Before you buy a domain name, first check to see if it's haunted

This happened to me and I found this tool super helpful to get my site unblocked: https://dnsblacklist.org/

I purchased a valuable premium domain to host a personal art collection (of anime cels). For some bizarre reason, the site was inaccessible from my work computer and it was de-listed from Google even if I typed the url itself into search.

I hired a square space specialist to figure out why, to no avail. I then begged our company’s CISO to investigate and it turns out we had some firewall setting on UniFi that blocked the domain because it appeared on a list. Once I checked way back, it turns out that it was as an anime porn aggregator years back. I personally reached out to all the web filters out there (Google, Symantec, bing) and one by one filed tickets for them to mark it as art instead of pornography and it worked. I am now properly crawled on Google but still MIA on Bing, search console is giving me some BS error that’s incomprehensible, typical of MSFT.

Another "haunted domain" check is by trying to post about it on social media. I ran into this with my current project's domain name. After building an MVP and trying to test the social sharing functionality, I found that Facebook was blocking the domain outright. Turns out there was some spamming from it years ago. Getting it unblocked was extra fun, as the page to request manual review was itself broken! Thankfully I knew someone on the inside who alerted the relevant team, but the whole experience was quite the novel speedbump.

> Ideally, search engine algorithms would give new domain owners a fresh start.

Sadly, I think this would be instantly gamed by abusers. They would release the domain name and attempt to register as a new owner or start repeatedly doing handoffs. It's difficult to tell who the owner is changing between and whether or not the new one is a better actor than the former.

Some time ago I noticed that my side project (with a domain that is not haunted) shows up fine on Google but not Bing/DuckDuckGo.

So I checked the Bing Webmaster Tools. URL Inspection says "Discovered but not crawled - The inspected URL is known to Bing but has some issues which are preventing indexation. We recommend you to follow Bing Webmaster Guidelines to increase your chances of indexation."

That's quite unhelpful. What's more, when I open the "Live URL" tab, it says, in green: "URL can be indexed by Bing."

It's a simple static Hugo site hosted on Cloudflare R2 (DNS mapped directly to bucket). https://pagespeed.web.dev gives it a score of 100 in every category.

Anyone else had something like this happen?

If it was easy to reset reputation with search engines what's stopping people from saying "under new management" every once in a while for an existing poor reputation domain? Probably better to just cut their losses and find another domain.

Interesting. Domain as a unit of trust makes sense until it doesn't. Buying a second hand domain is like a second hand car. But you may not know it is second hand!

I think the mistake here is the redirect old to new. That is always risky so only do it if deseprate. In this case I would have done the redirect from new to old. Then just use the new as a vanity url.

one other thing i would suggest is to set up a catch-all email for the domain and see what gets sent to it, sometimes you can access accounts associated with the domain, socials etc

I wonder if there’s a market for rehabilitating domain names

The usual version of this is the popular SEO technique of buying an aged domain with a few backlinks and slapping a wordpress on it.

For running a mail server every new domain is haunted.

I feel like this should be the registrar's responsibility. Least they could do is give a disclaimer and/or a heavy discount.

I’ll add: and if you lease a VPS, check out its address reputation and reverse DNS record.