How to Make Sure Your Expired Domains Are Clean

Spam checking is the most crucial part one must do before purchasing a domain. Let's say you're about to buy a house. Do you just buy it without doing any research about the neighborhood, value for money, build quality, location, etc? In the same way, the expired domain needs to be researched properly before investing your time and money.

Domain Coasters is well known for providing Spam Free domains. We have manually checked over 10k+ domains in the last couple of months. We do several processes to filter out the junky spammed domains.

Unfortunately, there's no way to automate the entire process for now. But we have simplified it to save your time. For us, it'd take anywhere between 3-10 mins to thoroughly scrutinize the domain.

I'm sure after reading this article you will be able to identify the spam of any expired domains. Before getting started with the spam check process, let's first understand the issues with reusing a spammed domain.

Why you shouldn't use a domain that's been reused?

If you're looking for an expired domain, you have to make sure it's not reused for any sort of spam activity.

For several reasons, we don't know what all sneaky stuff the previous owner did to the domain. In most of the cases, domains that are reused must have got some sort of penalty.

If you want to reuse the expired domain for SEO purposes, then make sure it wasn't reused in the past.

So here are the steps to make sure your Expired Domains are Virgin / Spam-Free.

 

Wayback Spam Checking

Wayback Archive checking is the first thing we do. Spammers got so advanced which makes it tedious to figure out whether they've been reused or not.

Here's how you can find it out:

Chinese/Japanese Archives Records

If you're into the expired domains game, you'd know how common is it to see amazing powerful domains being reused as Chinese/Japanese sites.

Have a look at the below picture! It has impressive links and has around 300+ RD.

But unfortunately, it has been reused as a Chinese electronics site.

It's a shame powerful domains like this have been ruined 🙁

403 Forbidden Error

Many PBNs would have blocked bots especially backlinks crawlers like Ahrefs, Majestic and more. But there are plugins that block every bot except search engine bots. So it returns forbidden error in Wayback as they've blocked the Wayback crawlers.

If a domain returns 403 forbidden error for the homepage, check it thoroughly or better just skip it. Most likely it'd been reused.

PBNs

We process tons of domains and it's pretty easy to spot a PBN.

Most PBNs have the same patterns as:

• Full Homepage Posts
• Basic themes
• Spammy articles (Payday loans, Pharma, etc)
• Totally out of topic content (Like Car loan articles on a health domain)

However, some people might be sneaky. The new owner might have recovered the old way back archive and installed WP on a separate directory and inserted links!

Link Insertions

Link insertions are hard to spot because the site will look exactly like the original version. Look out for links in sidebar, footer and in source code too.

Redirection

Redirection is fine. Some businesses might move to a new URL and they would redirect their old domain to new domain. In such cases, It's totally fine to use!

Example:

1. Newyorktimes.com redirects to nytimes.com
2. A gaming website redirecting to its developer's site.

However, if it's redirected to an irrelevant domain, then it's better to avoid it.

Example:

FoodandNutrition.com to NFLcheapjerseys.com

Anchor Text Spam

We have been through this several times, where domains are super-clean, nothing suspicious would have been detected in Wayback, but when we check the anchors it'd be ruined with anchors like buy Cialis online, payday loans, etc.

Two possible explanations we have:

1. The new owner might have retained the same wayback and inserted links or tried to rank the domain through inner pages
2. Someone did negative SEO on the domain.

Whatever the case, it's always better to skip those domains.

PRO TIP: Always use Historical Index in Ahrefs to check out all the anchors and backlinks.

Here are a few examples:

[rl_gallery id="1063"]

Here's a keyword list of few commonly found spammy anchors:

Drop & Nameserver History

This is another great hack to spam check the domains easily! To check this method kindly unlock the content locker 🙂

There was a piece of news around the community, that Google resets the backlink profile as soon the domain is expired, thus the link juice is lost. (Source)

However, it was a false statement. After various testing, expired domains do carry its old link juice. Matt Diggity tested this out and it turns out some expired domains did pass the test.

If domain ownership, nameservers, hosting changes too many times, then the domain may not pass the PBN test.

Tools that can check Nameserver changes, Drops, etc

• WhoISrequest
• CompleteDNS
• Domain Tools

Any domain which is dropped more than 3 times is probably reused and it's better to avoid such domains.

Nameservers to Avoid

• .jp namesevers
• 1 dollar hosting nameservers like HawkHostings, etc

Redirected Links

It's not uncommon to see domains being redirected to inflate metrics / tier links / Spam redirects. And it might slip out of your eyes easily. Use Ahrefs "With redirect chain"  option to find out the redirected links. There is no point in registering an expired domain which doesn't have authority links directly pointing to it.

 

Low-Quality Links

Low-Quality links are just a waste of time. We make sure that our domains have min 30+ RD and have contextual links from DR 80+ sites.  We filter out domains that have low-quality links.

Low-Quality Links sources:

• Directory Links
• Web 2.0 Links
• Comments/Bookmarks
• Forum links
• GSA/Xrumer links

 

Google Search Results

Google search result is a good way to find out the old cached version of the domains. Sometime, wayback might have failed to capture the website and search results could reveal how it was being used.

Summary

Spam Checking is quite a time-consuming work for sure. But with above-mentioned methods, you can simplify it to save time. Using tools like WhoisRequest is going to save you a lot of time and helps you to filter out domains with drops using their API.

In short, you have to make sure that the expired domain wasn't reused and has good quality links.

Getting expired domains in 2019 is definitely much harder than it was a few years before.  At Domain Coasters, we're providing Spam Free domains at the CHEAPEST price while retaining the Quality.

So why don't you just buy the domain from us instead of wasting your precious time with all these spam-checking processes?!?!