How (and Why) to Do Domain Background Check with Bill Hartzer

When (or better prior to) investing into a new domain that was owned by someone else before, you need to do the domain background check to make sure this is going to be a good investment.

To discuss domain name background check, Jim Boykin, CEO of Internet Marketing Ninjas, and Ann Smarty, IMN’s analyst, invited Bill Hartzer, a blogger, SEO, and marketer who started coding HTML websites back in the mid 1990s and has been an SEO expert for more than two decades.

As an SEO, there are certain things you need to investigate when it comes to a pre-owned domain. You need to make sure that is not a burnt domain

• Search for that domain name in Google
• Run it through archive.org and see what previously was on that domain
• Look at the backlinks to find any suspicious – potentially dangerous – backlinks and patterns
• Run that domain through SEMrush to see if there were any suspicious traffic dips which could potentially signal of a manual penalty
• Look up the history of ownership of the domain using the tools like Whoisology, Domain Tools and Domain IQ that can still give you some information on the owners of the domains as well as other sites associated with that person or a company.

How much of that can be known to Google?

Google is a domain registrar, so they have some indepth records of a domain if it is registered through them.

Otherwise they can see what we can see. So if the domain is using privacy protection, Google would not know much about the owner. However they have other means of knowing the owner, like Google Analytics or Search Console accounts.

There’s a tool called Public WWW that can help you identify all the sites associated with a certain code, like, for example, Google Analytics code. That’s another great tool to research domain and site ownership and find networks.