trick to determine if site is penalized?

There was a trick I learned years ago with google that would show me if a site had a penalty / was sandboxed or not. I forget what I was doing, but I was searching the domain and put a space in it between the .com or something?

it would show me If the site I was posting to had a penalty on it by either showing that domain coming up as first or not at all, and I was curious to find out again if anyone knew?

Was useful with sape and such.

Thanks.

I think the "trick" was typing site:domain.com however, most expired domains are deindexed and its not a conclusive test.

was it that simple? I thought I remembered spacing out the .com or something to determine if it had a penalty? There was a trick to it

oh, I think you type in site:domain.com and then space the .com and if it doesn't show up, it's sandboxed / has a penalty.