June 2019 Update — I simply started registering powerful expired domains without bothering to check for filters. If the site takes off, great. If not, on to the next one.
First Method — Google URL Shortener
People often recommend checking a site using Google’s URL shortener (goo.gl)—you add the URL of the site you’re testing, and if the service returns an error, the site is banned. This is true, but only partially.
I’ve tested many sites, and this method isn’t entirely reliable. To put it mildly. A huge number of banned sites easily pass the test this way.
I recently took a gamble and bought an unindexed domain at an auction; it turned out to be banned, yet the URL shortener worked perfectly. Before that, I tested a batch of 100% banned PBNs—in about 80% of cases, the shortener showed no issues.
I don’t use this method now.
Second Method — Avoid Sites Without Indexing
A website can be down for a long time yet still HAVE PAGES IN GOOGLE’S INDEX. That is a fact. If you buy a site with 0 indexed pages and no traffic in Ahrefs over the past few years, it’s a lottery. And by the way, the site I bought did have traffic earlier. 🙁 But it was banned anyway.
Being in Google’s index is already a very strong signal, much better than a URL shortener, but it won’t protect you from manual penalties in Google Search Console.
Third Method — spamzilla.io
I stumbled upon this service by chance and didn’t regret it — https://www.spamzilla.io/
It does a great job analyzing what used to be on the site. There’s a stop-word search feature. If there was pharma spam in the link anchors according to Ahrefs, it catches it. If it was a Chinese site, it catches that too. Very convenient. You can add your own stop words for checking or remove words if it flags them incorrectly. That happened to me, so I deleted some of the words.
Here I found the word «replica» in an anchor. That doesn’t mean the site is completely dead, but IT’S CLEAR THEY TRIED TO SQUEEZE EVERYTHING OUT OF IT. It failed in search, so they abandoned it.
Here’s a site that passed the check cleanly; you can look into it in more detail.
You can see from the Wayback Machine what was actually on it.
I haven’t seen such a convenient feature anywhere else. You can see that nothing much really changed on the site. The niche remained the same.
The anchor text is also completely clean.
If redirects were set up, it would show them. I haven’t seen this feature anywhere else either. Redirects = an SEO specialist worked on the site.
For example, here the site’s page count surged, and SpamZilla bumped up its spam score
And here is a completely clean site where almost nothing changed
June 2019 Update — I stopped using SpamZilla as well. Too many false positives. I check everything manually now.
Fourth Method — domain com
Type the site name space domain TLD into Google, like just4pooches com, and see if the site appears in the top spot. If it does, that’s a good sign. But again, this method isn’t 100% foolproof. I have a site with traffic that couldn’t be found this way and was nowhere to be seen, but now it ranks fine for it.
Check and verify, but unfortunately no one can give you a 100% guarantee. Just do more and make more mistakes. Eventually, some site reaches the top, and we cover all expenses. The main thing is not to invest too much money into a site at the initial stage.
June 2019 Update — I no longer check via domain com either
Here is yesterday’s post from my Telegram channel
On that same channel, I share examples of how quickly articles rank when a site has Google’s trust (spoiler: 3 months and some articles pay for themselves)
That’s all for now. Wishing everyone great traffic and maximum site revenue!
UPDATE: Some questions came up
Just now, I went out of my way to take 308 available .com domains and checked them for indexing.
The result: 207 domains indexed—70% of the total. You can definitely find good options among the rest.
Opinion: «If a domain expired, it won’t be indexed for a long time, even a good one» — this isn’t entirely true.