Internet is stuffed with thousands of websites with different and sometimes similar type domain names. If you are starting a brand new website, domain name would be the first thing that is needed. Here you can either register with a new domain name or buy an existing one. Due to so many websites present online, it might be difficult to get an entirely different domain name of your choice. Buying and existing domain name has both advantages and disadvantages.
If you buy existing domain name, it might happen that large amount of traffic that visited the previous website lands onto you. The customers of older website may not be knowing that the domain name got renewed in another website’s name. Thus at the starting you can enjoy visitors coming at your site which was actually for the previous owner. Here you do stand the chance of converting this traffic to your customers.
You may get the benefit from SEO point of view if the previous owner had already put in efforts to put relevant keywords in the domain name you purchased for getting higher search engine ranking. Here you get the advantage of an already optimized domain name that gives you higher ranking in very short span of time.
As a word of caution, see to it that when you buy an existing domain name it has not used any black hat SEO tactics or have been punished by search engines for such act. Otherwise if you ignore such things, it might create serious issues in future.
There are many things needs to be taken into account before finalizing the domain name. Look out for the present ranking of the domain name. See to it that whether it has any existing link to a site or internal page links, which should not be there. Take into account the domain age before purchasing it. Calculate whether the amount you pay for content and link building services are valid or not. The domain name should not have any penalty in its name. Also go through the existing web traffic of that URL, make it sure that there is no cheating. Consider the incoming and back links and check out their creditability.
These were some important points to be considered while choosing an existing domain name.