Expired domains are a great way to capitalize on the efforts of someone else without having to spend a lot of effort or time on your own to reap the benefits. In the past, I’ve talked about several different ways to use expired domains for your benefit. Whether you’re looking to add expired domains into your private blog network or are looking to develop one into your own primary “money” website, there are huge benefits you can enjoy by going this route. But, you don’t want to just go out and register any expired domain name. Before you purchase, you’ll want to make sure the domain you’re interested in is clean and free of spam. Spam checking is probably the most integral part of purchasing expired domains. It doesn’t matter if you buy domains from another individual, a broker, or you’re finding them yourself, you’re going to want to make sure they’re adequately spam checked!
Ahrefs AND Majestic Reports For Spam Checking
Often times Ahrefs and Majestic will paint very different pictures. For instance, if you see a domain with DA 29 PA 39 and a max CF of 8 & max TF of 6 then it shouldn’t take in depth analysis to realize something is obviously wrong. By looking at the full picture (DA/PA and CF/TF) you’ll often discover poor domains. Those who have been buying expired domains for a long period of time know it’s possible to spam your way to high DA/PA, just like what webmasters once saw with Google PageRank.
Types Of Spam & How To Identify It
1. Outbound Link Spam – The worst spam to find on an expired domain is outbound link spam. This usually comes in the form of links with Chinese or Pharmacy anchor text littered all over the site. This is the easiest, yet most time consuming spam to identify. You can identify it by using the Way Back Time Machine. Just enter your desired domain name into the search box and see what results come up. View old snap shots of the domain and look for outbound links that appear to have Chinese anchor text or links which are stuffed into paragraphs using multiple anchor texts.
2. Anchor Text Spam – Anchor text spam produces another major red flag. The difference between anchor text spam and SEO spam is that anchor text spam isn’t relevant. Often times this shows up immediately when you plug the domain into Majestic and you get a block of “Buy Cialis” anchor text. Alternatively you can plug the domain into Ahrefs and it’ll spit out the anchor text cloud, which is a fairly handy feature. Assuming it’s not showing up on the homepage of Majestic you can head into the “anchor text section” to get a better picture of the link building. Like outbound link spam, anchor text spam is often an indication of what’s likely a penalized domain. One thing I’ve personally done to help identify dozens of spammy sites that looked great on first inspection is use Majestic SEO’s Historic Index to check anchor text. This way I can identify not only if there is spam directed to the site right now, but if at any time, any where, someone had thrown a few nasty links towards the domain.
Additional Things To Watch For
When looking at expired domains, I always perform the two methods above. However, there are other things you can do to be absolutely sure a domain is clean. While looking at domains which other individuals are selling, I’ll plug them into Google just to see if they’re indexed. I type site:DomainName.com into Google and see if anything comes up. If so, what title and meta description does Google show? Is there any spam keywords stuffed in the Google description? If so, these are the types of things you might not notice by only looking at Majestic and Ahrefs.
Hopefully this post gives you some insight into my process and helps you find better quality expired domains in the future. A lot more can go into finding totally clean domains than most people teach. In fact, there are times I’ve spent multiple hours going through backlinks to be absolutely certain that everything pointing into the domain was clean and spam-free. The two types of spam above are the most common you will come across with expired domains, so Ahrefs and Majestic are two tools you might as well bookmark right now if you plan on getting into them!
