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A grayed out tool bar is not PR 0.
<<< GoogleGuy roots around on a messy desk looking for the piece of paper that lists the exhaustive history for all domains in the world. >>>
Ah yes, here we are. The last owner tried some exotic tricks. An easy rule of thumb: an SEO with a .nu TLD is usually a bad sign. ;) We caught 'em. The spammer dropped the domain on September 3rd, 2001, where it lay dead until you picked it up on May 1, 2002. Any of the professional domain watchers want to doublecheck my dates?
My advice: skip the expired domains next time. They're usually bad news, in lot of ways that most people don't realize yet. We usually don't lift penalties on expired domains. I'll check out your case; if we can determine that you have nothing in common with the old site, we might be able to put your domain back in.
Why do expired domains retain the penalty?
If someone is starting out with a new site and goes to his/her domain registration company and buys what they belive to be a good name..surely it is just crippling them before they even get off the ground.
PS any change of a tip with reguards to my pr0 :)
yes or no to a penalty :)
It seems to break a lot of rules anyway, independent of any sins on the part of the previous owner.. or maybe this is a characteristic design for the auto sales sites as a whole?
I didnt say your site was spam. I said it "looked spammy".
Does not your TITLE tag look "spammy" to you if you look as an independent person?
You mention half a dozen or so sites half a dozen times and most of them have tracking codes suggestion affliates. Now mention them once or twice is OK, but why more than once?
You say you are a directory. But when I as a surfer had a look, it had "affiliate" written all over it. Now having a second look, i see you have directory type categories at the left. But I still have a hard time cateogorizing this site as a "directory". It's a very long page, but in a cursory look, I couldnt find the term "directory" used, even in small type. All I kept doing was bumping into bold links to your partners, while your "directory categories" were far less prominent. It's a sales site, or an affiliate site, in my perception.
Though I accept perceptions can be wrong, we all know in advertising and marketing that "perception IS reality". The closest people get to the reality of your site is how they perceive it!
Maybe you need to actually call the site a "Directory" or reduce the number of affiliate links going to the same sites, put the focus on your useful content, kill the popup and fix that title tag, to change my, (and maybe other people's) perception that it "looks spammy".
Still i will be told off for getting into "site review" I am sure, but my key point is that there may be other reasons for your site being ignored other than previous owners sins. Just trying to be helpful. Not on a crusade.
mack, you asked why penalized domains can retain their penalty. That helps to prevent a spammer from profiting from a domain after they decide to throw it away. They'll use a domain until it's caught, and then they'll sell the domain once it's worthless. Again, you want to be careful if you're thinking about buying expired domains.
car-buyingtips, I'll have someone take a look at this domain from a fresh perspective. Looks like you're participating in an lot of affiliate programs though--pretty much the full spectrum?
I for one would be willing to pay for a one off answer teling me if my domain is penalised yes or no.
>Jane_Doe, in addition to webarchive, there are sites where you can search for domains to see if they're "dead." I'd recommend staying away from those domains. It's just common sense--you never know where that domain's has been. Better to get a fresh one.
Thanks for the web site info, Key_Master & Googleguy.
You hear of people and their "throwaway" domains.
I'd like to see how "throwaway" they are when their all banned from the G index and the minimum sized URL available is something like 100 letters long!
Hope Google hasnt got "too many" millions of URL in it's black list.
Guess it would actually have to be 101 digits, but lets not be picky.
I'm no too familiar with the DNS/name system, but I think its more important than G.
GG, IMHO scrap your black book and let people and their domains get on in life.... ;)
If you want to take over a website you can negotiate with existing owners and like any purchase of a business the new owner should do research into business "goodwill". Previous business behaviour and "Googleability", in the case of websites, is an important one for web domains I would say. If you are considering buying any site, research into it's previous behaviour is important, even before GG hopped into this thread. If you want to be in Google, you have to understand Google, and play by their rules, some of which, admittedly take some research and judgement calls. But that's what makes us here professionals, and not just opportunists.
OK, carbuyingtips tells us he is "innocent" of knowing the history of this domain. But as a professional buying domain names, it is part of your job to do this. It not only has an affect on google apparantly, it also has an affect on the non-google world. If a domain is known by people generally as being a "spammer", that will obviously affect the perception of your business, even if it is "under new management".
Might, like anything in this world, is maybe not right, but always the reality. On the other hand you can just ignore Google and concentrate on paid links, PPC, PFI, and heaps of other promotion avenues which I have argued for a long time is the best long term policy for the great majority of commercial and selling sites.
After all if the main objective of your site is to make revenue (especially by redirecting to other sites) rather than providing good free original content (like your biology site for example), why should you expect free promotion and advertising?
The value of a website should have much less to do with the actual domain name property and much more to do with current content anyway, and until Google sorts out how to do that, to me, workarounds like this are acceptable.
With new third level domains coming onto the market all the time, the day of the 100 digit or even 20 word digit domain is a long way away, especially if you ignore keyword-optimised_domains.
The domain name in question was on the market for MONTHS. I believe he is "innocent" in not knowing the history of the domain.
I doubt that 99% of the people that run websites would have thought to have checked if the domain name was owned by someone before. Internet archive only has one date for it - they could have easily had 0.
Im not questioning whether carbuyingtips was innocent or not, just whether he had spent enough time checking the background to a site, especially these days when many "new" domains are expiring and being given up. Perhaps the domain registeries should provide an indication of whether domains are actually virginal or used before in their info, and maybe even the other info about their previous life before re-incarnation?
