Insights / SEO

Backlinks and domain history: what to check before you pay

TheDomainery · 29 October 2026 · 4 min read

A domain's backlinks are the part of its past that can help or hurt you, and you can look at them before you pay a penny. Link tools such as Ahrefs report a rating for the domain and counts of the sites linking to it. Where this site shows figures like that for a name, it says which tool they came from and when. Use them as a starting point. Each tool measures in its own way, so two tools will rarely agree.

Good links look unremarkable. They come from sites in the same field, from publishers and local businesses that exist for their own reasons, and they've built up slowly. They point at pages that were useful when someone linked to them. A domain like that is carrying real reputation.

Bad ones look like a burst. Hundreds of links arriving in a few weeks from unrelated sites in other countries, with anchor text stuffed with the keywords someone wanted to rank for. Google's spam policy lists buying or selling links for ranking and automated link building as link spam. It allows paid links for advertising or sponsorship when they carry a rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored" attribute. If a name's links look bought, they probably were.

Then there's what the domain was. If it belonged to a different business, find out which one. The Internet Archive often has snapshots going back years, and they'll show you whether the site was a shop or a link farm. We'd also ask the seller whether the domain has ever received a manual action from Google. An honest seller will answer.

Our own stance is a little unfashionable. For a brand name, we'd take a clean domain with no links over a loaded one with a murky past, every time. Links can be earned again. A history of penalties is much harder to shake, and you won't always see it coming.

None of this needs special skill. Look at the archived pages, run the name through a link tool, and read the results sceptically.