Analyzing the link profile is hard and takes some experience. I know that you can spot spam if there are a bunch of links pointing to the domain coming in from random sources(not niche relevant) regardless of the anchor text.
Check for anchors as well and if you see any chinese or foreign language anchors then it's best to leave it alone, that is a big flag for spamming. Also if there are a lot of similar anchors it is likely that the domain was spammed. Even if the link building was genuine it could've been penalized for too many exact match anchors.
Make sure the domain is indexed in google, use: "site:domain.com" and if you see results from that domain then it is indexed. Although sometimes a domain if expired for a long time may not appear in the serps that doesn't necessarily mean it's bad but this changes if the domain has expired recently.
Check for metrics, DA, PA ( at least > 10 ). Also check TF and CF (google the analyzing requirements for those as I don't remember exactly what it was, in this case it is more about the ratio of TF to CF than their value by themselves)
There is a big learning curve with expired domains, if you're trying to rank a site and have a $500 budget set aside for a PBN then check out accelerator_dd's thread, he sells them for $37 a pop(registration and whois protection included) and when you buy 4 you get 1 free. The best thing about this seller is that he will fetch you niche relevant domains that are high quality. As of now google ranks your site if the links are coming in from quality domains but probably in the future this will change and niche relevant PBNs will have the upper hand. Instead of building out a huge blog network, use 10 - 15 blogs per site that are niche relevant with strong links.
Good luck.
