I’ve often heard that an expired domain needs to have existing traffic before buying it. The logic goes: if it had traffic, Google accepted it and will happily send traffic back to it now.
Well, in my experience, there is no clear connection with past traffic at all. I can buy a domain with traffic and it won’t go anywhere, just like in the example above.
Or I can buy one without any traffic, upload content, and what everyone hopes for happens—the first visitors start coming in.
I’ve concluded for myself that traffic is merely an indirect metric and shouldn’t be relied upon.