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4 Reasons Why Digital Marketers Should Start Using a WHOIS History Search Tool among Others

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In recent years, the growth of the Internet has caused tremendous changes in the marketing industry. Digital marketing has taken over traditional forms of advertising, as more and more people go online to look for products and services. These changes led to the increased reliance on digital marketing campaigns, which require significant investment in terms of time and effort. It involves doing careful market research to identify a target audience, build content, and plan how this will all work as part of a sales funnel.

One of the most reliable ways to carry out a digital marketing campaign is to partner with other websites to promote one’s products and services. Digital marketing can, however, be detrimental if the site you partner with has a checkered past. That is avoidable with the help of solutions such as a WHOIS history search tool and others.

Reason #1: Boost the Efficiency of SEO Campaigns

If you want to boost your SEO campaigns quickly, getting an old or expired domain can be a good option. Why? Some old domains already have good rankings with Google. Newly created websites often take years to rank, on the other hand. However, you cannot just get any expired domain to use for your campaign. You have to verify if your chosen domain has a clean track record.

Using a domain name history search tool can help you check if the website you’re eyeing has any associations to known individuals or registrants involved in criminal or illegitimate activities. You can also use a threat intelligence platform to check if it has been featured on phishing and malware data feeds to get a full picture.

Reason #2: Protect Your Domain’s Reputation

Ensuring the success of your marketing campaign involves using a domain that has a good reputation. If your domain has associations with suspicious domain names, it can tarnish your brand.

By checking a domain’s WHOIS history together with domain reputation checker tools like Domain Reputation API, digital marketers can double-check if it shares an IP address with a known malicious domain. If that’s the case, it might be best to choose another domain to avoid being mistakenly associated with cybercriminals. Digital marketers can also use a WHOIS lookup tool to check current records.

Reason #3: Verify Third-Party Legitimacy and Credibility

Most digital marketers use content and influencer marketing tactics to widen audience reach. Before partnering with a third party, they can first use a WHOIS history search tool to see if their domains are legitimate and credible. The tool helps you know when and where a domain was registered and see if its owner is who he/she claims to be. 

You can also know if the domain has connections to malicious domain names or if its owner has a shady past that you must know about, notably by using a tool like Reverse WHOIS Search — which lets you see which domains are connected (some of which might be considered malicious) to a given registrant’s name and other details.

Reason #4: Ensure Cybersecurity Protection

Cybersecurity is no longer a concern for IT officers alone. Even digital marketers have a role to play in not associating their brand with criminal undertakings. With a domain history search tool, they can investigate domains that they may want to use for a campaign prior to buying it. 

Let’s consider a hypothetical scenario in which your company is about to launch a new product site and is interested in a domain that had prior registrants. You can run it through the tool and found if it has been used by any individual or organization (or any known pseudo that they’ve used) tied to current malicious activity. You can also use a domain reputation checker to identify other possible vulnerabilities.

With the growing intensity and sophistication of cyber attacks, everyone in the organization must be well-informed about risks. One way by which digital marketers can help is to make sure that every domain they use for their campaigns is trustworthy and legitimate, something that is easily doable with the help of a WHOIS history search tool among others

About the author

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Jonathan Zhang

Jonathan Zhang is the founder and CEO of Threat Intelligence Platform (TIP) — a data, tool, and API provider that specializes in automated threat detection, security analysis and threat intelligence solutions for Fortune 1000 and cyber-security companies. TIP is part of the Whois API Inc. family which is a trusted intelligence vendor by over 50,000 clients.