How I check an expired domain’s past before I buy it
A domain comes with its history. These are the six checks I run every time, and what makes me walk away.
Old Web, New TricksAn expired domain is not a blank page. Someone owned it, built something on it, maybe sold links from it, maybe let it get hacked. Google remembers some of that. So before I pay for one, I go through the same six checks. None of them are clever. Skipping them is what gets expensive.
What it used to be
I open the domain in the Wayback Machine and click through snapshots from different years, not just the last one. I’m looking for what the site actually was, and whether that changed.
- Pages about casinos, pills or adult content that have nothing to do with the original site.
- Text in a language the site never used, which often means it was hacked.
- Years of parking pages, which means there’s little left to bring back.
Who links to it, and with what words
Next I pull the backlinks and, more importantly, the anchor texts. A clean domain has anchors like its name, its URL, or the topic it covered.
The anchors tell you more than the link count. One forum full of “cheap viagra” links pointing at a gardening blog is a bigger warning than a low number of links.
How often it changed hands
WHOIS history and drop history show how many times the domain expired and got picked up again. A domain that dropped many times was probably bought for its links each time, and possibly used in a link network.
Whether Google still knows it
I search site:example.com and the old brand name. If a real business used to live there and the brand search returns nothing at all, I want to know why. After buying, the first thing I open in Search Console is Manual actions and Security issues.
Whose name is in it
If the domain contains the name of a company that still exists, I skip it. Old traffic is not worth a trademark complaint.
Whether the topic fits
The links and the old content point to a topic. If I would have to change that topic completely, most of the value is gone anyway.
| Check | Where | Walk away if |
|---|---|---|
| Past content | Wayback Machine | Spam pages, hacked pages, foreign-language junk |
| Backlinks | Any backlink tool | Off-topic or spammy anchors |
| Ownership | WHOIS and drop history | Dropped and re-bought again and again |
site:, brand search, Search Console | Brand vanished, or a manual action after buying | |
| Name | Trademark search | A living company’s brand in the domain |
| Topic | Old content and anchors | You’d need a completely different topic |
That’s the whole list. It takes about as long as a coffee, and it has saved me from more bad buys than any tool has.