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

bryanbraun.com

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

#41

Post by aabhay »

rsingel wrote: post #38

Not always the easiest thing to do. A haunted domain could have been haunted 15 years ago. And Google refuses to tell you why or fix their system. Just one more place where the web gets screwed by a company too big to have to do basic customer service.

In their defense (and I don’t defend Google often), addressing this really well means:

- knowing all the complexities of every local, state, federal, international jurisdiction that might interfere with the whitelist

- awareness of the content in question which could be millions of subpages

- a customer support team that is definitely not incentivized based on tickets triaged per day, but is somehow incentivized to spend hours on “whale” tickets.

- going through ticket history and solving the problem for everyone now that its policy to solve this

- dealing with the inevitable rush of fraud that follows every tiny change in google systems

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

#42

Post by praptak »

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

I don't think it's possible to fix this problem without also helping bad actors. Maybe it's a problem that just isn't worth fixing. Just don't buy preexisting domains unless it's a project big enough to justify the necessary cost of due diligence.

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

#43

Post by egberts1 »

mmwelt wrote: post #14
BOOSTERHIDROGEN wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How?

I'm not the person you were replying to, but in the past, I've just used an IP reputation checking website, such as: https://www.apivoid.com/tools/ip-reputation-check/

Website unusable: Captcha forever waits using latest Firefox on latest iPhone13/iOS 18.0

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

#44

Post by AnthonyMouse »

dtdynasty wrote: post #6

> 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.

> 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.

This doesn't seem like that hard of a problem to solve, because these are domains with negative reputation, i.e. worse than zero.

So if a) the domain is no longer hosting any of the stuff previously complained about and b) is no longer receiving new complaints over a period of a year, it costs you nothing to reset the domain to zero. Because the bad actors don't have to behave for a year to get back to zero, they can just register a new domain.

All you're doing is giving the new owner the same fresh start that anybody can get by buying a never before registered domain for the same price as a year's renewal on the existing one.

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

#46

Post by viraptor »

I've had an opposite experience. One domain I bought was used for an entirely different purpose in the past, which got linked on a Wikipedia article in references. This gives me some good link juice and at least matches the geo area of the previous business. Since it's an extremely niche entry and low on the list of references, I decided to be slightly naughty and not touch it for a couple of years. Not sure what's the opposite of haunted in this case, but it was just as surprising.

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

#47

Post by drilbo »

e_y_ wrote: post #32

Not quite haunted but I've had people report that my website hosted on a .quest domain is blocked on their work computer. My best guess is that their filter thinks it's gaming related (it's not) or maybe they just block all "weird" domains.

unfortunately, blocking newer TLDs altogether seems common

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

#48

Post by lukan »

praptak wrote: post #42

"Ideally, search engine algorithms would give new domain owners a fresh start." I don't think it's possible to fix this problem without also helping bad actors. Maybe it's a problem that just isn't worth fixing. Just don't buy preexisting domains unless it's a project big enough to justify the necessary cost of due diligence.

"Maybe it's a problem that just isn't worth fixing."

There is a finite amount of short, memorisable names.

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

#50

Post by nicoloren »

romanhn wrote: post #26

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 faced the same issue with one of my project. But, as i don't know anybody at Facebook, I left the domain and buy a new one.
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