Are you buying a used domain name for your web site, instead of registering a brand new one? How did the previous owner use that web address? If its history has been spotty, you might be buying a domain name already penalized by search engines.

I received a call from a Realtor the other day, who was pulling her hair out, trying to figure out why, after being online a year, her site was nowhere in the search engines. She had spent good money with a search engine optimizer.

We did a search on Google using her domain name: "mywebsiteaddress.com". Her site came up as the only result - as it should. So we knew it was in the Google database. Google's spiders had indeed crawled and indexed the site.

Next, we did a search on a phrase, which should have returned her site as the first result. It was a line of text on the home page, which included her full name, and some other rather unique words. Her site did not come up at all. Drilling down through page after page of the search results, her site still did not show up. How could this be?

It was pretty obvious to me she was being penalized. Rather severely. I checked with one of my company's search engine analysts, who took about 30 seconds to conclude the same thing.

My analyst reviewed her Web site content and code, and reported there was no evidence of deceptive search engine optimization. No Spam doorway pages. No invisible or hidden text. No deceptive mirrored content. No cloaking. No over-the-top key word repetition. No content bait and switch. (See How to Make Your Site Disappear From Search Engines for more information on the most common types of search engine deceptions.)

If her site was free of search engine trickery, why were the search engines penalizing her?

I had a hunch. I did a search in the Whois database. The first record of her ownership of the domain was about a year earlier. I asked her where she got the domain.

"Well, I bought it for $1200 from the original owner..."

Bingo.

"I'm not surprised," I said.

It was the only reasonable explanation: Since her site was currently free of trickery, it had to be from a prior history.

She told me the story of the domain, and who was using it before her, and how. I won’t go into details, but it certainly had a checkered past! It was associated with a somewhat notorious public figure, along with all kinds of blatant Spamming and search engine trickery.

In order to correct the problem, she is going to have to completely sever her site from this domain. It will take some time.

Moral of the story? If you are buying a used domain, buyer beware. Find out who used it before, and how. If the domain still has a web site associated with it, pull a unique phrase from the site, and perform a search as I did above. If the site doesn't come up anywhere in the results, but you can confirm it's in the search engine's database, better invest your money elsewhere.

Published: August 20, 2003

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Lawrence Schoeffler is Vice President of Dominion Homes Web Services and founder of NUMBER1EXPERT. Dominion Homes Web Services includes Advanced Access, Agent Advantage by Homes.com, and Best Image Marketing, and is a division of Dominion Enterprises. Advanced Access is the industry leader in agent websites. More agents invest in an Advanced Access website than any other. Agent Advantage is the official agent website service of Homes.com, one of the most popular real estate portals in America. NUMBER1EXPERT by Best Image offers America's Top Performing Web Sites, with traffic and leads unequalled in the industry, sold exclusively to Top Selling Agents. Email Lawrence at .