Has this domain been penalized?

by 11 replies
13
Hi. I found a good domain with a good backlink profile:

www.eastmountainsouth.com

The DA is 29 and the TF/CF is 23/22. I did a manual review of the backlinks and they look good. I also went to Google and did a manual check of the domain to see if it shows up. Typing site:eastmountainsouth.com and info:eastmountainsouth.com show normal results.

However, when I use this automated tool to check if this domain has been penalized or not:

http://pixelgroove.com/serp/sandbox_checker

the tool above says the domain has been penalized. Is that tool wrong or did I make a mistake?
#search engine optimization #domain #penalized
  • What is the PR? If DA is 29. Look at the ahrefs backlink profile for the link and determine if there are a bunch of spamming links or not, if not, you're fine... If it's showing up in the organic search results, it's not sandboxed. May be dancing but I doubt it with DA 29...
    • [1] reply
    • PR of the site is 2. I've used several PR checker tools and the PR shows as valid.

      But just showing up in the organic search results could still mean it's penalized. From my understanding, your site can be penalized but still show up in the Google search results.
  • So when checking expired/dropped domains you want to check a few things in order to make sure you're not getting a penalized site that you can see without checking your WMT (IF you use it).

    1. Search the url on Google to make sure it's indexed... With expired domains this is hit or miss as most of them will be deindexed until you put them on hosting/index them again.
    2. Check the link profile with Ahrefs/Majestic and make sure you're not dealing with any (porn, pills, sex, viagra) etx anchor texts which will be a good idea of what the site used to be used for.
    3. Check archive.org for what the old site looked like and then get a real idea of what the site was used for.
    4. If you have SEMRush you can run a quick site audit to see if it still ranks, ever ranked and TANKED etc.
    5. Make sure the link profile has some links worth a damn "Metrics can be spoofed"

    Good Luck

    -RD
    • [1] reply
    • Yup, I did everything except for 4 because I don't have SEMRush. Everything about it looks good. Maybe that penalty checker tool is wrong? Still trying to figure out whether I am wrong or that penalty checking tool is wrong (the tool is at Google Sandbox and Penalty Checker Tool)
  • Banned
    The site has indexed pages but it looks like some Chinese spam.

    Good luck with that.
    • [1] reply
    • The site was taken over by a Japanese owner in 2013. Here is the web archive snapshot on May 17, 2014: http://web.archive.org/web/201405170...tainsouth.com/

      It just looks like a blog of some sort in Japanese. I don't think the pages indexed by Google are spam, based on the web archive above.

      I think it was the site of a band back in 2006/2007 (the website may have been using Flash because I can't see the snapshot of it by the web achive in 2006/2007). Between 2008 and 2012, I'm guessing the domain wasn't used because there are no web archives of it.

      Having said that, even though the site changed to a Japanese owner, I don't see why it would be penalized by Google based on what I have seen of the backlinks (I was using OpenLinkProfiler.org - The freshest backlinks. For free. to check the backlinks)
      • [1] reply
  • Seems to be punished...
Join the discussion

Next Topics on Trending Feed