9 Things about Domain Names and Site purchases you should know

Undisputed-ly, one wasteful exercise many web entrepreneurs/bloggers do while earning money online is to buy heaps of domian names in the hope of either developing content on them or selling them. Some also do site flipping by buying and selling turn-key domains. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to see success with all of them always. Many are wrong decisions and remain so, dormant and wasteful.
But here are some tips I want to share with those who wants to or are still buying lots of domain names, either to sell them or to develop content on them. Just my two and a quarter cents.

1. Check the domain age (if renewal or transfer)
   Always do it. Use the wayback machine to check what’s the domain age in case of transfers and renewals. And always remember, the older the better.
2. Check for possible penalizations
   Google down maximum information on penalizations. Google with the domain name and check until the 100th page. If there are any penalization issue the owner might have posted in some forums/discussion boards asking for help. You could be unfortunate about this, but a try s always good.
3. Check for link sales
   Biggy here. Always check if the domain you are going to buy have been dealing with any link brokers. Check the cache for unrelated links on the site. Sidebars, footers, inner pages etc are good check points.
4. Check for offensive content
   Always check on the cache if there has been usage of offensive content on the website like porn or racism. Wayback machine is the best method to check it.
5. Check cache for hidden text
   On the cache, also check all the pages and their back end code for hidden text. Sometimes, buyers
6. Check for IP shared usage
   Check the IP of the domain and the other domains on the same ip. Sometimes because of offensive content on other websites on the same ip range, our new domain could have the chances of getting banned from Google.
7. Check for linking patterns
   While checking the backlinks on Yahoo, if you find any particular pattern in linking, then it’s adviced to get more information on it from the seller. Because peculiar linking patterns like incoming links from the same sphere of domain/category means unnatural linking. NOthing harmful here, but always good to watch out.
8. Check for anchor text similarities
   If all the anchor texts on backlinks are too similar, make sure you are not in trouble because Gogle may discount the links and keep your site on “second chance” later. It’s always good to avoid domain names with strikingly similar anchor texts.
9. Check for bad neighborhoods
   Another good reason to check for if you are at risk. Bad neighborhood means getting incoming inks from porn/poker/objectionable content websites.

Some of them may sound too simple, but some of them do make sense.

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