Thinking of buying a cool domain? Check to make sure it isn't haunted. Domain marketplaces won't warn you if, say, moist.li was previously host to questionable content or the origin of unpleasant network activity. And if it was, you're not going to be able to sign up for useful services, you're not going to be ranked highly in search engines, and you're definitely not going to be delivering email from it. Bryan Braun's ghost story is about musicbox.fun and the exorcism is yet incomplete.
I had no idea, of course. It wasn't until I had redirected all of my
musicboxfun.comtraffic tomusicbox.funthat I noticed that something wasn't right: my web traffic from organic search dropped to zero.I assumed it was temporary so I double-checked my process and waited for awhile, but it never really recovered. It wasn't until a year later that I discovered the copyright violations and learned that the domain name was compromised.
Apparently, this is a thing that happens to domain names, but as far as I know, there's not really a name for it. When I described it to my wife, she said "Oh, so it's haunted."
The todo list: check the domain's web history at the Wayback Machine, search for DMCA complaints and domain history reports at SEO sites, check email blacklists, and be prepared to "wait for a while" while you commit to best practices.
Before you buy a domain name, first check to see if it's haunted [Bryan Braun]
