Before you buy a domain, make sure it's not haunted
Front-end engineer Brian Brown recently posted a blog post looking back at the mistake he made when buying a domain.
Before you buy a domain name, first check to see if it's haunted | Bryan Braun - Frontend Developer
Brown developed an interactive online music box that runs in the browser and hosted it at musicboxfun.com. In 2022, he discovered that the domain musicbox.fun was available, so he purchased it and moved his site there.
When Brown redirected all traffic from musicboxfun.com to musicbox.fun, the search results dropped to zero. Brown assumed this was a temporary issue with the site migration, so he checked various settings and waited for things to go back to normal. However, a year passed and the new domain still didn't appear in the search results.
When Brown investigated the domain further, he found that musicbox.fun was once the domain of a pirated music distribution site. The site had received thousands of copyright infringement complaints between June 2018 and February 2021, and by the time it was closed in 2022, more than 20,000 URLs under the domain had been removed from search engines such as Google.
When Brown told his wife about the negative effects of his previous use of the domain, she responded, 'It's haunted.' Brown liked the term 'haunted' because the phenomenon is similar to a haunted house in the following ways:
Something terrible has happened with the domain name in the past
On the surface, there is nothing particularly wrong with the domain name.
After a while, there are signs that something is wrong.
I was shocked to find out what had happened.
・I can't decide whether to perform the exorcism or abandon it.
・There are many superstitions about purification methods
Cosmetic fixes don't work
The inner workings of search engines are opaque, so it's impossible to know if you're affected, and it's unclear how to fix it. Brown recommends checking the Wayback Machine to see how a domain has been used in the past before purchasing it, and checking Google's transparency report and copyright infringement search sites to see if there are any copyright infringement claims.
It's also a good idea to use an SEO tool like Ahrefs to check historical data on backlinks and ranking estimates, especially for important domains.
Regarding musicbox.fun, Brown said, 'We are committed to investing time and effort in helping to restore the search site's trust score.'
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in Web Service, , Posted by log1d_ts