This is an honest review of SpamZilla for one specific job: screening an expired domain's archive history before you spend time on its links. It's for SEOs, PBN builders and site owners who already know SpamZilla and wonder whether a different tool fits that first pass better. You'll see what SpamZilla documents about its spam checks, where its approach leaves gaps, and how the same screening looks in Karma.Domains, with a real example from a live list I checked on October 27, 2026.
Disclosure: I run Karma.Domains, so read the comparison with that in mind. Everything about SpamZilla below comes from its public website and helpdesk, checked the same day.
What SpamZilla does well
SpamZilla is built around an expired domain database with metrics from Ahrefs, Majestic, Moz and Semrush, plus its own cleanliness score. Its strengths are real:
- Backlink depth. The Backlinks Miner shows the top 100+ backlinks per domain with anchor language, follow status and Ahrefs DR/UR, and you can click through to where each link sits.
- Authority link filters. You can look for domains with links from specific authority sites or require a minimum number of high-DR links.
- Extra tools. A Wayback Exporter downloads an old site as HTML, and you can spam-check your own domain lists.
- Saved filters with daily emails when new matches arrive.
If your process starts from backlinks and you want to restore an old site from the archive, SpamZilla is a solid choice for that.
How SpamZilla judges history
SpamZilla's helpdesk explains its SpamZilla Score (SZ Score) in some detail. It's a proprietary weighted score from 1 to 100, where lower means cleaner. The data points include domain age, active history from Archive.org, redirects, parked pages, anchor text, website history and backlink history. The helpdesk sorts scores into Super Clean (0–5), Very Clean (6–15), Clean (16–20) and Questionable (20+).
Spam detection itself relies heavily on a list of "bad spammy words" that SpamZilla matches against the domain name, its archive history and its anchor text. The helpdesk is candid that this can be aggressive. Brand words like Coach and Nike get flagged, and SpamZilla says it plans to let users supply their own word lists. When a domain is marked as spam, processing stops and it gets no SZ Score at all.
In the interface you can review the history through tabs such as Archive and Titles. The helpdesk notes that the last five or six snapshots in the Archive tab come from screenshots.com rather than the Wayback Machine.
Where that approach leaves gaps
A word list is good at catching obvious pharma or casino history. It's less useful for questions that aren't about bad words:
- Was the old site even in the language I need? A clean history in Greek doesn't help an English affiliate site.
- Did the topic change? A plumbing site that became a news aggregator may contain no "bad" words.
- Did the site ever say anything about my niche? Finding domains whose archived pages discussed a subject is a content search, not a spam check.
These are screening questions you want answered before you open the backlinks, because they remove most candidates in seconds.
The same screening in Karma.Domains
Karma.Domains treats archive content as something to search and filter, not only to scan for bad words:
- Search inside archived content. Keywords match the titles, descriptions and headings of archived pages, not only the domain name. Name-based search is there too, for when the name itself matters.
- Language shares. Each domain shows which languages its archived pages were in and in what proportion, and you can filter on them, including a separate check for CJK content.
- Redirects and errors. You can exclude domains whose archive shows redirects or 403 errors.
- A score with reasons. Karma Score drops for spam periods, doorway pages and sharp topic changes, and the report shows the snapshots behind it, grouped so you see real content changes instead of near-identical captures.
That runs across 13M+ domains from 40 auction sources, with 90+ filters and 400k+ new domains processed every day. Saved filters can send email alerts, and the same searches are available through an API and an MCP server with 32 tools, so an AI assistant can run the screening for you. SpamZilla's helpdesk says it doesn't have an API at the moment.
A real example from a live list
On the morning of October 27, 2026 I scrolled through the aged domains list on Karma.Domains, sorted by Karma Score. One row stood out: loveyourselfmagazine.com. The name reads like an English self-care blog. It had a Karma Score of 100, a Moz Spam Score of 5, 635 referring domains in Moz, and six years of archive history.
The language column said EL 100%. Every archived page was in Greek.
I opened the January 2025 capture in the Wayback Machine to confirm. It's a Greek wellness magazine with headlines like "Μάθε να ακούς την εσωτερική σου φωνή" ("Learn to listen to your inner voice") and "Ψυχική υγεία και ανθεκτικότητα στην εργασία" ("Mental health and resilience at work"). There's nothing spammy about it, so a bad-words check has no reason to flag it. That's correct: the history is clean. It just isn't useful for an English site, and the language share told me that in the list view, before I'd looked at a single backlink.
The same list had the opposite case. blackouthh.com scored 100 on Karma Score with an English archive but carried a Moz Spam Score of 59. The content history looked fine while the link profile raised a flag. The two scores measure different things, and seeing both in one row is what keeps you from trusting either one alone.
Which one to use
For backlink-first research and site restoration, SpamZilla's Backlinks Miner and Wayback Exporter are hard to beat. For the first pass, where you want to throw out wrong-language, off-topic and redirected domains before reading any links, I'd start with a SpamZilla alternative with Wayback screening and only open the backlinks for what survives.
Whichever tool you use, the order matters more than the brand. Check what the site was and what language it was in first. Then look at who links to it.
Originally published on karma.domains
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