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Yesterday, I decided to set up a new content site targeting niche market.  I almost made a big goof, by registering a domain that I believe is probably banned from Google.  Thankfully, I have a few checks which I now run through before I register a new domain, and that helped me to spot a potential problem before it happened.

Here’s what I did…

After doing some keyword research, I decided on a niche site to target.  Off I went to http://www.Godaddy.com to see what good domain names were available.

The niche I have found looks pretty good. 

• Plenty of searches being done for a lot of different keywords.
• A decent amount being spent on pay-per-click advertising. From a quick initial brainstorm, I’ve found at least 200+ keywords in the $1.50 to $3.00 range, with some that are much higher ($20).
• I’ve already got access to lot of private label articles, for this niche. Plus I’ve found plenty of information in the public domain, which I can change around a bit and re-use.
• There’s is also a number of high paying affiliate programs and products to promote in this niche, some with recurring commission.
• The competion in the search engines is fairly strong, but I’ve already spotted quite a few keywords that are not being targeted too heavily by other sites.

It’s going to take a lot of effort on my part, but this does look like a great niche to build a content site for.

Now, having done all this ground work, and then deciding that I’m going to be spending quite a bit of time developing this site, I really wanted to get myself a decent domain name for it.

This is when I could have made a big mistake…

After about 10 to 15 minutes of typing in various keyword combinations, to see if the domain name was available, I found one that I thought looked pretty good. 

I still had a couple of checks to do though, before I took the plunge and registered the domain.

I wanted to see if I could find out if the domain had been used before, and most importantly if it was used for anything dodgy.

1. I went to www.archive.org, and typed in the domain name in their ‘waybackmachine’.  This allows you  to see if any pages from this domain name had been archived in the past.  You can actually view the old web pages, to see what they looked like.

   What did I find? The site had some pages listed between 2003-2004.  The archive doesn’t seem to have updated its database during 2005, but it’s useful to check back before that.  Taking a closer look at the archives, the site was very ugly looking, and contained what appeared to be just hundreds of pages of automated content, created by some software program.

2. I did a search on Google and MSN to see if I could find the domain name listed on anyone’s website.  Sometimes when you do this you come across comments on blogs and forums, where people are complaining about a site you want to register.  If someone has come along before you, and built up a bad reputation on a domain you want to re-register, it’s always going to be a struggle for you to make it work.

My Conclusion…

I could be wrong, but it seemed very likely that this site had been banned by Google, because it did look like a site that was set up to spam the search engines, with tons of keyword targeted pages.  I didn’t find any comments from people complaining about the site anywhere, but for me, even though I had found a good domain name, it wasn’t worth the risk registering it.

It may well be that the previous owner just wasn’t making a go of the site.  It’s hard to tell, but by looking at the type of site he/she had built, it was the type of site that Google have been banning.

Just imagine, I would have spent ages setting up and designing the site. Filling it with good quality original content and working hard on getting lots of links into the site. Including writing and distributing articles. Getting in the search engines, especially Google, is not always an instant deal.  I could have worked on the site for months, only to find that Google and possibly a number of other search engines, had this site on their banned list.  I wouldn’t have known until after I had done a lot of work.

I’ve said before, that you shouldn’t rely on just one traffic source alone.  Especially search engines, because they can be very unpredictable. However, it’s not a great idea to start a new site, when there’s a good chance it has already banned from Google.

There’s other things to consider. If want to exchange links with other sites, or try and get some articles published, it’s not going to help you if your site has been kicked out of Google in the past.  Other websites will get penalized for linking to you, so it would be an uphill struggle to get traffic into your site.

Another Check Worth Making

Sometimes you’ll run a check and you won’t find any history of that website being online before.  So, they might not be banned by Google, but they could be on an e-mail spam blacklist.  

E-mail spammers send out e-mail from domains that don’t necessarily have any web pages online.  If the domain name gets tagged as being used by a spammer, it will get listed in spam databases, which are accessed and checked by the main Internet service providers.

Just go to Google and type in "spam domain blacklist", and you will find a number of websites listing domain names on lists.  You will see some good keyword rich domain names in there, not just the crappy looking ones.  The spammers would have left these domains to rot once they realized they had been blacklisted.

Because the Internet has been going a while now, many of the good names are either in use, or have been in the past.  So if you have big plans for a new domain name, do yourself a favor and run a few background checks on it first, to see what you can find.

Jason Lewis

P.S. It only took me a few minutes to run the checks above, and just a few more to find another good domain name with no dodgy history.  I think it was worth the effort.