Checking the link profile of a newly acquired domain name

[babblemouth]

We purchased two previously registered domain names a couple of months ago.

Both domains have no content published but have in the past by the previous owner.

Before I 'bring these domains back to life' is there anyway to check if they have any manual penalty against them?

Note: Appreciate I should have carried out this sort of check prior to purchasing them but got a bit excited that they'd become available and heart ruled my head!

 

[babblemouth]

or in fact any problem links pointing to them?

 

[WebMeUp]

If the domain you've purchased has a manual penalty, this may result in bad trust score, and the domain being blocked by some anti-viruses.
And in this video Matt Cutts answers to a question similar to yours.

 

[babblemouth]

So how can I find out a domains trust score?

 

[BlogBuyer]

May I ask where you bought the domains? Did you approach the buyer yourself or use a service?

 

[babblemouth]

They were both expired domains and purchased via my usual domain registrar.

 

[webgeek]

When you don't have analytics and webmaster tools historical data, a good fallback is to use semrush.com. It understates the stats by a big margin, but is fairly consistent in doing so, and often shows ranking declines which correspond to real ranking declines.

Look for sudden drops that align with the dates of a Penguin update, or long sloping declines starting with the key Panda updates. Beyond that, if the domain had ranked well and now doesn't, it's just a matter of determining the cause.

I've not found a commercial tool with data I can trust for backlink analysis. There's some obvious 'bad' ones that tools like Cemper LRT can find, but there's a lot of ones it'll miss that it shouldn't or give a score that leaves you needing to make the decision (as well as giving blank/incomplete stats on many metrics).

Plan on paying someone to do a full backlink audit, if you've got a penalty and need to find the way out. Trying to educate yourself to all the business rules associated with risky links is a full time job, particularly given the changes which make previously accepted links suddenly become toxic, and only a small % of those rules published with any clarity by Google.

Personally, I'd have thought this would be good to do before acquiring the domain, rather than after

 

[BubbleTrouble]

I prefer to use majesticseo to check trust flow of a domain before buying. I also use it when analyzing the competition.

 

[DrBradley]

I'v written a 3000 word authoritative guide to this over on my blog but I don't know if I can link to it. Just search for me "Dr Bradley Tomkins" and you'll find my personal blog with the article.