Today many webmasters can find many tools on the Internet. Among them, a unique service would be to let you know the history of a domain.
Single service
Unfortunately, such a resource does not exist yet. But to get a more or less complete picture of the history of the address name, you can use paid services.
- For example, the domains.checkparams.com portal provides access to its database, from which you can learn about domain rating changes for at least $ 0.10: Yandex - TIC, google - PR, Alexa; as well as changing DNS zipies, HTTP requests and responses.
- On the portal recipdonor.com for $ 0.01 you can find out the age of the domain, for $ 1 the history of changes in the site’s TCI, for $ 3 PR in Google.
These and other similar portals facilitate the study of the domain’s history, but at the same time they offer other paid services that are freely available. Until now, web builders have to get disparate data from different sources.
Free Access: Whois
The most popular domain name checking service for employment is Whois. On its official portal you can also browse DNS for free
records allowing you to find out the provider and corporate email account, if any, of the current domain owner; IP address of the server (provider); server response time to the visitor’s request.
But the domain history is not displayed in all of this information.
Many Internet portals placed this service on their pages and added
something to him. For example, Reg.ru - a well-known domain name registrar - offers monthly free access to Whois history and hosting. It can be used only by partners for the sale of domains (for the start of cooperation, documentation is required). A one-time request for previous owners from the moment of its registration will cost 90 rubles (much more expensive than previously considered services, but from the very beginning, and not just in recent years).
Available information about any domain
A lot of useful information about a busy domain can be obtained for free at domaintools.com:
- name of the owner or company to which the site is registered;
- the date of first registration and the number of records made since Whois;
- hosting name, date of registration and location (country, city);
- Server IP address and its type;
- the number of sites on the same server and several specific names from this list;
- link to feedback from the domain administrator;
- the date of registration of the domain on the current user and the end date;
- the percentage of compliance (relevance) of the site name to its meta description and keywords;
- a list of these phrases and the meta description compiled by the administrator;
- indicator of seo-site optimization (in percent) and even advice on improving this indicator;
- number of images, internal and outgoing links.
The site also provides a list of similar domains that have never been registered. A complete domain history (including all owners, changes to important records) sells for $ 49. Before buying, the system notifies you how much useful information you will receive so as not to pay in vain for a "zero" report. Thus, using the system, you will probably find out the age of the site and its history without paying a dime.
The story in pictures: Wayback Machine
Many masters know that you can view the domain content (main and other pages) using the search engine cache (archive the pages of each site). If he is busy, freed or just freed, you can see firsthand the
subject of the site (what it was or is). To do this, just type the address in the search engine and click on the “Saved copy” item in the results.
But few people know that all cached pages are archived and available for viewing in the free Wayback Machine service, which, like Whois, many sites hosted. To see the domain history, on the official portal of the service you need to enter the web address you are interested in and find the highlighted number on the calendar. Then point to it and click on the link. This will open the main page archived by the search engine on that calendar day. The database contains snapshots of sites since 1997.
If you did not find anything, this does not mean that the domain history is missing. It might not have been cached by search engines. This happens, but very rarely. Firstly, if the owner entered a tag in the page code that prohibits saving; secondly, if the search engine did not manage to cache the site (either the Internet project did not pass the system’s filters, or it closed very quickly).
The Wayback Machine portal archive is also useful because it allows you to find out if a domain matches your project (check for relevance). For websites that do not have a regional affiliation, it doesn’t matter that the owner has changed, that you can create a site on a different topic, that search engines will change the issuance in accordance with the new information, it’s really important how Internet users remember it, what they expect to see by going through given address.
For what it is worth paying
So, you can check the domain history on different web resources both for free and for free. The information they provide is collected by webmasters, rather, to study competitors. Knowing who owned it and when they registered this name for the first time gives nothing. Here’s what’s really important to find out: is he in a search engine bath, is he in the black list of Yandex (filter AGS) and others, is he prohibited from indexing. Therefore, it’s worth paying for information about rating changes (for example, Yandex TCI). But this information is not significant. If the new site will be constantly checked by search engine robots, then over time a good Internet resource will prove itself on the positive side and will be “pardoned” if it was on the black lists. But this will require more than one week.
How to determine if a new site got rid of the load of negative history
When a domain has already been purchased, it is possible to understand whether a site is blacklisted by how it is indexed. If the system’s robot constantly updates information, this can be seen in your webmaster’s personal account, and the site’s pages are not indexed for a long time (they are not shown to users in the search engine), which means it is on the black list. For example, in the “History” section of Yandex’s dashboard, you can see how the number of pages in the search has changed over time. On the chart, the indicator should grow, preferably exponentially.
For specialists in creating and promoting websites, domain history has always been important. However, over time, with changes in search engines, the need for such information has disappeared. As web developers would say: "This is a dead topic."