How To Spot A Bad SEO Domain - Practical Example

Many catchers attempt to catch spammy SEO domains and many submit those to DomainLore (and have them rejected due to non-acceptable quality)

It seems even SEO domain hunters, who should have better tools at their disposal to separate the wheat from the chaff, are often not inspecting what the heck they are buying.

I’ve been asked why some SEO domains with noticeably good ratings are getting rejected. So here is a practical example:

A seemingly great SEO domain has dropped today - tuugo.co.uk.

In a catching frenzy, you look at this domain - MozDA 30, DR 57, 187k backlinks! 5759 referring domains!!

And you try catching it, as hundreds of catching tags did today.

But it takes just a minute to verify what this domain is really about..

Going to Ahrefs..

A link from mit.edu, you say?

It is extremely rare to see a real link from .edu domain and which counts for rankings.

What do we have here?

No surprises:

A fake redirect from mit.edu subdomain, which is not even a real link from a real page, but a “content-injection” link, from auto-generated page, only to be indexed by unsophisticated crawlers. Google is smart enough not to count those links, but some SEO tools would still show those and provide false impression they have any value.

Then you start looking at what anchors this domain is getting backlinked with and you see it is as spammy as it can get:

"Marketing Agency"
"Digital Marketing Agency"
"Online Marketing Agency"
"cbd oil king"
"CBD"
"dilapidation inspections london"
"sunlight objections london"
"Pakistani night girls"
"dilapidation Building Inspections london"
"Hair Transplant"
"prostitute near me"
"best credit card dumps"
"1500mg full spectrum cbd
"3d Laser Scanning London"
..
..
and so on

Finally, you open web.archive.org to see what this site is at all about:

Oh, right.. it is a “directory”.

You wish for it to be a clean directory, a mini-version of the likes of dmoz.org or something.. but you quickly realize it is just a good old link farm overflown with spam.

Whoops!

And then you recall a very recent policy change from Google..

.. and maybe start thinking: if I attempt at catching SEO domains - or even more importantly - if I am buying SEO domains, perhaps it is worth paying for a basic Ahrefs subscription?

Well, DomainLore tries it’s best to do this job for you and prevent any spam/abused SEO domains from being listed here.

You should be bidding with confidence.