Buying a Domain is Not Easy as You Thought
For any kind of business, you must need a website and for that you need to purchase a domain. There are chances that the domain you purchased might have a troubled history with the search engine giant Google. Most people have discovered that the purchased domain is permanently blocked by Google for reasons such as utilizing illegal SEO techniques and those who bought the domain have to clean up all the mess and have to a reconsideration request to Google to remove the penalty imposed on it. Sometimes, the trouble will be bigger when you purchase a domain along with site content as well. Recently, Google released a video in which Google’s web spam division head Matt Cutts explained what are the things can be done before purchasing a domain of your choice.
Doing a Thorough Background Check on the Domain
- To ensure that the domain you purchased does not cause any site ranking issues in the near future and for that, first you need to do a site search for the domain name you are going to buy. According to Matt, it is bad sign when you get no results for that domain even if there is some content within it. Google will try to take domains that are parked, so that they won’t be shown in the search result pages. If you do a site search on the domain on Bing, it may show up on its search results but no in Google which indicates that the domain has a bad history. You can intensify the search in Bing by inserting spam keywords and see what it will displays in the search results.
- You can also search for the domain name without using .com or with whatever extension is on the end. You can do a thorough search on both Google and Bing looking for things such as spammy comments that posted when those sites listed out from Google index.
- Another effective way is use the Internet Archive and if you do a domain search on it, the archive will displays the previous versions of the site relevant to the domain in question. If the website looks spammy then you must take caution and try not to purchase that domain. Because the previous owner of this domain may have utilized lots of negative SEO tactics that might have angered Google and you will have spend lots of energy to recover to remove site penalty and another serious effort for boosting the site visibility. Some domain registration sites block previous site content from showing in the internet archive and some parked domain pages do this automatically as well.
- If you are planning to buy the domain from its current owner, then you have to do some research on Webmaster tools console or Google Analytics to check for screenshots, new messages or something helpful to monitor the traffic over time and you can withdraw your plan for purchase if the traffic has dropped far down for given period.
If you are Still Decided in Buying the Domain
If you really like the domain name and want to purchase after knowing the bad history associated with it, Matt says that you need to check on the links present in that site before doing a reconsideration request. If the links present in the site are inorganic, you need to start over by disavowing all the links you can find. If you are going to start a website with the same domain, you need serious help for recovering from the past penalty issues and for boosting the site to attract heavy search traffic. There are SEO service providers which offer penalty recovery services for Google’s Penguin and Panda affected sites and offer SEO solutions unique to your demands.
