When purchasing a high TF, high DA expired domain, how far in the 'wayback machine' is too far?

I guess this myth that because a service is third party it is irrelevant will never go away. Its however an observation that has no science behind it.

Each of the services regardless of their faults STILL have a much wider dataset than ANY one individual SEO. They crawl MILLIONs and in some case billions of pages and they WERE made to mimic Google's own system.

the more intelligent way to look it is to realize they all have faults and compensate for that by using more than one and then checking the individual backlins they point to NOT discounting their data entirely.

at this points I have probably analyzed tens of thousands of domains and no matter what anyone claims it is IMPOSSIBLE to look at all the backlinks for the domains that drop or are on auction each week. Any sensible domain buyer MUST use some kind of metrics to skim down on the number of domains to analyze more closely.

So when people write that the metrics of the third party services are irrelevant I know I am dealing with someone who hasn't bought a lot of domains. if you have been big into domain buying and analyzing you will know a few things in regard to metrics

A) if ahrefs and majestics show little links or show very low scores the domain is a dud 95% of the time. Wasted time has taught me that trying to find the RARE occassion when both ahrefs and Majestic have missed key links is a waste of time.

B) only when you see a lot of hacked or spammed links does a high ahrefs and majestic score not hold up as a reasonably valuable domain (though it might not be as high a value as either would report)

C) Moz is neither here nor there - they miss too many key links and they count too much spam links. The only real reason people use DA to buy and sell off is because moz allows for a lot more free searches and data

So metrics are NOT irrelevant. they simply should not be the only consideration. Because there are faults you use the metrics to filter the domins to look at closely and then examine their backlinks to make sure things hold up.

Trying to pretend that you can eyeball a domain's link profile (with the literally milions of websites out there that you have never heard of) and know the value of each of those links makes ZERO sense.