Tips on Not purchasing Previously Spammed Domain Names

Matt Cutts of Google, in his latest video gave out a few quick tips on how to avoid purchasing domain names that have been destroyed by a spammer in the past.

The video was a response to a question posed to him. The question being:

How can we check to see if a domain (bought from a registrar) was previously in trouble with Google? I recently bought, and unbeknownst to me the domain isn’t being indexed and I’ve had to do a reconsideration request. How could I have prevented?

His first tip is to do a site-colon search on the domain name (site: domain name), he goes on to say “If there’s no results at all from that domain, even if there’s content on that domain, that’s a pretty bad sign,”

His second suggestion is to perform a simple search on the domain name, sans the extention e,g, the .com. This would research the site’s reputation.

Cutts also recommends using Archive.org where previous versions of the site can be viewed to check if it has contained spammy content in the past. If the site is being purchased directly from the current owner then asking to view the site’s traffic analytics should help to identify any abnormal trends.

Cutts says,

Overall, if you do a site-colon search, or you search for the domain name, or you look for it in internet archive, that’s a really fast, quick way to get an idea of whether it was owned by someone that used it for ill, or whether they were doing some good stuff with it,