Can history of a domain name cause trust domain problems?
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History of a domain’s effect on trust in Google

History of a domain’s effect on trust in Google - answered by Matt Cutts

Summary:

The answer is yes a purchased domain’s history can affect your future site. So if there are links pointing to the domain and Google still don't show it at all after 7 month that could mean that something is wrong. That’s why you should do a little research on the domain that you are going to buy. You can look in archive.org to see if it was used improperly.

 

Matt's answer:

I think the answer to that question is yes. In general, if you’ve had a domain for 7 months and you search for that domain, maybe even the exact URL like www.example.com and it doesn’t show up in Google at all, it might be safe to conclude that the domain does have trust issues with Google. Now maybe it’s a really esoteric country code. We’re having trouble finding links to it.

 

But if you know of links pointing to the domain and we still don’t show it at all after 7 months, there might be something is going on, and to help you figure it out, let’s pretend to be a spammer. Okay, so now we’re black hats. What are we going to do? We’re going to buy a domain. We’re going to use it up as much as we can until it’s totally burnt to the ground and no other search engine will trust it. And then, if you are really evil, you’re going to sell that domain to some trusting innocent person.

 

If you’re thinking about buying a domain to do a little bit of research on it

You can look in archive.org to see was this is a porn domain in a former life or was it owned by someone who was doing something spammy with it. You can also search for the domain in Google and if the domain doesn’t show up at all in Google, there can be good reasons for that. Maybe somebody had blocked it with a no index or a robots.txt. But if there’s no mention of it at all and the URL doesn’t show up in any way, shape, or form, that can be a little bit of a yellow flag.

 

Before you buy a domain with some history check to see if it shows up in Google

And then that way when you’ve got a spammer going, he’ll have to go around and try to find someone else to take advantage of instead of you.

by Matt Cutts - Google's Head of Search Quality Team

 

Original video: