Yet another valuable use for the WayBack Machine, glad it got a mention.
Before you buy a domain name, first check to see if it's haunted
21–30 of 195 posts
Re: Before you buy a domain name, first check to see if it's haunted
#22I feel like this should be the registrar's responsibility. Least they could do is give a disclaimer and/or a heavy discount.
Re: Before you buy a domain name, first check to see if it's haunted
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google product manager interview question - Write some code with an LLM tool that leverages a LLM to determine if the new owner of a domain is doing (a) same dodgy thing as prior owner that got flagged (b) different dodgy thing as prior owner but should be flagged (c) something completely innocuous (d) needs further review.
Please don't give Google ideas for more ways they can have an algorithm arbitrarily screw you over with no recourse, they're listening.
Well, current approach guarantees you’re getting screwed over. Any improvement is beneficial unless it blocks a better approach?
Re: Before you buy a domain name, first check to see if it's haunted
#24Interesting. 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.
Re: Before you buy a domain name, first check to see if it's haunted
#25Some 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?
Re: Before you buy a domain name, first check to see if it's haunted
#26Another "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.
Re: Before you buy a domain name, first check to see if it's haunted
#27I wonder if there’s a market for rehabilitating domain names
*exorcizing domain names
Re: Before you buy a domain name, first check to see if it's haunted
#28Some 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 unhelp…
Yup. I've regularly had problems with a static site [0]. Sometimes it's a top hit for my name on Bing, sometimes completely unlisted. Seems to flip back and forth - with that same message you get.
It's a handwritten HTML website, enhanced with JS but not reliant on it, hosted on Cloudflare. Not quite a 100 in every PageSpeed category, but just about.
Re: Before you buy a domain name, first check to see if it's haunted
#29Some 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 unhelp…
OP here, and yes, I've been getting that same message for musicbox.fun. I thought it just needed some time but I requested a fresh index two weeks ago, and nothing seems to have changed. :/
Re: Before you buy a domain name, first check to see if it's haunted
#30This 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…
I'd be somewhat interested in seeing the cels. :)