Links vs. Lifespan: Two Axes for Scoring a Domain

Fri, 16 Oct 2026 02:35:00 +0000

By Lucy Kim, co-founder of Karma.Domains

Most domain scores in SEO sit on one axis: links. DR, DA, Authority Score and Trust Flow all read the link graph in their own way. That axis is useful, and it has known bugs. I think of them as the four issues I'd file against any link-only metric:

Manipulable: links are bought, rented and generated.
Inertial: a high score can outlive the site by years.
Blind to new projects: a young, live site looks weak for a long time.
Disconnected from usage: links say nothing about whether the site works today.

Karma Domain Metric (KDM) is our attempt at a second, independent axis: time.

What the second axis measures

KDM is built only from Wayback Machine captures. It asks how long the domain existed, how regularly it was archived, whether it disappeared for long stretches, how steady the activity was, and whether interest grew or faded. The output is 0 to 100.

Two edge cases come up a lot in support:

A domain with few snapshots still has a non-zero score. The model looks at distribution over time, gaps and a minimum confirmed lifespan, not just the count. With very little data, though, the score is capped from above.

An old but quiet domain scores lower than expected. Age alone isn't reliability. Rare, irregular captures with long pauses pull down several components at once.

Plotting a domain on both axes

The useful part is reading the two axes together:

Links	Lifespan (KDM)	What I suspect
high	high	real long-lived site, check content next
high	low	links outlived the site, or a network
low	high	stable project that never chased links
low	low	probably skip

The "high links, low lifespan" corner is where most expired-domain mistakes happen. The score looks great, and the site has been gone for years.

Neither axis tells you what the content was. For that we use Karma Score, which reads the archived content for spam, doorways and topic changes. A domain can have a long, busy history and still have spent it as a doorway.

Using it as a filter

In the Karma.Domains table, KDM is hidden by default; enable it in the column settings. Then you can filter on it before any deep analysis.

If you just want to score a few names, the free domain authority checker returns KDM with all five components next to DR, UR, DA, spam score, backlinks and referring domains, for up to 10 domains per run.

Boundaries

KDM isn't a Google metric, and it isn't trying to predict rankings. It's a synthetic model on open data with stated assumptions. I use it to decide which domains deserve a closer look, then I read the archive myself.

Coder Legion - Recent posts tagged domain-names

Links vs. Lifespan: Two Axes for Scoring a Domain

What the second axis measures

Plotting a domain on both axes

Using it as a filter

Boundaries