and expired domains, totally different story for other places and use-cases.
If you're consistent, you can get lucky like with the example below. A site I stumbled across, and bought for about $20.