Are you confused in Buying a Used Domain Name… Recently two or three of my colleague asked me this question. That’s why I have decided to write a check list to check before buying a used domain name.

Check for the Penalization
This is the fist step for deciding a used domain name for your website. As It’s pretty hard to get a domain back in the track after its penalized. The SEO gets to be harder and a lot of time and resources get wasted. If the domain is penalized, it should have no or less indexed pages in the respective search engine. The operator which checks the indexed pages in most of the search engines is “site”. Search for “site:domain” in the search box and see the results. There are also some online tools available like iWebTool, Banned Site Check from SEOHosting.com

Check for the PR
Page rank is a method of google to determine a page’s relevance or importance. Page Rank fraud is becoming a serious problem now a days. If you are buying the domain only for PR, you need to check if the PR is original or fake. I know people who got scammed on buying a domain with fake PR and its very easy to manipulate.

There are many online tools available to check the PR, such as PR Checker. But the easiest and perfect way to check that is Google’s info operator. Search for the “info:domain” command in Google Search Box. If the site info that is returned doesn’t match the site that you searched for, then it’s probably faked. Otherwise, it’s most likely genuine.

Check for Backlinks
You should also check for the indexed backlinks in search engines. The less it is, the higher the chance of being penalized. The operator for Google and Yahoo is “link”, otherwise, its “inlink”. Search for “link:domain” to check for the backlinks indexed. Its my general observation that Yahoo normally shows higher backlinks than Google.

Cache Date
It also help you to check if the domain is banned. the operator for checking this is “cache”. Check if the domain is cached recently, if the cache date is too old, then there is something fishy.

Whois Check
You MUST check it before making any decision. It shows you who is the current owner and registrar of the domain. It also shows you the creation date, registry modification date and the expiry date of the domain. The popular tool is Whois.

You can also check few more things like Alexa Page Rank and Domain History Check.