One often stumbles upon a chance to get a good sounding domain name from a second hand, often for a very reasonable price. One can even find that domain to be useful or include a suitable keyword. There’s nothing more frustrating then setting up a website on it and finding out that the domain name isn’t favored and doesn’t get any search traffic. Is there a way out?

There may be a multitude of reasons why a domain may not rank – former hosting of illegal content, pirated content, black hat SEO tactics or similar. Based on John Mueller, the Google Webmaster Tools Analyst, there’s one thing that should be done if you bought a domain with a bad history – wait!

The domain in question was affected by a history of pirated content, for more than 2 years. The penalty itself wasn’t specified. The answer in short means one thing – there are no real resets when it comes to domains with a bad history. The domain itself is not lost forever though, if the problem didn’t last for way too long.

If an illegitimate activity lasted for say 10 years or so, no waiting will help, if the problems only lasted for months, the domain is not lost – it may need some time though. How long exactly this lasts was not specified. Therefore the simple word of advice – be very careful before you buy any domain, and investigate its history properly!