Advanced SEO
📅 February 13, 2025
⏱️ 10 minutes read

The Ultimate Checklist for Analyzing an Expired Domain's Backlink Profile

You've moved past the initial 10-minute vet. You have a domain on your watchlist that shows immense promise: good top-level metrics, a clean history on Archive.org, and it's still indexed in Google. Now it's time for the deep dive. The true value and risk of an expired domain are written in the code of its backlink profile. This is where you separate the truly great from the merely good, and where you can spot sophisticated spam that fools the surface-level checks.

This is not a quick scan; this is a forensic investigation. Using a professional SEO tool like Ahrefs, Moz, Semrush, or Majestic is essential for this level of analysis. Follow this ultimate checklist to leave no stone unturned.

Checklist Item 1: The Authority and Trust Flow

Start with the 30,000-foot view of the domain's authority. Look beyond a single metric and compare several.

  • DA vs. DR vs. TF: Check the Domain Authority (Moz), Domain Rating (Ahrefs), and Trust Flow (Majestic). Are they roughly in the same ballpark? A huge discrepancy can be a red flag (e.g., a DA of 50 but a TF of 5 might indicate a high quantity of low-trust links).
  • Referring Domains vs. Backlinks: Look at the ratio. A healthy profile has a good ratio of referring domains to total backlinks. A domain with 100 referring domains and 200,000 backlinks is a massive red flag for sitewide spam links.

Checklist Item 2: Referring Domain Quality & Relevance

This is the heart of your analysis. A domain is defined by the company it keeps. Sort the referring domains by their authority (DA/DR) to see the most powerful links first.

  • Top 20 Links: Manually visit the top 10-20 most authoritative websites linking to the domain. Are they real, legitimate sites? Do they look professional and well-maintained?
  • Topical Relevance: Is there a clear topical theme among the linking domains? If you're buying a domain for your tech blog, you want to see links from other tech sites, not from recipe blogs and auto repair forums.
  • Geographic Relevance: Check the TLDs and language of the linking sites. If you're targeting an English-speaking audience, a profile dominated by links from Russian (`.ru`) or Chinese (`.cn`) domains is a sign of a spammy or hacked link profile.
  • Look for "PBN Red Flags": Do many of the linking sites have generic themes, stock photos, and articles on a wide variety of topics? Do they have names like `BestSEOGuide2015.com`? These are signs the domain was part of a PBN.

Checklist Item 3: Anchor Text Analysis

The anchor text distribution tells you how other websites view and categorize your target domain. It's also one of the clearest indicators of manipulation.

  • Brand and URL Dominance: In a natural profile, the vast majority of anchors (typically 70%+) will be the brand name, the URL itself, or variations (e.g., "Unowna," "unowna.com," "[www.unowna.com](https://www.unowna.com)").
  • "Money" Keyword Percentage: Look for the percentage of anchors that are exact-match commercial keywords. A high percentage (over 5-10%) of anchors like "buy cheap laptops" is a huge red flag for a past link scheme.
  • Foreign or Toxic Anchors: Scan the list for any anchors in foreign languages, or related to adult, gambling, or pharmaceutical topics. This is an immediate sign of a toxic history.

Checklist Item 4: Link Velocity and History

A good SEO tool will show you a graph of how the domain acquired its links over time. This can reveal unnatural patterns.

  • Look for Sudden Spikes: Did the domain have a slow, natural growth of links for years and then suddenly acquire 50,000 links in one month? This often indicates the start of a spam campaign or that the domain was repurposed for a PBN.
  • Look for Sudden Drops: A sharp, sudden drop in the number of referring domains can indicate that the domain was part of a PBN that was de-indexed by Google.

Checklist Item 5: Top Linked Pages

Analyzing which specific pages on the old site attracted the most links is crucial, especially if you plan to rebuild on the domain.

  • Identify the Power Pages: Find the top 3-5 pages with the most referring domains. These are your most valuable assets.
  • Cross-Reference with Archive.org: Plug these specific URLs into the Wayback Machine. What content was on these pages? Understanding this gives you a blueprint for the kind of content you need to create to maintain the relevance of those powerful links.
  • Check for 404s: Are many of the most powerful links pointing to pages that were already deleted by the previous owner? This slightly diminishes their value but presents an opportunity to reclaim that link equity by rebuilding those pages or redirecting them.

Conclusion: The Full Story is in the Links

Completing this checklist provides you with a comprehensive, multi-faceted view of an expired domain's backlink profile. It takes you far beyond the simple DA or DR score and gives you the context needed to make a truly informed investment decision. This level of analysis is what separates amateur domain hunters from professional SEOs and investors. By learning to read the story told by the links, you can confidently identify domains that have a rock-solid foundation and avoid the ones with hidden cracks that could bring your project crashing down.