How to Check a Domain's History Before You Buy It

Start with a WHOIS lookup and look at three fields.

• Creation date. This is when the current registration began. Selling a domain or moving it to another registrar keeps the original date. Letting it expire does not: once a domain is deleted and someone registers it again, the clock starts over. So a name that looks old but shows a creation date from last year has almost certainly been dropped and picked up by a new owner.
• Status codes. clientHold or serverHold means the domain has been suspended and won't resolve, sometimes after abuse complaints. redemptionPeriod or pendingDelete means it's on its way to being deleted.
• Registrar. Note it down. You'll compare it with older records in the next check.

Current WHOIS only shows today's registration, and since 2018 the owner's name is usually hidden. Past records fill in the gaps. A WHOIS history lookup shows how many records we hold for a domain and which years they cover. The full report lists every record along with a timeline of changes.

Things to look for:

• How many owners it has had, and how long each one kept it. One owner for ten years is a good sign. A different owner every year is not.
• Gaps followed by a new creation date. These are the times the domain was dropped and registered again.
• Nameserver changes. A move to a parking company's nameservers shows when the domain was parked for ad income. A move to a new host often lines up with a new owner.
• Owner details from before 2018. These often name the person or company behind the domain, which helps with the checks below.

For more on reading these records, see How to Find Out Who Owned a Domain Before.

The Wayback Machine has copies of many websites going back to 1996. Enter the domain and open a few dates across its life, especially around the ownership changes you found in check 2.

You're looking for anything you wouldn't want tied to your name: pharmacy or casino spam, adult content, copies of another brand's site, or pages stuffed with unrelated links. Long stretches of parked pages are common and usually harmless.

The Wayback Machine doesn't capture every site, and some owners block it. If there are no snapshots, that doesn't mean the history is clean. It means you'll lean on the other checks.

• Google Safe Browsing shows whether Google currently flags the domain as unsafe. Chrome and other browsers warn visitors away from flagged sites.
• Spamhaus shows whether the domain is on its blocklist, which many mail servers use to reject email.
• Search Google for site:example.com (with the domain you're checking). A domain with years of history and no indexed pages at all may have been dropped from search results.

If you're buying the domain for search traffic, also check its backlinks in an SEO tool. Hundreds of links from unrelated or foreign-language sites usually come from an old spam campaign.

A listing can usually be cleared once the domain has a new owner, but it takes time, and mail from the domain may be filtered for a while after that.

A DNS lookup shows where the domain points today. If it has MX records, someone is set up to receive email at it. Expect some of that mail to keep arriving after you buy it: newsletters, invoices and messages from people who had the old owner's address. If you plan to use the domain for email, that's worth knowing before you set up a catch-all inbox.

Old TXT records that verify the domain with other services belong to the previous owner's accounts. You can remove them once the domain is yours.

A domain that matches a trademark can be taken from you in a UDRP complaint if the trademark owner shows it was registered or used in bad faith. Paying for the domain doesn't protect you. Search the USPTO database for US marks and the WIPO Global Brand Database for other countries. Try the exact name and close variations, and pay most attention to marks in the line of business you plan to use the domain for.

One item in the right-hand column isn't a reason to walk away. A dropped and re-registered name can be perfectly clean. Several together usually mean the domain will cost you more than its price.