Expired Domain Checker
Type a domain. We tell you how many independent websites point at it — the qualified referring-domain count — computed on our own machine from the public Common Crawl web graph. No account, no card, no daily limit.
We ship the count for every domain with at least 20 qualified referring domains. If a name is not in that slice, it has fewer than 20 — that is the answer, not a missing result.
How it works
Type the domain
Just the name —
example.com. No http, no www, and no list to upload. One at a time is the honest speed for a decision this expensive.Read the count
You get the number of distinct websites that link to it, plus whether the name is registered right now, straight from RDAP.
Then go look at its past
The count tells you there is value. It cannot tell you what the domain was. That check is the one that saves the money, and it is the one this page cannot do for you.
What this number is, and why it is the one that matters
An expired domain is worth something because other websites still point at it. The number that captures this is not backlinks — a thousand links from one forum is still one website — it is how many distinct domains link to it. That is the qualified in-degree, and it is the number the paid tools sell you by the month.
We did not buy it. The Common Crawl web graph is public: 2,450,405,793 links between domains. We pulled it onto one machine and counted the in-degree ourselves, for 15,511,556 domains. This page reads that count.
What the same number costs elsewhere
| Service | What you get | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Ahrefs (Lite) | Backlink and referring-domain data in Site Explorer | €119.00 / month |
| WhoisFreaks (50k credits) | WHOIS, DNS, SSL and ASN lookups — explicitly NOT backlink data | $75.00 / month |
| Majestic (Lite) | Referring domains and referring IPs, Fresh Index (last 120 days) | €46.99 / month |
| This page | The qualified referring-domain count, computed from the public Common Crawl web graph | Free |
Prices read from each vendor's own pricing page on 2026-09-07. We link the page so you can check it yourself; they change them without telling us, and a price we cannot show you the source for is a price we do not print.
What this page does not tell you
A high referring-domain count is not the same as a good buy, and
this is the part that costs people money. High authority and recycling are
not independent: an expired domain with a clean history is exactly
what a spam network goes looking for. In our own screening run,
kellycanovaphotos.com was ninth on a quality-sorted list of 244 names —
163 real referring domains, a clean English name, thirteen years of history. The
last page it ever served was titled Situs DominoQQ Online Indonesia.
The name does not lie. It stays silent. Nothing in
kellycanovaphotos.com tells you what it became, and no
referring-domain count will either. You have to look at what the domain
was, and that check is the slowest one to run, which is why almost
everybody puts it last and finds out too late.
Free page, or the file
The tool above is free and stays free. The file is the same work done already, laid out, and yours offline — buy it if that is worth 23 euro of your time, not because the page held anything back.
This page
- Qualified referring domains for any domain
- Whether it is registered right now
- Unlimited lookups, no account, no card
- The threshold and the method written on the page
The Expired Domain Field Guide: 15 Checks That Rejected 45%
- 3,412 expired domains already screened and ranked
- The archived page of each one, so you see what it was
- The scoring method, step by step, to redo it yourself
- The traps: link farms, recycled spam, fake authority
One payment, no account on this site, no renewal. Gumroad handles the checkout and the VAT; we never see your card.
Questions
Is this really free, or is it a trial?
Free, with no account and no request limit. The count is already computed and sits next to the page as a static file, so serving it costs us almost nothing — there is no meter to run. What we sell is the separate thing: the fifteen-check filter, the 244 screened names, and the eighty-page guide.
Where does the data come from?
The Common Crawl web graph, released publicly three times a year. We compute the in-degree ourselves rather than licensing a score, which is why we can show you the method: count the distinct domains that link to a target, then drop the referrers that link to nearly everything, because a site that points at a million domains is not endorsing any of them.
How current is it?
It is a snapshot, not a live crawl. The web graph is republished a few times a year and we rebuild from the newest one. For deciding whether an expired domain has real inbound links this is fine — that history took years to accumulate and does not change in a week. For anything that needs today's number, it is the wrong tool and we would rather say so.
Why do some domains say "fewer than 20"?
Because we only ship counts of 20 and above. Below that the number stops being useful for this decision: at three or four referring domains you are not buying authority, you are buying a name. The threshold is a deliberate cut, and the tool says which side of it you are on rather than pretending to a precision it is not carrying.
Do you log what I check?
No. There is no analytics script, no cookie and no database on this site. The lookup runs at the edge, reads a static file and answers. We could not show you a list of what people searched for because we do not have one.
How is this different from Ahrefs or Majestic?
They crawl the web themselves, continuously, and sell you a live index with the anchor text, the individual linking pages and a lot more besides. We read one public dataset and give you one number from it. If you are doing SEO for a living their number is worth the subscription. If you are deciding whether a dropped domain is worth forty euros, ours is the number you were going to look at anyway.
Can I check a domain that is still registered?
Yes. The count works for any domain in the graph, live or dropped, and the tool tells you which it is. People use it on their own site as often as on expired ones, and that is fine.
The other free tools
Same rules: no account, nothing stored, and the working shown.
How to get into domain investing without paying for data first
Almost every guide to buying expired domains starts by telling you to subscribe to something. That order is backwards, and it is why most people spend money before they have made a single decision. The sequence that actually works is cheaper: find dropped names, check whether anything real links to them, look at what each one used to be, and only then decide whether it is worth a bid. Three of those four steps cost nothing. This page is the second one.
What a referring-domain count is worth to a buyer
It is the fastest possible filter, and filters are what you need when the drop lists are thousands of names long. A name with two referring domains has no inbound value at all, whatever the age or the length. A name with a hundred and sixty has genuinely accumulated something. The count sorts a list from unmanageable to shortlist in an afternoon, and that is all you should ask of it.
Where the money is actually lost
Not on names with too few links — those are obvious and free to skip. It is lost on names with plenty of links whose last owner was a spam operation, because those look exactly like a bargain right up until the moment you build on them. The check is boring: pull up the archived copies of the old site and read them. No score, ours included, encodes it.
A free alternative to paid backlink checkers, and where it stops
For a count of qualified referring domains this page is a genuine free alternative, computed from open data with the method written down. It is not an alternative to a live SEO index: no anchor text, no individual linking URLs, no history graph, and the snapshot is months rather than minutes old. We would rather draw that line ourselves than have you find it during a decision.
The other free tools here
If you are pricing out a domain-flipping side project, the break-even calculator answers the other half of the question: how many sales at what margin before the renewals stop hurting. All the tools on this site are on the free tools page.