When you start to build website in the beginning, the only thing you needed to worry about when you were trying to get your website to appear in search engine results was whether or not you’d submitted it to a search engine.

The Overwhelming Information Can Exhauted For SEO Starter

Something that you’ve likely not given a great deal of thought to, however, is whether or not your domain might be incurring penalties from Google or other search engines.

Your page rank could be suffering not because you’ve failed to dot the i’s and cross the t’s with your SEO efforts, but simply because your domain has been penalized and you’re not even aware of it.

PERSONALLY, I do believe Google has lists of suspicious domains or blacklisted domains. If you are in those lists, most likely every link you gets Google will be very suspicious towards your links. Therefore, the link juices will be very low for each link you get.

There Is No Point optimizing a Penalized Domain

Having a penalty-free domain matters more than all your link strategies and other optimization efforts because no matter how perfect your SEO may be, a penalized domain will still fall short of achieving ideal positioning in search results or it may not be displayed at all.

Whether you already own a domain name or you are planning to buy one and you think you’ve got the perfect domain name singled out, you need to make sure your domain won’t be impacted by search engine penalties due to things that are simply beyond your control.

It might surprise you to know that domain resellers and hosting companies, including domain registry organizations, do not need to perform a check of domain names before offering them for sale or alert the potential buyer to any negative data associated with the domain name.

Some domain sellers and resellers can sell hundreds or even thousands of penalized domain names to buyers and those buyers are then stuck with a domain that will always fail to perform in search results.

There are no guarantees and no refunds when you buy a domain, so it’s up to you to make sure your domain name is free of issues and won’t find itself on the bottom of search results, or not on them at all, due to penalties applied by search engines.

Here are a few tools and tips to You Avoid Penalties When Buying New Domain

These tools and tips can help you check the track record of your domain to make sure you won’t have the shadow of an unsavory past preventing you from achieving the best possible page rank with your SEO, content, and user optimization strategies:

1. Ask for Google’s webmaster tool’s Screenshot to evaluate the traffic history of the domain. Large negative spikes in traffic can indicate search engine penalties or other issues with the domain that could mean lower page rank.



2. Visit archive.org to view the content previously hosted on the page. If the content appears to be primarily spam, the site could’ve been penalized in the past by search engines.



3. Using Google Search Engine and perform a search of your domain name without the “www” prefix or “.com” suffix (or other suffix). If the results indicate that the site has been talked about in a negative way, you may want to avoid buying the domain.

   Use a search engine to search the results for your full domain name, with the “www” prefix and “.com” suffix. As with the previous tip, the results can let you know what history the domain name may have and whether or not it is positive or negative.



4. Use Backlink Checker Tool: There are many backlink checker Tools help you check backlinks to identify the possibility of domain penalized before purchases a domain. Ahref has a step to step guide on How to identify if a domain is penalized

You Are Not Alone

It is not just beginner making this mistakes, Professional Marketers too also making this mistake. Neil Patel is a senior expert in Internet Marketing. Neil Patel launched a site “NutritionalResource.com”.

He did all hard work optimize everything, but he still cannot get the website to rank. Until he checks Webmaster tool knowing the domain penalized. Read here for the whole story.

Once you’ve secured a domain free of search engine penalties or other possible negative issues, the way is clear for you to create a website that has unlimited potential for achieving optimal page rank and search positioning. At that point, the only thing stopping you will be your creative efforts and marketing strategies.

[This blog post was originally written and published by Brian on July 7, 2015. It is most recently updated by Howard on Jun 02, 2020]

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Updated: 21 November 2024

About Vivian

Vivian is an anthropologist lost in the world of digital marketing. She has an interest in learning about the science of marketing and the creativity that businesses use to transform themselves into purple cows.