Is this domain penalized?

I'm talking with the owner of codhq about purchasing the domain for a for-fun site. He claims that the domain is not penalized, however I have my doubts.

It has about 7,000 links, lots of which are foreign links and even a few from adult sites, though the anchor text distribution does look very natural. It does not appear to be indexed in google (though there are no actual pages up on the site, but even googling the domain name returns nothing), and it doesn't appear to have a robots.txt file (which could otherwise have been what was preventing it form being indexed).

Here's what he replied when I approached him about the site not being indexed..

to my knowledge, there are no "penalties" on the domain. I don't even know what that means. It's always had legitimate content, and used to have a Pagerank of 6. There'd be no reason for it to be "penalized".

I think your understanding of how smart Google's indexing is flawed. If a page hasn't been online in years, I'm quite certain Google will suppress its index weighting.

Click to expand...

Does a site show up in google's index even if there is nothing to index? If you go to the site you'll see that it just returns a page not found error, there are no actual files or pages on the site currently. If that's the case, should I still be able to google the exact domain and get a result?

The domain name is codhq with the standard domain extension (the site won't let me post it as I'm a new member).

The site is deindexed

how come its deindexed?

When I go to codhq.com it doesn't even load. There's not even a parked page there.

turdface said:

When I go to codhq it doesn't even load. There's not even a parked page there.

Click to expand...

Right, which I'm wondering if that's why the site doesn't show up in google's index. I think the site is literally being pointed to a DNS with no files at all hosted on it.

Normally, if a site wasn't indexed I would assume penalty, but could it just not be showing up because there's literally nothing to index or should googling the exact domain name still return a result if it's not penalized?

Have him post something on it and get it indexed by Google and then you can think about buying it.