How to Get Into Domain Investing (What the Numbers Actually Look Like)
Most advice on this starts with a story about one domain that sold for a fortune. We started with 742,019 of them instead, and the story changes.
Search "how to get into domain investing" and you get the same three ingredients everywhere: buy a domain nobody wants, wait, sell it for more. What almost nobody shows you is where the domain you are looking at actually sits among all the others, because almost nobody has all the others to compare it to. We do. The public Common Crawl web graph lists 119.7 million domains and 2.45 billion links between them, and we pulled the whole thing onto one machine and counted it.
Every one of them clears at least 20 qualified referring domains, which is the floor below which a domain is not really being linked to, just occasionally mentioned. Below that line, our tool reports nothing, and that silence is the answer, not a gap in the data.
The number that matters is smaller than the stories suggest
Referring domains, not raw backlinks, is the count that survives contact with reality: a thousand links from one forum is still one site that likes you. Across the 742,019 domains we track, the median sits at 36 qualified referring domains, calculated on 2026-09-07. 84.2% of them have fewer than 100. The one that made someone's forum thread famous, with tens of thousands of referring domains, sits somewhere near the top of a list that tops out at 457,738, and it is about as representative of what you will find as a lottery winner is representative of a payslip.
That is not a discouragement. It is a budget. If you go looking with the expectation of finding the next viral flip, every domain you actually find will feel disappointing by comparison, and you will either overpay for something mediocre or walk away from something genuinely useful because the number is not five digits long. Aim at the median instead. A domain with 30 to 60 real referring domains, sitting in a niche you understand, is a normal find, not a consolation prize.
One real domain, checked the day this page was built
Numbers are easier to trust when you can point at one. kellycanovaphotos.com carries 163 qualified referring domains as of 2026-09-07, roughly 36 times the median we just quoted, and it is unregistered as of 2026-09-07, checked live rather than screenshotted once. You can run the same check on it, or on any name you are considering, with the free tool below; it reads the same file this page did. Check it yourself.
A referring-domain count on its own only tells you there is a shape worth looking at. It does not tell you whether those 163 sites are genuine recommendations or a link farm that traded mentions with itself for a year. For that you have to look at who they actually are, one by one, which is what a backlink checker is for and a plain count is not.
Screen by referring domains, not backlinks
Feed a candidate into the checker and read the count against the median above, not against a story you read somewhere. Below 20, the tool tells you plainly instead of guessing, and that is worth more than a confident wrong number.
Read who is actually linking
A high count from a hundred unrelated spam blogs is worse than a modest count from ten sites in your niche. Pull the list, not just the number, before you decide anything.
Confirm it is actually available
A referring-domain count says nothing about registration status. Check that separately and right before you bid, because names move in and out of availability by the day.
What a paid checker charges for the same number
| Who | What you get | Price | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ahrefs (Lite) | Backlink and referring-domain data in Site Explorer | €119.00/month | source, read 2026-09-07 |
| WhoisFreaks (50k credits) | WHOIS, DNS, SSL and ASN lookups - explicitly NOT backlink data | $75.00/month | source, read 2026-09-07 |
| Majestic (Lite) | Referring domains and referring IPs, Fresh Index (last 120 days) | €46.99/month | source, read 2026-09-07 |
Every price above was read on the vendor's own pricing page on the date shown, not copied from a summary somewhere else. That is the same rule `attrezzi_confronto` enforces on the tool pages, because a price without a source and a date is exactly how a wrong number (WhoisFreaks at "$59 a month") stayed on a page we sell for weeks.
Questions
Is a high referring-domain count enough to buy a domain?
No. Never on its own. It tells you a real, measurable signal exists, which rules out the domains that have nothing at all. It does not tell you what the domain was used for, whether the links are relevant to a business you would actually run on it, or whether the site is remembered for something you would rather not inherit. Those questions need a look at the archived pages, not just a count.
Why 84.2% under 100, when people talk about domains with thousands of links?
Because the domains people talk about are the ones interesting enough to write about, which is a sample biased toward the extreme end by definition. The graph does not select for interesting; it counts everything above the qualifying threshold, and most real domains cluster well below the number a forum thread would ever mention.
Does this use the same data Ahrefs or Majestic use?
No, and that is worth saying plainly: Ahrefs runs its own crawler continuously and claims tens of trillions of links; we work from one public Common Crawl snapshot released a few times a year, at the domain level, with no anchor text and no traffic estimate. It is a smaller picture, current as of the date on this page rather than today, and free.
We sell a €23 file on this: The Expired Domain Field Guide: 15 Checks That Rejected 45%. This page does not need you to buy it. Everything above works whether you do or not, and the file exists for the one thing the free numbers cannot tell you: what a domain was before it expired, not just how many places still point at it.
More guides
Same rule as the tools next to them: every number sourced, dated, and rechecked on a schedule instead of frozen the day it was written.