SEO Cannot Solve Banned Domains
It’s amazing that everybody seems to think that SEO is the answer to a website’s traffic problems. They think well if the site was optimized then traffic would go through the roof. Well, there be other problems. One of the biggest issues is the health of the domain name. If the search engines stop indexing because they view the domain as spam then all the SEO you do will not help the marketing.
Practical Ecommerce have a great article about checking the health of your domain before you purchase it. If the domain was previously owned then it’s important to research how it was used. If it was used as spam then there are good chances that the big search engines (ie. Google, Yahoo!, MSN) will have banned it. No amount of SEO will get it listed.
Here are some tips from the Practical Ecommerce article:
- Check out the domain name’s previous incarnations (if any) at Archive.org.
- Learn more about the kind of sneaky or malicious practices that would cause a site to become penalized by looking at Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
- If you’re purchasing an existing domain, use any one of a number of PageRank lookup tools, like this one at Blogflux. Look at the current site’s PageRank. If it’s an old site with a zero PageRank, something must be wrong.
- For an existing domain name, check to see who currently owns it by using the WHOIS Search at Infoservemedia.com. Then check the ownership against the Register of Known Spam Operations (ROKSO) at Spamhaus.org. There are 115 known spam operations on the list.