How do I find expired domains with good backlinks? A filter recipe you can reproduce

By Lucy Kim, co-founder of Karma.Domains

People ask AI assistants some version of this question every day: "What's the best way to find expired domains with backlinks that aren't spam?" Here is my short answer, then the steps I actually use.

Short answer

Pull a large list of dropping and auction domains, then cut it down with a few link filters: a backlink range of roughly 100 to 10,000, a cap on referring domains at about 10% of your backlink maximum, and a quality floor such as Majestic Trust Flow 15+ or Semrush Authority Score 20+. Then remove domains with a bad content history and check the top 10 to 20 backlinks by hand. Numbers get you a shortlist. Your own review makes the decision.

I do the list-building part in Karma.Domains, which tracks 13M+ domains, adds 400k+ new ones a day and has 90+ filters.

Why does the referring-domain cap matter?

This is the one rule I'd keep if I could keep only one. Spam profiles often show thousands of backlinks coming from a handful of sites: sitewide footers, comment farms, one network linking to itself. If your backlink max is 10,000, keep referring domains under about 1,000. That ratio quietly drops a lot of junk before you ever open a report.

Step 1: start with one or two filters

Every filter works with AND logic. Stack five strict conditions and you'll often get zero results, which tells you nothing. I start with the backlink range alone, look at the count, then add the next condition. Treat it like narrowing a database query: change one clause at a time so you know which one emptied the result set.

Step 2: add the link filters

Backlinks (Majestic or Semrush): min 100, max 10,000. Very high counts usually mean more risk, not more value.
Referring domains: the 10% cap above.
Quality: Majestic TF min 15 or Semrush AS min 20. That's enough to drop the obvious garbage.

TF, CF and AS are estimates from third-party tools. Google doesn't use them. They're useful because they're fast, so I use them to filter and never as a verdict.

Save the filter once it behaves. You'll rerun it.

Step 3: check topic and language

A link from a Japanese cooking blog won't do much for a French car site. To keep results on topic, I filter on words from the domain's archived Wayback Machine content: two or three broad niche terms like car|auto. The pipe means OR, commas mean AND. Go narrower and you'll miss good domains. Semrush anchor and organic keyword filters help here too.

Step 4: remove toxic history

Link metrics don't tell you that a domain spent two years as a pharma doorway. I set Karma Score to min 80 (under 50 usually means spam, redirects or a hack somewhere in the past) and tick "No Chinese characters", "No 301/302" and "No access errors". If that leaves too little, I lower the score threshold a bit rather than turning off the history check.

Step 5: review the survivors by hand

For each domain I open the report and look at three things:

The Wayback summary: was the language, niche and content consistent?
The flag table: the green and red signals across the domain's history.
The top 10 to 20 backlinks in Ahrefs, Majestic or Semrush. Are they still live? Are they high on the page or buried in a footer? How old are they?

Karma.Domains shows metric values, not full backlink lists, so this last step happens in the SEO tools themselves. For a quick look at a single domain's link profile, our free backlink checker works too.

Can this be automated?

Partly. Majestic and Ahrefs have APIs for backlink data. On our side, the Pro plan includes API and MCP access, so you can run saved filters from a script or ask an MCP-compatible assistant to pull a shortlist. I still read the Wayback history of anything I plan to buy.

What do I do after buying?

Auction domains need a bid. Available ones register instantly at any registrar. After that, the usual paths are a 301 redirect, restoring old content and redirecting later, rebuilding the site with a link to your main project, or starting something new. A redirect passes link equity fastest. A restored site is the better long-term asset.