Matt Cutts on researching a domain purchase

[chris]

Matt Cutts (the head of Google's Webspam team) offers some suggestions on purchasing an existing domain in a recent video titled "How can I research a domain that I may want to purchase?".

Here's the video, it's only 3.5 minutes long:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-EdhaMDXho

 

[Cooper Mills DomainLawyer]

good video!

 

[nt81]

Satan speaks..

 

[Rhythm]

Just a guess:

Buy a non-keyword non-emd domain for a few dollars that is hard to remember or recall or advertise so that your customers have to search for you on Google.. or better yet.. so that you have to pay Google to advertise it until you rank 1st.

 

[m8e]

Executive Summary, typed while listening to video

search google for...

site:domain.com

zero results may be a bad sign, may have been dropped from google

search for "domain" minus the .com

might get domain results showing what people were talking about relating to this domain

key thing to ascertain: was it a spammy domain previously?

use archive.org and type in www.domain.com and see what it looked like

if buying existing site/domain
ask to see
google analytics
webmaster console
see traffic over time

If you really like the domain and buy it anyway,
even if it was a spammy domain...
can do a "reconsideration request"
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35843?hl=en

but don't count on previous links carrying over, especially if previous owner was webspamming

can also do disavow on the previous owners spammy links to get a clean start