Banned domains - how to avoid them

If you are in the business of buying and selling domains, catching domains on the drop, or collecting domains you think might be valuable in the future, it is important to make sure the domains you are purchasing are not damaged goods.

If you would like to learn more domaining tips and tricks like these, read my domaining ebook.

Domains have been known to be banned by search engines like Google for breaking their TOS ( terms of service ). Domains have also been known to exist on global spam blacklists. Many domains get blacklisted for spamming search engines or spamming via mass emailing.

You certainly don’t want to pay top $$$ for a domain only to find it never gets indexed by a search engine and you are left with fishing for traffic from backlinks and paid traffic for the rest of that domain’s life.

So, what do you do? This is one of the topics I cover in my book but I shall reveal it here for the sake of educating those that are not aware of this problem.

Firstly, you can use an online tool to check whether a domain is banned by Google. I have provided a tool you can use to check banned domains. The tool is free, and it does what a lot of these tools do - it queries the Google API and checkes what G has to say.

For most domains that I query, it returns the message

“This domain DOES NOT appear to be banned”.

This tool is not sufficient on it’s own though.

For newly registered or not registered domains, the tool, thanks to the Google API, returns the following confusing message:

“The domain has no PageRank value, it is LIKELY to be banned”.

Try it out by checking the status of an obviously non-registered domain like weqwewqewerewrewrr.com. Certainly had my heart racing a few times. Don’t fret though, if you read further below, the message states:

“The domain has no record with Google, it is either new or may be banned”.

So, even though the Google API states that your domain may be banned, it also states that there are no records with Google of your domain which may indicate that your domain is simply new and hasn’t been indexed yet.

So, in order to check whether your domain is just new or has really been banned by Google ( and possibly other search engines ) this is what you should do:

If you Google your domain like “weqwewqewerewrewrr.com” from our example above, you will get a standard message :

Sorry, no information is available for the URL domain.com
* Find web pages that contain the term “weqwewqewerewrewrr.com”

If you Google a banned domain though you will get a different message:

Sorry, no information is available for the URL weqwewqewerewrewrr.com
* If the URL is valid, try visiting that web page by clicking on the following link: weqwewqewerewrewrr.com
* Find web pages that contain the term “weqwewqewerewrewrr.com”

Oh and finally, if you do end up purchasing a domain name that has been banned by a search engine, most search engines have a reinclusion/reconsideration procedure in place. You can find the Google reconsideration request form here.

I’ll try and fit in a post dedicated purely to avoiding getting domains/sites banned in the first place in the next couple of days, so stand by for that.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 13th, 2008 at 5:56 pm and is filed under Domain News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.