GoDaddy Auctions review

This review is based on public information about GoDaddy Auctions and third-party ratings, checked on 4 October 2026. The rating out of 10 is the editor’s own judgement.

A note on sources. The GoDaddy Auctions site and GoDaddy’s affiliate page returned an error to our reader on 4 October 2026. The facts below come from GoDaddy’s own help page on listing types, which we could open.

How it works

GoDaddy Auctions is the aftermarket of the registrar GoDaddy. For off-page SEO, the part that matters is expired domains: names whose owners did not renew, bought for the backlinks they already have. Our guide to expired domains and 301 redirects explains how they are used.

GoDaddy’s help page describes five listing types:

Listing type	Length	How it sells
Expired auction	10 days	Bidding, starts 26 days after the domain expires
Expired closeout	5 days	Buy Now, price falls daily, from $5
Value priced auction	15 days	Bidding, opening price set by GoDaddy
Offer and counter-offer	Offers lapse after 7 days	Negotiation with the seller
Offer with Buy Now	Offers lapse after 7 days	Negotiation or a fixed price

The first two are the expired stock. The other three are general aftermarket listings. An accepted offer is binding.

One rule deserves attention. The help page says the registrant can reclaim an expired domain up to 30 days after expiry. An expired auction starts at day 26, so read the help page on timelines before you bid on a domain that has only just been listed.

Pricing

Expired auctions sell at whatever the bidding reaches. Closeouts are the fixed-price route: the help page says prices fall each day to as low as $5, and that a closeout fee and a renewal or transfer fee are added on top.

GoDaddy’s help pages refer to a GoDaddy Auctions membership for buying. We could not read the page that states its current price, so we do not quote one. Check it before you plan a budget.

For context, our tactic page puts usable expired domains at $50 to $500 and strong ones at $1,000 to $10,000 or more, on practitioner estimates.

Checking a domain before you bid

Nothing here is vetted. A domain reaches auction because someone stopped paying for it, and the listing does not tell you whether it was a real site, a spam site or part of a network. Check the archived versions and the linking pages yourself. Our lesson on faked link metrics covers the warning signs, and redirects and link equity covers what to expect after a purchase.

The risk of the tactic

We rate this at 3 out of 5. The range for expired domains is 2 to 4, and the use decides where you land. Google added an expired domain abuse policy in March 2024, aimed at domains repurposed mainly to manipulate rankings. Rebuilding on the same topic is the low end. Redirecting into an unrelated site, or using the domain in a private blog network, is the high end.

What public reviews say

We found no Trustpilot profile for the auctions site at the address we tried. GoDaddy as a whole has a Trustpilot score of 4.4 from 143,785 reviews, checked in October 2026. Those reviews are about the registrar, its support, billing and website builder, so they say little about the auction experience.

For other options, see our expired domains and network hosting comparison.