Who wants a good laugh at my expense - domain purchase question

[1000ways]

Hey all, looking for some help here. If you could use a good laugh read on.

Looking for a new niche I stumbled across an available domain that I liked...let's call it cheapmidgetwidgets.net. Perfect.

So I threw up wordpress and a quick intro post and pinged the eff out of it to try and get it indexed real quick. The next day I checked to see if it was indexed using the site:http://cheapmidgetwidgets.net operator and I find that the only page indexed was a page something like: http://cheapmidgetwidgets.net/catego...collection.php and the title says Midget Collection Hacked by Douchebag McGee. There is no page like this...there's no store category...there's just one dumb wordpress post and it's not that.

After the initial moment of panic, I looked up to see if my shit had been hacked and there were no obvious signs. And after doing some research it looks like this was a previously owned domain. My gut feeling is that this site had been owned and got dropped because they got it sandboxed or worse. The question I have is if it was a previously owned domain, is there anyway I can tell if it's worth developing...i.e. is it permanently blackeyed by google, that and is there any chance that the hack could go from the previous owner to my install? I kind of doubt it but last thing I need is my shit getting all bunched up.

Needless to say I learned an important lesson about due diligence and domain buying. I hope you are amused by my ignorance!
Cheers

[Josh]

As long as it is indexed you should be fine.

[1000ways]

That's the thing. The only page that's indexed is the old page that apparently was hacked.

I guess to simplify the question: Is there anyway to check to see if a domain has been slapped by google? Or do you just search and if it's there it's there?

I guess I can try working it up and see if I get anything. If I don't see any indexing in a month I'll cut bait and chalk it up as a lesson learned. The one thing I'm concerned about is running into this in the future. How can you check to see if a domain had a previous owner and if that owner ran the domain into the ground?

[Josh]

Just put new posts on it, send a few backlinks, and see what happens.

I imagine if it is still indexed even with the older pages then it can't be that bad.

[Dave1]

Try http://www.waybackmachine.org/

It seems to work well for sites over a year old. You may be able to see what content used to be on it.