Is it ever a good idea to purchase a domain that was once part of a PBN?

[Tiberian]

Is it ever a good idea to purchase a site that was once part of a PBN, and attempt to try and make it legitimate again? Or is it not even worth the hassle?
It seems like it was once legitimate (back in 2001-2008 or so) and then at some point it was purchased and used for linking.
I'm mostly interested in it for the name, more than anything else, but it does have some legitimate backlinks (again from 2001-2008).

 

[CCarter]

Is it ever a good idea to purchase a site that was once part of a PBN, and attempt to try and make it legitimate again?

Does it currently rank within Google for any search terms. If so what's the range in traffic volume. If you can't find anything than it's burnt to a crisp.

 

[Nargil]

Is it ever a good idea to purchase a site that was once part of a PBN, and attempt to try and make it legitimate again? Or is it not even worth the hassle?
It seems like it was once legitimate (back in 2001-2008 or so) and then at some point it was purchased and used for linking.
I'm mostly interested in it for the name, more than anything else, but it does have some legitimate backlinks (again from 2001-2008).

It absolutely isn't a good idea.

As soon as you notice that the site has been used previously as a PBN, throw it away immediately. It's not about legit backlinks, it's about it being used for black hat purposes.

Whether it's indexed or not doesn't really matter. I've seen plenty of times people buying an indexed, formerly abused, domain. Registering it, building it up, putting up a few articles and all of a sudden, few days later, manual penalty appeared in their search console.

Another problem might be the fact, that these domains might be penalized by algorithm or they might simply be lame and crippled. That happens pretty often, that people register this kind of domain, build money site on it and no matter what they do, they are unable to rank it.

So rather than possibly wasting your money and time on something that's doomed from day 1, make sure you are going with something legit.

 

[secretagentdad]

Only if it’s one hell of a brand name.

 

[Ryuzaki]

I've bought domains in the past where everything seemed clear and above water. Every way of detecting any issues passed with flying colors.

When I buy a domain I ALWAYS add it to Search Console, because if there's a manual penalty attached to it it will appear there within a week or two.

Many times I've bought domains where they have traffic from links and type-in traffic. That's valuable, but the problem is that spammers know it too. So in the past they'd bought the domain and either redirected the traffic to a spam offer or rebuilt the site so all looked fine on the surface to Google but was cloaking spam offers for real non-google-bot users.

There's some stuff you can't defend against. But in every single one of those cases I sent in a reconsideration request, said I was a new owner and built a brand new site, so the problem couldn't be persisting, and they cleared it for me within a week.

I've also recovered other types of penalties like Penguin and Panda and the sites go on to do very well.

I've never tried to recover an actual PBN site though. Once they're deindexed, I just call it a wrap on that. That shows that you aren't possibly an innocent user or naive user downstream, but a "malicious" builder of a PBN. I'm sure the domains can get cleared up and used, but I've never bothered. Seems like a big uphill battle not worth battling.

 

[Tiberian]

Awesome, thank you, guys. You saved me a huge headache.
I'm definitely hearing loud and clear that "benefits" I would have received by purchasing the site would be overridden by all of the other factors.

Oh, and the brand name, it was good, but I can find something similar.

 

[Golan]

My rule of thumb is simple: backlinks are much more important than domain history. If there was a PBN or doorway or whatever else bad thing on the domain at some point of its history, but the then-owner didn't build enough bad backlinks to the domain, and the backlink picture is overall good, - i personally take such domain for my projects any day. Especially if the domain is still in index.

And then, as @Ryuzaki said, you see everything in GSC.