Matt offered a few rules of thumb to make sure you’re not buying a domain that spammers have burnt to the ground. First step is to do a search for the domain by typing the “site:domain.com” into the Google search bar. If there are no results at all for the domain, you should consider not to buy that domain.

Next step is to go Archeive.org and search for the domain. The archive will show you what previous versions of the site looked like, by knowing what the site used to look like you can get a clear idea of the domain history. If this ends with spam, Matt suggests not t buy that domain name.

If you are thinking to buy a domain directly from previous owner, ask if you can see the analytics report to get an idea of what the traffic pattern were like. If you find a sharp drop in traffic, then it’s an indication of Google penalty which has hit the website earlier. So matt suggests not to buy such domain.

Webmasters are aware of the fact that expired domains can benefit or do nothing or seriously hurts SEO efforts. So be careful in picking the domain name and follow the Google’s Matt Cutts “Rule of thumb” as explained above.

For more information on how to pick the domain name, watch this video: