Hot to tell is a SEDO domain is banned

[TVIDesign]

Hi Guys,

I've dound a domain i'd like to buy on Sedo. I could just buy a new domain but I wanted an older doamin already listed in google. currently...

* It has Pagerank 0
* archive.org has no record of it.
* google has 5 pages listed (all the normal sedo legal pages etc).
* as a name it's ok but nothing special.
* The price is £300 (although I could offer less).
* Google last crawled the home page nearly a month ago so it's obviously on a slow crawl repeat.
* google is listing most pages without the www. i.e. just h t t p://domainname.com

So, my questions are...

1) Is there any way of telling if the domain has any kind of google penalty against it?
2) Is it worth buying a domain already listed in google or should I just buy a new one?
3) Are the canonical issues going to be a problem or will it just drop the original pages when i add the www. ?

Sorry for all the questions. This is the first time I've considered using Sedo.

Jon

[jezaff]

cant answer 4 sure, but i bought a recycled domain that didnt list even if you searched directly. Within 2 days of leverging my existing high PR sites it was fully crawled and ranking well. So its certainly possible to recover.

I have also heard there is a channel to contact google over this stuff and get yourself relisted after a change of ownership.

I mean, logically, why would they want to exclude a good site becuase it used to hold something bad? OK, easier said than done, but worth a risk.

Actually, my purchase was an expired domain, so only cost me a few quid. I guess if you are spending ££s then u may wnat to be cautious. My approach has alway been to keep searching for an unregistered domain. With a few very expensive exceptions I dont think people come to URLs direct anyway. And will www.blahblahcreditcards.com really be less succesful then www.blahblahblahcreditcards.com once youve got a good seo strategy in place?

[TVIDesign]

Damnit, just read the page carefully and found out that the domain wasn't spelt correctly.

Definitely not worth the money now but still interested in any replies as I'm still looking for the best way to get hold of a good old domain.

[Brendon]

Expired / parked domains aren't worth it any more (in the way they used to be). Basically, once you buy it and change the data, you get a clean slate reset, so only buy such a domain if you would have considered buying it as a fresh reg