If you buy a bad domain, with a penalty, or a ton of bad links, that can really hurt the potential future success of that domain. In this video, Matt Cutt’s from Google covers what you should evaluate when considering a new domain, from an SEO perspective. Some things he covers are:
- Do a search for the domain with site:domainname.com
- Is it there? If there are 0 results that is a bad sign.
- Search for the domain name, see what people are saying about it. Id it positive or negative?
- Use archive.org to see what the previous versions of that site looked like.
- Evaluate webmaster tools, look for an messages or major issues such as large drops in traffic.
- If there are issues with search engines, you can do a reconsideration request and disavows.