• Home
  • About
  • Privacy Policy/Disclosures
  • Advertise
  • Contact

TLD Investors

Domain Investing Stats and Tips

That old domain with all the backlinks might have a legacy domain penalty

December 29, 2020 by Raymond Hackney

Legacy Domain Penalty

Over the past couple years we have seen a greater interest in buying old domain names for their SEO/Authority value. I had a friend mention to me over the weekend that he bought a name for that very reason, that just can’t seem to rank.

I mentioned to him an article I read a few weeks back. It deals with a legacy domain penalty from Google. In the article it mentioned that the premium domain name Girlfriend.com had this very penalty.

It’s a penalty that’s associated with a domain from when it was registered by someone else in the past. Apparently the penalty remains after the domain is registered by someone else years later.

SearchEngineJournal.com points out:

The site with a penalty has not received notices of a manual penalty.

And that’s what makes it weird because how can a site be penalized if it’s not penalized, right? And if a site is not penalized, why can’t it rank for the name of its brand or even a snippet of content from the home page?

So if you are paying big money for a domain name with great DA, Trust Flow and backlinks you might need to dig deeper to see if there is a legacy penalty.

Related Content

Share this:

  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window)

Filed Under: Domaining 101, Google, SEO

About Raymond Hackney

Raymond Hackney has been involved with domain names since 1997. One of the most prolific writers in the domain industry and founder of TLDinvestors.com and 3Character.com

Comments

  1. Tauseef says

    December 30, 2020 at 3:51 am

    Very useful information. Thanks

  2. SEO Domains says

    January 2, 2021 at 12:13 pm

    SEO is a complicated thing. Much more complicated than the names market.

    One can not just find a good domain using “great DA, Trust Flow and backlinks”. All metrics are shit in this sense, they are useless for decision making. Simply because – Google doesn’t play by the rules of Moz, Majestic, Ahrefs or any other 3rd party organization, and Google ranking bots don’t give a flying fk on any 3rd party SEO metrics. The only use of any SEO metric – is a preliminary filtering. Whether the domain is worth you time to open it and manually investigate its quality.

Recent Posts

  • Understand Your Own Magic Words
  • Seller of Masks.com drops asking price
  • Dynadot wins the Namepros end of the year favorite registrar poll

Recent Comments

  • Matt on Understand Your Own Magic Words
  • Anonymous on Seller of Masks.com drops asking price
  • Anonymous on Seller of Masks.com drops asking price

Categories

Monthly Archives

domain name news

© 2021 TLD Investors · All Rights Reserved

loading Cancel
Post was not sent - check your email addresses!
Email check failed, please try again
Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.