Today's question comes from Dave Shuts in Yorkshire, England.
Dave wants to know I bought a domain seven months ago.
The website I put on, it still doesn't show up in the search engine results pages.
Since 2000, it's had different owners used by a company in a it's then served ads, then for sale with the company for four years.
Will it have trust issues in Google?
Well, Dave, I think the answer to your question is yes.
In general, if you've had a domain for seven months and you search for that domain, maybe even the exact URL like Dubdubdub example. Com and it doesn't show up in Google at all.
It might be safe to conclude that the domain does have trust issues with Google.
Now, maybe it's a really esoteric country code.
We're having trouble finding links to it.
But if you know of links pointing to the domain and we still don't show it at all after seven months, there might be something going on and to help you figure out, let's pretend to be a spammer.
Okay, so now we're black outs.
What are we going to do?
We're going to buy a domain.
We're going to use it up as much as we can until it's totally burnt to the ground and no other search engine will trust it. And then if you're really evil, you're going to sell that domain to some trusting, innocent person.
So the thing to do whenever you're thinking about buying a domain is to do a little bit of research on it.
You can look in archive.org to see was this a porn domain and a former life, or was it owned by someone who was doing something spammy with it?
You can also search for the domain in Google.
And if the domain doesn't show up at all in Google, there can be good reasons for that.
Maybe somebody had blocked it with a no index or a robot text. But if there's no mention of it at all and the URL doesn't show up in any way, shape or form, that can be a little bit of a yellow flag.
So before you buy a domain that has some bit of a checkered history or it looks like it might have been used for spammy purposes. Check to see whether it shows up in Google.
And then that way, when you've got a spammer going, Ah, he'll have to go around and try to find someone else to take advantage of instead of you.