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You’ve seen the TV movies: girl meets great guy, falls in love, gets married, sets up house, and before you know it, things start surfacing about his past. Things aren’t what they seemed. He has a sordid history!
The very same thing can happen with domain names. People have been buying and selling domains since the mid nineties, and chances are most every permutation of at least the shorter variety of domain names have been chosen and registered at least once before. Probably several times in fact. Many times certain words, particularly anything having to do with sex or money could be suspect.
Sometimes those domains were used for less than wonderful purposes. Some were used for porn, some for spam sites, others for things like rogue spyware and malware sites. All of these are found by Google and the other search engines–who summarily dismiss them from their listings, and blacklist them forever.
What this means to you is that if you were to unknowingly purchase a domain that has a history like this, you’d have a very difficult time getting your site indexed, ranked, and otherwise productive. It’s called having a site in a “bad neighborhood”. If Google were to ban the site, if you subsequently purchased it you would have to apply to Google with a “reinclusion request”, to get them to consider re-listing the domain. This obviously takes time and there are no guarantees they will comply.
There is also the question of links. If sites were linking to the domain before, they will still be doing so, especially if they were spam links, as the webmasters seldom go to the trouble of removing “dead” links. And, if the domain were live again, so would be the link. This can be an obvious source of concern. Also, getting these sites to remove those links is an exercise in frustration and fruitless exertion.
There may also be trademarks associated with the domain that you’ll want to avoid. The US trademark database has the current info you need regarding this issue. If you have any doubts about this you should definitely check, as this could get thorny.
If the domain was banned or blacklisted for email spamming, there will be ongoing concerns regarding your ability to have any of your emails delivered as well.
Domains can also be blacklisted for being on a shared server that has a spammer sending out oodles of spam email, through no direct fault of their own. Guilt by association!
To check on a domain’s history (or lack of one!) you can check the domain through the WayBack Machine at http://www.archive.org/index.php. This will give you a detailed look at the history of the site, and how you should proceed.
Checking out a domain before you purchase makes good sense, particularly if you have a feeling it’s too god to be true. Many times you’ll find that to be the case!
