The most important thing to think about setting up blog network is how to choose domain. You win half of the battle if you have a good expired domain for your private blog network. If you have a good quality expired domain, you don’t start from scratch.

How do you find a good quality expired domain?

First what is a good quality expired domain? For those who know a little bit of this topic, they may have some idea but may not know what exactly. For example the terms DA, PA, TF, CF, etc. I will explain these terms one by one as following.

1. Domain age – Some domain name has been registered since 1999 and has been changed owners since. From my experience, Google gives priority to old domain than new ones. However, you must be careful about the history of the domain whether they have done any spamming or not.
2. Index number – I am interested in looking at the number of indexes such that this domain has been banned from Google before. I look for at least 1 index.
3. DA value (Domain Authority) – This is an index that moz.com calculates and let you know the quality of a domain. It is calculated using many factors for example number of backlinks, domain age, PR and etc. Some may doubt if we could consider only DA value then. The answer is “Yes, partly.” Because sometimes information that moz.com take for calculation is not available. The number of backlinks may be lower than some big names like ahrefs.com. In later posts, I will write step-by-step for considering domain. This one, I only give you some basic theories.
4. PA value (Page Authority) – This is also moz index. The same as DA value but calculate for specific page only.
5. TF value (Trust flow) – Majestic collated many trusted seed sites based on a manual review of the web. This process forms the foundation of Majestic Trust Flow. Sites closely linked to a trusted seed site can see higher scores, whereas sites that may have some questionable links would see a much lower score.
6. CF value (Citation flow) – Citation flow predicts how influential a URL might be based on how many sites link to it. Links are now not all created with equal weight – and because a strong link will have a relatively stronger influence on URLs, Citation Flow is based on stronger
7. Number of backlinks – This information can be obtained from many sources. The most popular one is majestic and ahrefs. They can be either with charge or free of charge. If you pay, you can get unlimited information. More backlink generally mean better but you need to consider other factor too. Are those backlink from different domain/server location? Is that content related to domain? Do those backlink look like spam?

For all of the 7 factors I mentioned, I give higher priority to the amount and characteristic of backlinks of domain because they can identify if that domain is of a good quality or not.