Kassey Lee explains the process he went through when evaluating an expired domain for purchase.

I was watching Godaddy Auctions today and found the expiring domain YogaYoung.com. Since “yoga” is a popular keyword, I decided to look into this domain.

First, I checked LinkedIn but found no company using the name “Yoga Young”. Google search gave no hope either.

However, dotDB, a site that shows registered domains containing a word/second level domain, reported 12 matches. dotDB has a nice feature I like — the matches have links. By installing the Snap Links extension to my Firefox browser, I can open the links and check their websites all at once.

The result was the discovery of two operating websites: YogaYoungistan.com and YogaYoung.cn.

Since YogaYoungistan.com already matches its brand Yoga Youngistan, there is no motivation for the company to change its domain to YogaYoung.com which is not brand-matching after all.

Nevertheless, YogaYoung.cn looked promising at first because Chinese companies like to upgrade from .cn to .com.

The home page design paints a solid company and the photos show a professional team and active yoga classes. However, even if you don’t read Chinese, you can see the name “Maya Yoga” prominently displayed at several locations. Thus, we can conclude that Maya Yoga is their brand and therefore upgrade from YogaYoung.cn to YogaYoung.com is unlikely because they are not brand-matching.

Based on this research, I decided not to acquire YogaYoung.com because I could not find any potential end users for it.