To set up your site, you first need to figure out how to choose a domain: a new one or one purchased after the previous owner stopped paying the domain subscription and lost the right to it. I wrote more about choosing a domain in positioning guide , but today I’m returning to the topic to write more about burned domains, which are definitely not worth buying. Don’t have time to analyze your domain history? Contact me – I will take care of it comprehensively.

Burnt domain – what does it really mean?

Choosing a domain is an important decision, because it’s obvious that you want its the name was catchy, easy to type and remember. Ideally, this is the name of your company with a .com or .pl suffix. If no one has previously registered a domain with just such an address, you have an easier task, because you buy hosting and a domain subscription (usually 100-150 zlotys a year) and you can already put up a site at this address.

Unfortunately, it sometimes happens that the name you are interested in is already taken. In such a situation, you can only hope that the current owner abandons the site and stops paying the domain subscription. Then you can buy it on such sites as. AfterMarket . Depending on their potential, domains cost from a few to as much as several thousand zlotys on the exchange. However, before you decide to buy, you’d better check the history of the domain, so that later you will find that it is practically impossible to position it.

A burnt domain is one that has a negative history, making it actually have a negative value according to Google. This is the case if the previous owners of the domain performed actions on it well beyond good SEO practices, primarily concerning link building . On a burnt domain, it does not pay to put up a new site or expand content, because visibility will not increase or will happen to a small extent anyway. It is also not useful for linking – if you put a link to your site on it, the domain will not increase its power, and may even negatively affect its visibility.

How do I know if a domain has hit the “Google blacklist”?

The first step is to check the domain copies stored in the Web Archive. This way you can see for what purpose the domain was used by previous owners and how often and how the content posted on the domain changed.

The color indicates the dates when a copy of the page was saved:

You can choose one of them to see what was happening on the domain at that time:

You will be redirected to a copy of the site, standing then on the domain you plan to buy.

You can also check your domain history at WHOIS database , the national domain registry. Here you will find the most important information, such as the status (whether it is active or expired), the date of creation and last modification, the end of the billing period, the names of the servers, the data of the current subscriber and the data of the person who registered the domain:

When evaluating a domain, tools such as. Senuto , also used for SEO estimations.

Here you can see the changes in domain visibility on the chart:

It is natural that for the time that a domain has expired, its positions drop. Indexing robots that come across it encounter a blank page, so visibility is getting worse. However, if a domain’s SEO performance has been declining rapidly while it was still active, this could be a signal that someone was using bad practices there. Declines due simply to the domain’s expiration time, you will easily make up for with content expansion and patient linking with quality links.

How to choose a domain?

An on-page virus or unnatural growth in the number of external links can lead to serious consequences for a domain, so even if you don’t do SEO yourself, it’s better to know good SEO practices to control your SEO work. Are you worried that your domain is burned? Contact me – we will see what can be done.