Having a domain name which has been penalised or delisted by search engines in the past can damage rankings, an article has revealed.
Talking to Practical Ecommerce, Chris Stump from Onlyhammocks.com revealed that despite months of search engine optimisation just a few of his hundreds of pages had been indexed by Yahoo!, Google and MSN, and those were appearing well down in search rankings.
After research, Mr Stump found that this was due to a previous incarnation of the domain name which had been used as a spam site.
During this period, Practical Ecommerce reports, Yahoo! and MSN had banned the website, while Google had penalised it.
The news provider recommends researching the history of a domain name at Archive.org before buying it.
Original article : http://www.directnews.co.uk/news/search-engine/seo-development/-check-domain-names-penalisation–$1233928.htm