Three months ago, my side-project Similar To Books had zero traffic, zero authority, and no backlinks outside a few directory listings.The screenshot below shows the domains now backlinking to mine. The Guardian. Wikipedia, 17 times. University of Illinois. The Atlantic. And not shown here is a cluster of niche book blogs. None of those came from outreach or an expensive PR campaign.I bought two expired domains at auction for under $200 combined and 301 redirected them to my site. That's it.PR agencies charge $5,000 and up for a single Guardian placement, with no guarantee it lands. I got those Guardian links as a side effect of buying a dormant book site for $100 USD.Here is how it works.\The Mechanic Is SimpleWhen a website shuts down and its domain lapses, the backlinks pointing to it stay live. Wikipedia entries, news articles, university pages, all of them still reference a URL that now goes nowhere.Buy the domain. Redirect it to your site. Google passes link equity through 301 redirects, and those links now point at you.Every link the previous site earned over its lifetime transfers in one move. No cold emails. No guest post pitches. No PR retainer.Finding the Right DomainsGo to GoDaddy Auctions. Search a keyword in your niche. I searched "books."Start with Buy Now listings, not auctions. Auctions get competitive fast and you will overpay. Buy Now lets you move at a fixed price before anyone else notices what you're looking at.Sort results by Majestic Trust Flow. Trust Flow scores the quality of a domain's backlink profile based on how trusted its referring sites are. The score factors in the amount of trusted backlinks vs spammy backlinks. GoDaddy surfaces it directly in the results column, so no separate tool is needed at this stage.Any domain above TF 10 with 80+ referring domains is worth 2 minutes of your time vetting through the below methods.Vetting: Two ChecksAhrefs (the free backlink checker is enough): pull the domain and look at Domain Rating, referring domain count, and dofollow percentage.The domain I bought, bookshelved.org, showed DR 36, 592 linking websites, 14,000 backlinks, 78% dofollow. That profile took years to build and was sitting at auction for under $200.Semrush free plan: go to Referring Domains and sort by Authority Score, highest first. This is where you find out whether the links are actually worth having.\For bookshelved.org, the top of that list showed Wikipedia and Goodreads. All book-related backlinks. All pointing at a book site. All transferring to a book site. Some of the other backlinks from high authority domains like Oracle and Python.org are less topically relevant, which made me think twice about buying this expired domain.Topical match matters. A pile of links from software engineering blogs landing on a book recommendation site can send a confused signal to Google. The subject of the referring pages should make sense for your niche.The Wayback Machine CheckDo not skip this step.Run the domain through web.archive.org before you buy anything.You are checking two things. First, what was the site actually used for? bookshelved.org was a genuine book wiki and blog with 412 captures going back to 2002. Clean, book-focused history. That's the ideal find.Second, was it ever used for gambling, adult content, or spam? If yes, it is not ideal but there is a recovery path: rebuild the site using Wayback Machine content and a vibe coding tool (should take less than 30 minutes), get pages indexed, and watch Search Console for suppressed impressions. If traffic and indexation look normal after a few weeks, the domain is clean. If impressions are flat, Google has applied a penalty and you need to work through it before redirecting.Two Ways to Play ThisBefore buying, decide which scenario applies to you.You already have a site: Buy the expired domain and 301 redirect it to your existing domain. Cloudflare handles this in under five minutes. Add the domain, point the nameservers, set a redirect rule sending all traffic from /* to your main domain, done.One thing to know here: 301 redirects pass link equity, but not all of it. Google has said they aim to pass full PageRank through redirects, but in practice most SEOs observe some dilution per hop. The links still move the needle noticeably, which is the whole point, but you are not getting 100 cents on the dollar.You have not picked a domain yet: This is the better position to be in. Instead of redirecting, build your site directly on the expired domain. No redirect, no dilution, the full weight of every backlink pointing straight at your pages. If you find an expired domain in your niche with a clean history and a strong referring domain profile, there is a real argument for skipping the "pick a brandable .com" step entirely and just launching on the asset with the built-in authority.The vetting process is the same either way. The difference is just what you do after you buy.Three Things to Know Before You StartTwo to three domains is the ceiling. Google does not officially penalize this, but stacking too many redirects at once looks unnatural. Space acquisitions out and do not push past three pointing at the same destination.Authority without relevance does not transfer the same way. A DR 50 domain from an unrelated industry does less for a book site than a DR 30 domain cited in Guardian book coverage.Links tied to specific content do not travel well. If a domain's backlinks exist because it hosted one famous article or a specific person's work, those links reference the content, not the domain itself. The equity signal is weaker than it looks on paper.Three months in, similartobooks.com sits at around 80 organic visitors a day and growing. No guest posts. No agency. Two domain purchases, under $200 combined. In addition to expired domains, I have leveraged AI directories with backlinks to our AI book recommender and sneaky backlinks to further improve the site’s SEO.The tools: GoDaddy Auctions, Majestic TF (visible inside GoDaddy), the free Ahrefs backlink checker, Semrush free plan, Wayback Machine, Cloudflare.Outside the domain cost itself, the whole process costs nothing.\