Google's John Mueller had a fun analogy when it comes to buying used domains and the potential issues they may have. He said it is like buying a used car.
John wrote on Twitter " It's like buying a used car; sometimes it's easy to get things working well, sometimes it takes a really long time & a lot of work and you still have hard-to-find noises."
The reference is on bad links or a shady history an old domain once had. You just don't know the full history and how Google sees the domain name.
Here are the relevant tweets from John on this:
In short, you can clean it up, but it's impossible to know ahead of time how much work / time it will take. Content issues tend to be easier, issues with links might be more involved. I suspect you have the know-how & tools to take something like that on though :)
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) October 16, 2019
There's not really much to prove, since you can't guarantee what a site would rank as :). It's like buying a used car; sometimes it's easy to get things working well, sometimes it takes a really long time & a lot of work and you still have hard-to-find noises.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) October 16, 2019
Forum discussion at Twitter.
