Registration of a Pre-Owned Domain Name: Advantages and Disadvantages

A Web Hosting Article Contributed by Nuno Rolinho

Registration of a Pre-Owned Domain Name

A registration of a pre-owned domain name just like everything, might have its advantages and disadvantages. Almost everyone that owns a domain name have already thought about a great domain name, but when they tried to register it...they found out that someone has already bought it. Normally the person that bought that domain is a domain scavenger, that is, someone that buys a bunch of domains and park them (non active websites).

Then they just put the domain for sale in some auctions website or make it available for sale at the domain name registrar website. This is one way of buying a pre-owned domain name, but occasionally, domain name owners lose interest in their websites or don't pay the bills. This is an opportunity of a life time, you can either buy the domain when it gets expired or wait for some domain scavenger to buy it for the next 5 or 10 years...

Registration of a Pre-Owned Domain Name: Advantages

One of the best things on applying for a pre-owned domain name registration is that that domain name already got some advertising. If you have a website for a whole year, even if you don't ask google or altavista to put your website on their search engines, somehow it will appear there.

This is good because you don't need to insert it again, and besides that, some search engines (i.e. google) have a page rank; if you get a high position on this ranking your website will be on top of the searchings. If your buying a domain with the name: "sellbananas.com", you probably sell bananas just like the previous owner, that means the the site description/main subject should be the same.

That leads us to another great advantage, that is all the linkage that your website already have on other websites that somehow are related to your business...instant and free advertising!

Registration of a Pre-Owned Domain Name: Disadvantages

Before applying for a pre-owned domain name registration, you should consider that all the negativity that belonged to the former owner of this domain. I'm talking about spam and enemy attraction. The enemies of the previous owner will must probably be your enemies and the spamming that affected the previous domain email account and bandwidth could be transferred to your new domain name registration.

If the previous website with that domain name had bad reputation, then it will take a while until you clean that bad reputation out of your new website. Now, let's go back to the "sellbananas" example, let's imagine that you have a company called "Bananas & Co.", and you buy the "sellbananas.com" domain.

But unfortunately there's actually a company called "Sell Bananas" in your country and they want to buy your domain, since you don't have the rights for that name, only the domain name, the "Sell Bananas" company can go to court and stake a claim to it and must probably win the case.