Should You Buy an Existing Domain Name?

When you are thinking of buying a domain name for your business, have you taken an existing domain name into account? As you know domains come and go these days and sometimes it can be quite difficult to find a completely new one of your desire. Whether buying an existing domain name a good choice comparing with registering a brand new domain? Here I will bring you the disadvantages and advantages of purchasing an existing domain name and hopefully help you make a right decision.

Advantages
I start from the advantages to searching for and purchasing an existing domain name. There are many reasons why an existing domain is welcomed for webmasters.

Firstly, you may expect a large amount of traffic that has previously flowed to that particular website. You can imagine that there are surely some customers of the older owner may not know that the domain name didn't get renewed, so that they are of highly likely to visit that domain name after you buy the domain. In other ways, you can enjoy these traffic due to the hard effort of the previously owner. This could be an excellent beginning for your website to against totally no visitor.

Secondly, you may also benefits from the old owner who definitely pay their efforts in targeting keywords to ensure the domain name get listed higher at the search engine results page. In such cases, you domain name is search engine friendly and it will takes you less time and energy for SEO purpose.

Thirdly, the possibility of buying finding a short, catchy domain with the targeted keywords contained will be increased. As we all known, it is not an easy job to find a desired domain that is still available especially if your niche is quite competitive. Also due to the fact there are some domains owners buy these perfect domains simply as an investment, then short domain names are more likely to already be registered. Choosing the right domain name for your internet business enterprise becomes more challenging if you never take the existing domain names into account. Because it is not an easy job to find a good domain name that is still available you may be force to buy an existing domain name from the market.

An Disadvantage
However, if you have settled your mind for buying an existing domain, you should be aware of the potential pitfall. The major disadvantage of buying an existing domain name is that it may have been punished by the search engines for the inappropriate SEO tactics (or black hat techniques). If you are unfortunately enough and purchase domain of this kind, I would empathize. Under such circumstance, it is quite hard for your website to be get indexed again, which means even if you are going to invest a lot of money on promotion and SEO, you will receive no outcome absolutely.

To help you purchase a right existing domain to boost your business, below I have addressed some Dos & Don'ts. Hopefully, they will guide you to the right direction.

Dos:

Search for the existing rankings of the domain name.
Look into the existing link of the website. Are there internal page links?
Think about the domain age and authority before buying.
Think over carefully whether the content building and link building deserve what you are asked to pay for.
Check out whether there are any penalties on the domain name.
Analyze the incoming links to see whether they target your desired keywords.
Figure out whether the backlinks are come from other sites that are also owned by the particular website owner. If this is the case, then it is very likely that these backlinks will be disappear very soon after you make the purchase.
Check out the existing traffic of that website and make sure there is no cheat.
Check out the age of the domains existing links.
Look for authority news sites linking to the domain.

Don'ts:

Do not buy an existing domain without taking its Google Page Rank into account.
Do not buy an existing domain that only has low quality and spammy links.
Do not simply focused on and pay a high investment on a keyword matching domain, and also remember not to go for hyphenated URL address.
Do not buy an existing domain that has not been indexed by the major search engines.
Do not buy an existing domain that is not in your niche, unless you will sell it in the future.
It is not advised to build organic links with multiple domain purchases.

If you would like to get a brand new domain name, you can either:

1) get one from web hosting companies since many of them will offer you with free domains when you register their hosting solutions.

2) get one from a separate domain name registering company.