Do a search for "car-buying tips" in Google.
There you will find sites very similar in name (remove the "-" or a few words here and there), and some I checked go to the same group of affiliates. Would you not want to be careful in the company you keep? Would you not, as a serious marketer, checked out your competition? Especially if your domain name can easily be mistaken for another? And surely a true professional would research the industry in Google first before investing in a new domain and web site.
Just a simple search in Google, (and i only spect 2 minutes on it, compared to say a serious business person who was establishing the feasibility of the site who should spend a few hours or more looking at all competing sites), could suggest comments people made about the previous site on the domain (I didnt try groups.google but that would have been the next step), other similar sites and their linkages. "find similar" is another way to research, and maybe even the "link mapping" sites and software out there.
If you want to be a long timer, you have to spend a longer time evaluating the sites and bad- or good-will you are purchasing, just like any serious business person in the non-Web world. And there are tools to do it. When you buy a business, you become liable for all past debts, goodwill and badwill - thats why there are legal, and history searches done on businesses for sale all the time. Why should the web be different, and we DO have tools (quite efficient and free at that!) to do it.
The site may have a penalty, but I can't imagine why anyone would ever link to it (it may link to useful sites, but then why not link directly to them?) so I can't imagine it ever being highly ranked by Google anyway. And that TITLE would be a total turn off in a list of search results.
But maybe I'm not... (I was going to say I'm not Jane Doe, or not Everyman, but then I remembered they're handles here!) ...I'm not your typical user.
When buying a complete site, the domain is but one part of the package and is, by itself, simply a series of letters and numbers. That particular combination of letters and numbers is then used as an address to find the site content.
It is the actions of the site's owners and/or their agents that may trigger a penalty which, except-in-very-long-keyword-stuffed-for search-engine-position-domain-name, is little if not nothing to do with actual the domain name itself.
If someone buys an existing site, then they also buy any liabilities which is accepted business practice. However, registering a domain name that has been deleted, no matter for how long, should entail reistering that domain name only without any baggage.
When a Domain changes hands or is re-registered by a new owner after being deleted, then all penalties should be lifted. If the same actions that incurred the original penalty are repeated, then the penalty should also be repeated. However, the new owner should be deemed innocent until proved guilty.
Consider this scenario, Joe Blogs gets a raise and buys a car. It needs insurance, so he phones the insurance comapny.
Joe Blogs: Hullo, I need to insure my new car.
Insurance Company: Certainly Sir, what is your home address?
JB: Don't you want to know what sort of car I have bought?
IC: Not yet sir, I need your address.
JB: OK, it is 66 Something Drive, Somewheresville.
<pause>
IC: I am sorry sir, we cannot insure your car.
JB: Why?
IC: Your home address has been blacklisted as belonging to an insurance defaulter.
JB: But I just bought the house and moved in two days ago.
IC: I am sorry sir, your home address has been blacklisted as belonging to a insurance scammer named Ima Spammer. You should have thought of that before you moved in. You never know who may have lived there before. We suggest next time you buy a house you only buy a new house.
JB: That doesn't make sense. Where can I check to see if a property has been blacklisted?
IC: I am sorry sir, we do not give out that information. Again, we suggest you buy a new, fresh, house next time.
JB: But what about my car, how can I drive it around un-insured?
IC: I am sorry sir, that is not our problem. When you have bought a new house, please call us again.
<click>
Doesn't make sense, does it?
Onya
Woz
Thanks for the heads-up on expired domains, GoogleGuy. But this is really scary. How long before the unscrupulous start spewing trashed domains all over their tromping grounds ... a virtual mine field for unsuspecting competitors that aren't astute enough to check the history of the new URL's they're considering.
I appreciate the analogy as it got me thinking, but cant agree yet...
When you buy a car, you DO, at least in the places I have lived, take responsibility for repayments, and its up to you to make sure there are none. If a street gang knows your car and hates the previous owner, they will continue to throw stones at it. Because they cant see the difference between the car (domain name) and the owner from their hideout.
Maybe its the distinction between buying the car or just the registration?
But i feel when you buy a new domain name you get mcuh more than just a collection of letters and an address. With all the PR nonsense going on I can understand why this is a concern for Google in particular.
You automatically get a page rank in Google for example based on past popularity. At the time of buying, without any content at all. And maybe even totally unrelated. Po*n sites taking over institutional sites is a good real example.
You also buy an exposure on many other search engines and directories, and sometimes get the value of a 300 dollar Yahoo link and a hard won dmoz link, for example.
You also get the value of people who type the name directly in the URL bar, plus any recent printed matter (non Web) with the URL on it.
These advantages may not last for long, but it is the very reason why many DO buy domain names, not us here who buy them for the nice sounding name only ;)
So when you get all the "Good Things" by taking over or purchasing a domain name, you also get all the "Bad Things" as well. I dont think many have thought of that before, and GG's bombshell may just wake us up. This may well not be just a google thing in future, but seems a natural progression in making the Web business more professional.
[edited by: chiyo at 8:44 am (utc) on Sep. 21, 2002]
If someone buys an existing site, then they also buy any liabilities which is accepted business practice. However, registering a domain name that has been deleted, no matter for how long, should entail reistering that domain name only without any baggage.
In which case domains would never be transfered, they'd just be allowed to lapse and then registered by someone "totally unrelated" an hour later...
GoogleGuy: Jane_Doe, in addition to webarchive, there are sites where you can search for domains to see if they're "dead." I'd recommend staying away from those domains.
Oh bugger... Now he tells me.. Ack...
