Some tips for selecting aged domain

Read a great post https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/people-are-10-years-behind-with-their-seo-knowledge.1513368/page-2 that I agree with 100 percent. There were a lot of questions on aged domains in that thread, so I thought I'd share some selection tips:

A checklist for backlink analysis of the aged domain before you buy/participate in an auction:

Link analysis is best done with ahrefs (ahrefs has the most active robot, so the link database is the most complete and up-to-date).

1. Check both the quality of referring sites (in terms of their organic visibility and the strength of their backlinks profile), and the relevance of their niches.
2. Analyze the profile for the anchors from the grey areas (viagra, adult, gambling, etc.) and anchors in other languages (there are exceptions, when the dropped domain was a serious international company, or the dropped domain is selected for a specific language GEO).
3. Analyze the way links are placed - the links should be mostly contextual, leading from good publications. If we see links from comments, from the profiles of forums - just avoid this domain. Links from directories (directories of sites) may be present if the dropped domain is owned by a company, but they should not be the majority.
4. On the tab "Overview" look for suspicious spikes of links in the past (this can be a signal of SEO spam by bad SEOs or hackers who hacked the website).
5. Check what was with the site via web archive. Pay close attention to both the quality of the site itself and the presence of 301 redirects in the past. Keep in mind that if the domain has been redirected with 301 somewhere for a long time, or dropped out of the index, then the link juice from it has already been sucked out.

Important: do not be lazy to check the links manually. After the initial analysis, I always recommend taking a few hours to go to the sources of links, check their quality, not only by SEO metrics, but also from a user perspective. A good signal is when donor publications themselves have organic visibility for relevant keywords. Such links are the most effective. Remember that buying an aged domain is always risky, even if the backlinks profile is "clean", there can always be other factors that will nullify its trust. Therefore, investing time in a thorough analysis makes a financial investment in buying a dropped domain less risky.

And then when I complete the list, the domain was already sold, lol.

Just kidding. I guess that this is for a pricey domain. Those less than $100 can be re-sold anyway.

On short: Do your homework, or you may end up losing money. Good tips!