The Complete Step-by-Step Guide to Find and Spam Check Expired Domains
by Josh Kelly
Last Updated: Dec 2020
You don’t want to invest in a big PBN, get all your articles written and links up, and only later to find out that you bought bad domains, to begin with. Whether you’re registering domains yourself, buying expired domains that were pre-checked, or even bidding at auctions, it’s easy to end up with lemons.
To help you avoid the bad domains and end up with a solid and effective PBN, I’ve put together this guide for finding great domains.
In this guide, you’ll learn:
- How to determine if an expired domain is worth registering;
- What are the signs of a spammy domain that you should avoid;
- How to make sure your expired domain will pass link juice, before investing in setting them up.
The industry of expired domains can often feel like a community reserved for domain experts and SEO gurus, but we’d like to change that. We prepared an introductory video with some super practical truth bombs anyone can use!
In 30 minutes from now, you’ll feel a lot less lost looking through our expired domains list!
These are the same guidelines we use at Hammerhead Domains to register all the domains for our marketplace, and for my 500+ site personal PBN. Our expired domain PBN supports hundreds of first page rankings, so I can tell you from our direct experience that this works.
At Hammerhead Domains, we offer 15,000+ expired domains with buy-now prices. These domains are registered with us and can be easily transferred to you.
Expired domains still have links pointing to them and authority in Google. Instead of paying hundreds of dollars for each domain, you can register our domains yourself for the price of registration. You can build a decent size PBN this way for just a few hundred dollars.
A quick disclaimer: While this expired domain strategy is working right now, SEO is always changing, and expired domains probably won’t work forever. Also, PBNs and any other reliable SEO strategies I know take a significant amount of time and financial investment. It’s not a “get rich quick scheme” and should not be treated as such.
How to Choose a Good Expired Domain for SEO
Effective PBN domains have high Moz DA, high Majestic Trust flow, and will index in Google. Lower authority and trust may be acceptable, especially if the domain has backlinks related to your business’s topics. Getting indexed by Google is an absolute must.
Read more about expired domains: how to buy them and make money with them.
Google indexing a domain means that they start including it in their search results. You can check whether a domain is indexed by searching “site:domain.com” in Google. Pages on your domain should be the first result.
If a domain you register indexes in Google, it means that Google has NOT assigned a penalty to the domain. If it doesn’t index in Google within about 10-15 days after you register it, it may have a penalty and you shouldn’t use it in your PBN unless it eventually indexes.
Domains are penalized for having a spammy backlink profile (spammy anchor text, or spammy content on the backlinks). Manual penalties could also have been applied to the domain while it was still being used, or a bulk penalty could have been applied if, say, the expired domain had been hacked and was hosting a virus.
There is no way to know for sure whether a domain has a penalty associated with it before you buy it. That’s why careful spam checking is required before registering domains. We offer a full refund for expired domains with a Google penalty bought from us.
As we look at information about the expired domain, we’ll explain signs that a domain would have a manual penalty associated with it.
At Hammerhead Domains, we find lots of unregistered domains and we only show you the best 1% of domains we find after we filter out lots of spam. Even so, you need to manually spam-check each domain before picking it up.
Once you get the hang of it, this entire process will only take you a few minutes per domain.
Tools You’ll Need:
- A way to check the top backlinks and anchor texts. We use and recommend Majestic. We’re not an affiliate, we just find their data to be the most comprehensive and useful. The lowest level of Majestic subscription should work. You can also use Ahrefs or Moz to do spam checking (although Moz only updates their index 1-2x per month).
- A Hammerhead Domains membership. You get access to 15,000+ exclusive expired domains, including DA20+ domains for less than the cost of 1 domain on auction. Get started by becoming a free member here.
How to Select a Rank-Crushing, High-Authority Expired Domain
It’s up to you to determine what minimum DA and Trust metrics are good enough to add to your PBN, but I’ll give you some rules of thumb that I use when looking at metrics:
- DA needs to be above 15 if it has relevant backlinks to your business’s topic, and above 20 if it’s not relevant. I prefer DA 25+, but good DA 25+ are rarer and usually more expensive.
- Majestic Trust needs to be above 10 for the top host (aka top subdomain – ex: domain.com, www.domain.com, or sub.domain.com, whichever has the highest trust), and the higher the better.
- TLD (com, org, co.uk, etc…) – All the domains in our list are already registered so you’ll have no problems with that.
- Having more than one referring domain is good because if you lose that link in a few months, the domain won’t lose all its authority. I usually prefer at least 10 referring domains, but this is one of my least crucial metrics and I sometimes ignore it if a domain is otherwise really good. Too many (like 500+) referring domains is often a sign of spam.
- I completely ignore PageRank as it hasn’t been updated for a long time and is now irrelevant.
- Majestic Citation isn’t particularly important, but if it’s way higher than Majestic trust, that can be a sign of spam.
- Moz PA isn’t super important because you’ll redirect all the links to the homepage and it will eventually get all the PA on the homepage, but if PA is more than 10 points higher than Moz DA that’s usually a good sign.
We update Moz and Majestic metrics on a weekly basis, but they may be slightly out of date. To verify Moz metrics you can use the official Moz Site Explorer or this bulk Moz checker.
Backlink Spam Checklist:
Once you’ve selected a domain that would be worth registering, it’s time to spam check it. Put the root domain into majestic, and look at the summary.
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Anchor Texts
Look at the circle diagram for Anchor Texts. Are more than 33% the same keyword that’s not the brand name?
This domain may have received a penalty for the anchor text being too high. Avoid it and move onto the next domain.
Are there any particularly spammy sounding anchors?
Avoid porn, gambling, pharmaceuticals, and knock-off designer clothing-related keywords. In this example, almost 90% of the keywords are related to a specific brand of Nike shoes. Avoid domains like this and continue your search.
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Top Pages
Take a quick look at the URLs of the top pages. Sometimes you’ll see subdomains or page URLs that are clearly related to spam. If you see any URLs like this, just move on.
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Backlinks
Click on the top few backlinks and search for the keyword. (If there’s no keyword, you can view the page source and search for the domain name.)
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Avoid Hacked Sites
If the keyword is not visible, it may be a sign that the site was hacked and the hacker hid the links. For an example of hacked links check out the top backlinks for discountmontblancpensuk.com:
One of the top backlinks is on www.circuitexpressinc.com/Iso_cert.htm and at the time of writing, the page source for that page shows an element hidden by javascript with a number of inserted backlinks, including our inserted discount pens site:
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Spammy Backlinks
Assuming the backlinks don’t appear to be hacked, you’ll also want to check that the domain doesn’t share backlinks with lots of spammy sites.
Directory links like this, that stay on topic and link to legitimate sites are great backlinks:
But you generally want to avoid directories where you share links with tons of random sites, some of which are spammy:
Similarly for comment links, genuine comment links are fine:
But avoid sites where the top backlinks are on pages full of comment spam:
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Use History
Search the domain on the Wayback Machine at web.archive.org. By clicking through the website history, you should pretty quickly get an idea of what this site has been used for. My philosophy is most lenient at this stage because if the site was spammed with bad backlinks we should have already found it. With that said, I still avoid domains that were used for anything related to porn, gambling, pills, or knock-offs.
There is some controversy on whether or not to register a domain that was previously used as a PBN. If the domain otherwise looks good, I do register domains that were previously used as PBNs. So far in our domain buying, domains used as PBNs get indexed at a slightly lower rate than those which were never used for anything related to SEO. However, the previous PBN ones still index often enough to make them worthwhile.
If you use Web Archive often, consider making a $10 donation next time they’re raising money. They provide an incredibly useful service to folks like us for free and run on donations.
Watch Me Spam Check Domains [Video]
In this video, I go through a few domains on Hammerhead Domains and talk you through the spam checking process. You’ll see me find 2 domains that are ready to register, and I’ll show you 1 example of a domain that you should skip.
Get Indexed
Once you’ve purchased a domain, make sure your registrar puts up a parking page on the domain (and doesn’t redirect it).
Generally, if you’re domain doesn’t index within a week or two after you put up a parking page, it means Google has your domain marked as spam and you should just move on to a different domain. The good news is that 98% of the expired domains at Hammerhead Domains are indexed!
However, it is possible that your domain isn’t indexing because Google can’t tell that you’re domain is now live. This can happen because all the links are pointing to pages or subdomains that aren’t live.
If you think your domain might not be indexed because Google can’t tell that it’s live, the easiest fix seems to be to set up a blank WordPress install and redirect all the inner pages and any subdomains with links to your homepage. This will ensure the Google crawlers reach your homepage. If it still isn’t indexing, it probably has a penalty.
What I’ve seen is that sometimes, especially if a domain has most of its links pointing to a subdomain, a domain doesn’t get indexed within the first week, but then if I set it up on hosting it does eventually get indexed. Sometimes though, even after setting the domain with hosting and redirecting the subdomain or inner pages, the domain still doesn’t get indexed (presumably because it has a penalty).
I usually don’t go through the pain of setting up hosting and all for domains that aren’t indexing unless all the links are pointing to a subdomain. I suspect a few more of my domains would get indexed, or at least they’d get indexed faster if I set up hosting and redirection for all domains I purchase. It just doesn’t feel worth the time for me, when registering another domain is only going to cost nine dollars.
Common Questions and Concerns
What About Foreign Language Domains?
Many people avoid foreign language domains, but they’re actually a goldmine for high-authority domains. Put English content on them, and they seem to work just as well as to rank English language money sites as any other PBN sites. You can use the same spam checking process for foreign language domains, just use Google Translate to check everything.
Should I Try to Get a Domain Reindexed?
The short answer is no. It’s not worth the time to recover the $9 investment.
To find out the specific Google penalty and request to get it removed, you’ll have to register the domain with Google’s Search Console. To verify the domain, you have to get the site hosted.
Think about it before you do this: you are about to add spammy domains to your Search Console account and claim ownership of these spammy domains. From Google’s perspective, it might raise alarm bells if you suddenly want a penalty removed on a bunch of high-authority domains. See the problem?
Alternatively, you could register a new Google account for each domain, but given the time commitment to re-index a domain, it’s not worth the time to recover a $9 investment.
Host Your Domain
Hosting PBNs is an important topic that can make or break your PBNs. Do not neglect to learn about how to host your PBN and find good hosting!
I’ve written an in-depth guide to PBN hosting, including some recommendations for where to safely host your PBN domains. Check it out:
Best Safe & Cheap Hosting for PBN Domains
Setup Your Domain
Once your domain gets indexed and you’ve set up hosting, you’re ready to add content and link to your money site(s) or client sites. Steve at Texfly has an excellent guide to setting up PBN domains, so I’ll refer you to his work for the next steps.
Most SEOs develop their own processes over time and I recommend you do too. I set up my domains exactly as Steve does, but his recommendations are a good place to start. Unlike Steve, I don’t worry at all about social media for my PBN sites. I don’t use any analytics on my site and I don’t add any monetization.
Go Forth and Find Good Domains!
With this strategy, we’ve had about 80% of the domains we register index within about 2 weeks.
There may be a learning curve, but with the information, I’ve shared with you in this tutorial you’ll now be able to purchase high-quality expired domains way below market value. And you’ll be able to rank your money sites and your clients in a consistent reliable way.
Don’t get paralyzed by doubt, go register a few domains today and get ranked.
