Dave Shuts from England bought a domain 7 months prior and yet it still isn’t showing up on search engine result pages. He wonders if its history might have something to do with the situation. Digging deeper, he found that it was first registered in 2000 and it has since gone through a number of owners. One of them was a company in Australia that used it to serve ads. Is it possible that trust issues are preventing its appearance on Google SERPs?

Matt Cutts agrees with this assessment. Seven months is far too long as domains typically appear after a few days. Try typing the exact URL on the search engine textbox. If it still does not appear in Google results, then there are probably trust issues going on. The problem may also be rooted in an esoteric country code. Another possible reason is a lack of links pointing to the website. This would prevent spiders from finding it. This should be easy enough to check and rule out.

Matt invites us to look at the situation as a black hat SEO. Such a person would buy domains and use them for spamming until these sites become useless because of their bad reputation. The domains might then be sold to an unsuspecting buyer. Avoid being victimized by doing a thorough background check before purchasing.