How can one do prior research to determine if a domain is safe before purchasing it? It may have been involved in malicious activities, resulting in search engine penalties.
Do you do your homework before buying new domains? It’s possible that new domain names aren’t exactly ‘new’. They could have been registered previously and abandoned by someone else. The domain could have been used maliciously, resulting in search penalties. How can one do research to find out if a domain is safe before buying it?
1. Search the site
Search Google for “site:yourdomain.com” (minus the quotes), and you should see pages from that domain, if it has content. If you can see results from that domain, including the latest content, then that domain is in great shape, and has no indexing problems.
2. Search by name
You can often find out about a bad reputation (if any) of a domain simply by searching Google for the domain name itself. For example, “mybloggertricks” or “abcblog”. Those domains could be mentioned somewhere on the web, or they could be spammed with them. Check out the results, and see if there’s anything you should be concerned about.
3. Archive of the Internet
If you go to archive.org, and put in a domain, you will see what the previous versions (if any) of the site looked like. The first thing to do if a site looks like it is spamming is to be more cautious, and maybe stay away from it altogether. If you want to get that domain up and running again, you’ll need to do a lot of work. The previous owner may have burned it to the ground.
4. Domain purchase
Buying a domain from someone who already owns it means you can ask for access to the Webmaster Tools console and/or Analytics for that domain. Check for Google messages in GWT, and analyze Analytics trends. You can inquire about these changing trends from the current owner if the traffic has increased as a result of spam activity, or dropped significantly after a penalty.
Before you do so, however, make sure to read the following article if you have already purchased a domain and discovered problems with it.
Also, you might want to discard the links the previous owner had purchased by using the Link Disavow Tool. Be careful, and avoid mistakes.
