Domain Tip #1: Domain’s History Affect Google’s Trust

Sadly, yes. If you are purchasing a domain name which had bad history then you might have the chance of losing Google’s Trust. Yes, Domain’s History affect Google’s Trust. You can do a simple Google search for this. Use the domain name as search query and check how bad/good it played in the past.

You’ll probably face this problem when you :

1. Register an Expired Domain Name.

2. Buy a domain name from other person.

Domain's History Affect Google's Trust

Domain’s History Affect Google’s Trust – Matt Cutts

How You Can Solve It?

You need to notify Google about this, like you acquired this domain name and good changes will be made irrespective of its past bad performance. If you have recently purchased a domain that you think may have violated their guidelines before you owned it, you can use the reconsideration request form to let them know that you recently acquired the site and that it now adheres to the guidelines.

Reconsideration Request

If you have Google Webmaster Tools, you can use Reconsideration Request. Before doing that make sure your site does not violate Webmaster Guidelines right now.

Tips To Avoid Such Issues

Since domain’s history affect Google’s trust, before buying an expired domain name or buying from another guy, do the following actions for that domain name. Because they might have been part of a bad network, performing illegitimate or spammy activities.

1. Check Whois and History

Registrar History for HellBound Bloggers (HBB): 2 registrars

NS History: 9 changes on 7 unique name servers over 3 years.

IP History: 9 changes on 7 unique IP addresses over 3 years.

Whois History: 100 records have been archived since 2009-01-30.

Reverse IP: 7 other sites hosted on this server.

WhoIs History

You can use this to check how many times they changed the hosts and registrars. Like frequent change of hosts could be due to banning from Host. You can also check how old they are.

You can make use of this tool to find whether they have used “free hosts” for hosting their sites. Hope you are aware about the hazards of using free hosts.

2. Check Google Cache date

You can use this option to check how the content was before. You can see the contents of the page even if the original site is temporarily down.

HBB - Google Cache

Though not very useful, but this will come in handy.

3. Perform Reverse IP

You can use Reverse IP to check which other websites use the same hosting resources you do. Using this you can check whether they can affect your site’s performance.

Reverse IP - HBB

Tools For Performing Reverse IP :

Sometimes different tools produce different results, but this is a rare case. It normally depends on the kind of host you are using or you have used before. This works perfectly in shared hosting, if you want to see how this tool can benefit you, find a site hosted in a free server and do a Reverse IP Lookup.

4. Use Internet Archive

You can use this to check how the site looked in the past. It’s service “Wayback Machine” allows users to see archived versions of web pages of the past, what the Internet Archive calls a “three dimensional index”. Millions of websites are saved in a gigantic database. Below you can see how HellBound Bloggers (HBB) looked in the past (2009).

HBB Archive

Like Google Cache, but this is far more advanced. You can use this to find out what kind of content or design they were using in the past. As you can see in the above picture of HBB, the kind of design and content we had on 2009, almost like 2-3 years back.

Some sites might have posted spam or adult orientated content and used that in black hat techniques, so checking their past is really useful.

5. Typical, Google Search

Google can help you to reveal their past. Just a simple Google Search can give you ample amount of information about the site you are searching.

HBB Google Results

You can also use different Google search queries to get different results, by which you can get all sort of links related to it.

So to earn Google’s Trust make sure you have a domain name which doesn’t have any bad performance in the past.

If you are confused about how to register a good domain name without issues, you can refer our post – 20+ Tips For Registering Good Domain Name.

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