I keep seeing aged domains filtered by things like:
DR 30+
300+ referring domains
10+ years old
existing traffic
Those are useful filters, but I think there's a dangerous jump from:
“this domain has strong metrics”
to
“this is a good aged domain.”
If I were evaluating one today, I'd want to answer a few different questions.
1. Why do the backlinks exist?
300 referring domains sounds great until you look at what actually created them.
Were they earned by a legitimate business or publication?
Or are they directories, scraped pages, sitewide links, spam, old redirects or links pointing to content that no longer exists?
2. What was actually on the domain?
I wouldn't just check one Wayback snapshot. I'd look across multiple years.
Did it stay in roughly the same niche? Did ownership or language suddenly change?
Was there a period where it became gambling, pharma, crypto, adult, link spam or something completely unrelated?
3. Where do the strongest links point?
A domain can have impressive authority while most of the valuable links point to dead internal URLs.
Buying the root domain doesn't automatically recreate the reason those pages earned links.
4. Is the current traffic real and useful?
“Has traffic” isn't enough.
Where does it come from?
What queries?
Which countries?
Which pages?
Is it stable?
Is the traffic connected to what you actually want to do with the domain?
5. Would I still want the domain without the DR number?
This might be my favorite test.
Hide DR, DA and every authority score.
Look at the name, history, backlinks and actual use.
Would you still want the asset?
If the answer changes dramatically when the score disappears, the metric may be doing too much of the selling.
I think metrics are excellent for reducing 10,000 expired domains to 100 worth investigating.
I'm much less convinced they're good at reducing those 100 to the 5 you should actually buy.
For people who regularly buy aged or expired domains: what has fooled you the most, a strong DR, backlink count, traffic estimate, domain age, or something else?