How to check the 'health' of a domain

danielcoates · Mar 12, 2015

I have my eye on a domain, I'm not going to reveal what it is, but I would like to check the 'health' of it before I buy. I know that some domains, if there abused can be blacklisted, and as such are treated by the search engines poorly, and will appear further down the listings.

How would I go about checking a domain for this?

Daniel

UncleBob · Mar 12, 2015

If it's an active domain name then Spyglass should give you a rundown of all the backlinks and an indication of if they are bad or not.

If you don't have Spyglass running, or it's an inactive domain, ahrefs.com is worth a try.

Should you buy and find that there's a whole world of bad backlinks, Google aren't all that evil. you can go through the motions of requesting that links are removed, then use the Google Disavow tool to have them disregard results.

I would have thought that you could just use the webmaster tool to contact Google, tell them that you recently bought the domain in good faith and the existing links are not your fault. They should assist.

We have had a couple of dealings with Google in relation to the above, we've been impressed with how fast they respond and how helpful they are. They are aware of the accidental thing they have created, with people trying to charge businesses $5 or $10 to get rid of bad backlinks, and are working to beat it.

Best of luck with the domain, whatever it is

foz · Mar 12, 2015

http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=google.com

spiderspider · Mar 12, 2015

There are various website you can use to check if the domain is adsense banned (not sure how / if they are 100% accurate).

As said, ahrefs, Mozo backlinks.

Have a look at http://web.archive.org/ and see how it has been used before.

Type the domain into google in brackets like "thisdomain.co.uk" and see what results it brings back.

Murray · Mar 12, 2015

danielcoates said:
How would I go about checking a domain for this?l

If you're not sure about it, maybe you should have someone who knows what they're looking for to take a look for you?

As mentioned above you can use open site explorer or spyglass to look at the links

archive.org to look at what's been on there before (if anything)

Semrush is worth a look too

You can put "site:domain.co.uk" in google see what comes up