The checklist
- Why do you want it? If the answer is only "it is old", stop. In our study of 224 aged domains, 96% had an Authority Score of 2 or less despite a median age of over 22 years.
- Look at its history. Open it in the Wayback Machine and scroll through the years. You want a real site on a related topic, not a casino, pharmacy or foreign-language spam phase.
- Read the backlinks, not the count. Open the referring domains list. Real sites, directories and articles are good. Thousands of links from unrelated or auto-generated pages are a warning.
- Check anchor text. Anchors full of gambling, pills or adult terms mean someone used the domain for spam.
- Search for the domain name in quotes. Mentions on forums, news or social media tell you what people associate with it.
- Check for trademarks. A brand name inside the domain can cost you the domain later.
- Check whether it is still indexed. Search for site: plus the domain. Zero results after a spam phase can mean a penalty.
- Check the topic fit. Links help most when your new site is about the same thing the old one was.
- Plan the first 90 days. A domain with clean links and no site gains nothing until you put useful pages on it. Budget for the build, not just the domain.
What our data says about expired domains
In our expired domains study, 11 of 37 dropped domains had been registered again by someone else. Two were serving spam and two had become look-alike content sites using the domains' old purpose. That is exactly the history you want to find before you buy.
