How can you check the history of a domain if you are buying it from a reseller. I do not want to buy a domain that has been banned by Google or something other search engines will not crawl due to inappropriate material. I need to know before I purchase what the site was used for.

www.whois.sc
www.archive.org
www.google.com

Just a general search in google itself will show you all sorts of results too.

Check web archive you can get the history of the domain. Go to the way back machine and enter your domain there

Are you about new domain name registration or about already registered domain names?

Really Web Archive is just wonderful and not just for seeing whether a site did anything dodgy. Its fantastic just to see the evolution of certain sites over time-especially when it comes to looking at your own sites, or sites you used to look at.

Google has cached pages too.

I use Web Archive to browse through all sorts of sites, including the competition. There's a ton of cached info online, so you shouldn't have much of a problem researching the history of the domain you want now.

Thanks guys for all of your responses! I used web archive to check the url's history and everything has checked out, no "dodgy" history.

I also looked up websites like yahoo and it is so cool to see the transformation over time into what it is today. Certainly humble beginnings.

web archive is by far the best tool for researching websites that are no longer available. Would highly recommend.

If you want to know whether that site has been banned or not better you should check it in Google.

How do you do that? Is that where you just insert the site name in the Google search?

How do you know if it has been banned versus not being indexed by Goggle?

The google search with site:yourdomainname.com will give you idea about this. If you can't find the site in SERPs that means the site is probably banned or completely disappeared from search results.

I wasn't familiar with the web archive option. Thanks for sharing it here! I just checked some sites in there and fortunately the few I just registered don't have any history of prior use.

SERPs? I have no idea what that is. Is this some program you have to download or is this an online application.

I did the Google search and found nothing. I am starting to get nervous because there was one point where my page was indexed. Wonder what it's disappearance means.

SERP is Search Engine Result Pages

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_results_page

Ahh, that's simple enough!

Well my site is not showing up for it's own name. Not that it is complete or anything as I have not officially launched yet, but at the time I purchased the domain it was showing up then.

Hopefully I have not been banned and just disappeared due to lack of updating and such.