You have developed your business model, set aside or acquired funding and set into motion the grandest of ventures ever known to mankind. You devote countless hours to your mission, tirelessly you plug away producing content and marketing your new site and often times working until 4am when you have to stop because your eyes are burning and your spouse is threatening to physically harm you if you don’t go to bed. Things are just starting to roll as you had hoped and dreamed, then something terrible happens.. Your fancy new SEO’d, keyword optimized, clean, beautifully designed content rich site is nowhere to be found on search engines, you know you have done your research and you should be owning your niche but nothing is there, no traffic, no results on the search engines so you start to cry and end up locking yourself in your bedroom drowning your woes with Diet Coke and Doritos, ending up broke, alone and 450lbs… Oh, why you say.. Why did this happen?

The answer can be quite simple, unfortunately you didn’t check out that domain you spent $250,000 on before you bought it and it turns out the previous owner used it for less than honorable purposes so you are basically screwed. Domains can be and are blacklisted every day for holding or distributing malicious content among other reasons, one simple way to check for this is to search on Google, yes I said Google. If you use this search term:
http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=http://www.domain.com/&hl=en

(replace “domain.com” with the domain you wish to check and you can find out a lot about the domain name you are interested in purchasing before you plop down that roll of Benjamin’s. Checking the previous use of the domain should be added to your normal list of pre-purchase checks, If the site was used for malicious purposes in the past move on, chances are its got bad karma all over the net, crappy back links and a “shady” history. If you find this out after the fact, you have a choice to make, either ditch it and find a different name or you can fight the fight to clean your good name, but this can be a very major undertaking and in my opinion difficult to accomplish.

Bottom line, check your stuff before hand, don’t get into this kind of situation in the first place and you won’t have to worrk about it.