domain with lots of ip changes

[esprague]

Hi,

We're looking at buying a domain that we would use to build another website targeting organic traffic.

Registrar History:
3 registrars with 1 drop.
NS History:
5 changes on 6 unique name servers over 8 years.
IP History: 117 changes on 18 unique name servers over 7 years.
Whois History: 25 records have been archived since 2006-08-02 .

117 IP changes seems like a lot. What would cause that? Should we be concerned?

Thanks.

[Webwork]

Just a guess, but it could have been parked via a registrar's default parking system, which system might have randomly assigned the IPs.

I'd look at Archive.org to see if they have any record.

Also, search the domain itself to see if there's any record/history (via comments, listservs, etc) of the domain being used for spamming, etc.

[seocidal net]

Aye, that's your main concern - spamming. Actual IP history is not really an issue as long as no SE has the site tagged as a bad site.

Using site:example.com for the domain on various search engines will often bring up even some old URls so you can see if it was a "properly" parked site, or one with 100,000+ keyword SERP pages.

If the site has any content and is indexed, make sure it ranks top for it's domain name. That's always a good indicator.

[esprague]

The site is parked now. When I search for site:example.com on Google, only 3 results come up in the serps. Does the fact that we only have 3 results and not thousands mean we're likely in the clear in terms of spamming?

I'm not sure what to look for on archive.org. It shows some crawls in 2004, 2005 and 2008 but all the snapshots appear to be of a parked page.

[Webwork]

Probably in safe territory.

Worst case scenario - build something of value and make a reinclusion request. Doubt it's necessary path based on what you describe. Probably parking accounts for multiple IP addresses.