Domain Due Diligence
Domain due diligence is the pre-purchase investigative process used to assess a domain name's history, legal standing, technical profile, and commercial value before committing capital. A thorough review covers trademark conflicts (USPTO, WIPO, and EU trademark databases), [[whois]] ownership and transfer history, spam and blacklist status via MXToolbox and Spamhaus, archive.org snapshots to detect past adult content or pharma spam, backlink profile quality in Ahrefs or Majestic, and [[comparable-sales|comparable sales]] for fair-value benchmarking. Skipping due diligence on [[expired-domain-auction|expired-domain purchases]] remains the most common and costly error among new domain investors.
Example
Before bidding $3,000 on an expired domain at auction, an investor checks archive.org and discovers it was used for a spam pharma site in 2019 — the name is blacklisted by major email providers, making it worthless for most end-user buyers.