Buying a domain previously owned by a now deceased person

If you feel conflicted, you could host the original pages in a dedicated directory with a no-index header, and set up a permanent 301 redirect for those pages..? If they end up listed with your own results, it's trivial to get Google to remove them via Search Console (I do this occasionally for my pure HTML website, which has no Google Analytics etc. on it).

That way, anyone who ever saved the link or linked to it from a blog would still get through to the content.

To me it's analogous to buying a house. If you buy a house over a certain age, especially one that's changed hands several times, there's a pretty fair chance someone died in it. You can either stress yourself out over that and walk away, or accept that that's just part of life and move on with things.

Last year I helped my best friend clean out his mom's condo after she passed away unexpectedly. Aside from a few sentimental items he kept and some things that were valuable either as gifts to the remaining family, for donations, or for or resale, the very very vast majority of the accumulated stuff went straight into the dumpster. A lifetime worth of things were cleaned out in two days and the condo was sold within a week.

Nothing in our lives is truly permanent and the only constant is change. Accepting that change is part of being human.

I don't think this is any concern beyond natural intrigue. The internet comes and goes.

It sucks someone died of course, but if we switched to a house analogy you wouldn't worry about preserving the former owner's claim on the house you just bought would you? Assuming like in this case you have no connection to the deceased.

Maybe I'm a bit too heartless, I dunno, but I feel like you've got no worries here at all. A domain expired, a domain was registered. They share a name solely through coincidence.

I think it doesn't matter. At the same time...

So once a friend of mine worked at a good will store sorting through donations. And they found a treasure trove of family albums. The person making the donation said that it was from a tenant of theirs who was kicked out or lost the apartment. Anyway, I took the photos and forgot about it. Then when I was digging through the storage, I found them, and decided, what the heck, I'd try to figure out who these belonged to. So I studied all the photos in the albums, and some clippings and receipts, and with a little leg work, figured out who it was, looked them up, and gave them a call, asking if they want their photos back.

They were pretty openly hostile to the inquiry. So I backed off, and threw the albums in the garbage. So, that was that. Maybe I approached the phone call wrong. Or maybe they really didn't want it, or to be bothered. You never know.

Maybe add a banner to point to the web archive of the previous site? Life moves on and domains are ultimately rented much like our time here. Having a new business doesn’t stop you from honouring that, in my view.

I mean, at some point surely the host will take it down anyway, once the registration expires. At which point it will likely be squatted on, automatically. At least you'd be making productive use of this little patch of web land.

I do not see a problem with you taking over the domain. The respectful thing to do is to permanently erase the previous owners files without reading them.

There is no need for you to memorialize the deceased owner. In fact, I think it would be disrespectful to do so.

When my wife was dying, she explicitly asked me to permanently delete her emails. I did this with great sadness, but I did not read them out of respect for her wishes.

I just helped a deceased friend's family clear out his house and sell it, sell his book and music collections, sell his car, etc., etc. If his one-man small business had a retail store which he'd owned, we'd have sold that off, too.

A good way to deal with any new-feeling emotional|social situation which happens on-line is to think about analogous situations which were real-world things long before there was any "on-line".

I have a side project named CaseYak and for the first year of it we were forced to use thecaseyak.com because caseyak.com was taken. We looked into the whois record for caseyak.com at the time, and it turned out it was owned by someone named Stephen Casey… who lived in Alaska (AK). So it was casey ak dot com (lol). Not sure what happened to Mr. Casey but the domain just opened up this year.

You're going down a rabbit hole of emotions and stress you don't need in your life. Either

a) find a new domain without the attachments of this one OR

b) buy the domain and do what you want with it.

honestly, you're going to stress yourself out cause whatever you do is not going to be enough. there is a reason people leave emotion out of business.

The past use of a domain can haunt you for a while, depending on what that past use was.

For example, I knew someone who bought a domain (from a 3rd-party domain seller) whose more recent past had included adult content (you would never know from the name itself). After they set the website / email up, they discovered that their domain was on a lot of blacklists, and had mucho mail delivery problems. It took over 2 years to get through it all.

This doesn't sound like it would have that particular problem, but the domain's history can, in fact, haunt you. If the content it previously hosted could ever be considered as something that might be blacklisted by the big "blacklist cartels" (i.e., SpamHaus et al), be forewarned.

If it is a good name, I think it is only a matter of time before someone gets it. You might as well, if you like the name.

Of course, I have absolutely no idea if that is a good business move. On the other hand, you'd be doing a service to anyone who bookmarked that website by adding a note about the transition somewhere on the new site. I like Hard_Space's suggestion too. This is coming from seeing what happened with Ian Murdock's website. Thankfully, a copy of it is also hosted at https://ianmurdock.debian.net

Buy it and preserve memory. At least you're conscious of the person, someone else won't be.

I've got a domain where the previous owners just let it expire while it still had useful information on it. My solution was to 301 redirect requests to the Internet Archive so that any links continue to work for a while, while also making it obvious that the site is gone. I won't be paying for this indefinitely though, the information isn't that vital and people should learn of the archive. Hopefully this helped them do that.

The difference between the situations is that I wasn't interested in using the domain myself. Hosting the old site in a subdomain like u/Hard_Space described sounds like a good solution (I'd go for a subdomain rather than a directory, people often don't read further than the slash and it makes it feel like one site, while a subdomain is at the front and feels more like a separate part, especially when given a descriptive name).

This is timebomb. Information saved in search engines, etc, any time could appear again, and will look hugely contradict with current site activity.

I think, better to register/buy other domain, with different name.

If you have much money, also could for convenience of customers, make dedicated site with old name, where write on very beginning of main page something like "this site dedicated to memory of good person, but if you looking for ...co, redirect here (link)", but this is terrible solution, considering people could enter to buy something and they will first see negative information. But for some things this is not so important.

One thing I have seen done in such cases is simply to have a discreet note somewhere on the main page like "Note: Prior to 2022, this domain was used by a different individual. If you've come here looking for the old bookwebsite.com website, which used to be owned by Bookguy, this content can be found in the webarchive at archive.com/bookwebsite" or something like that.

Ask someone from ArchiveTeam to run ArchiveBot against the site, the resulting WARC will eventually make its way into the Wayback Machine. After that, feel free to use the domain for your own purposes.

https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Main_Page

archiveteam@archiveteam.org or IRC at the channel #archiveteam (on hackint)

Many years ago I got my .com transferred to me from the registrar that held it (it was expired, but not yet "released")

For a couple years I kept getting 404 errors in the site logs for pages dedicated to WWF/WWE wrestling stars ...even after moving hosting companies

I'd register the domain, use it for what you want, and ignore whatever may have been there before

I saw a gardening-related site being sold for several thousand dollars by an expired domain reseller after the owner died. This happens a lot.

From a SEO perspective, you should be fine as long as it wasn't previously a malicious or spammy site.

From ethical/emotional well that's your decision. Personally I'd be fine with it

I'm not suggesting you'd want to do this, but (theoretical question) is it still possible for the new owner of a domain to get web.archive.org to delete the archived data from that domain, the data created by a previous owner?

I remember reading complaints about that happening. Here's a ten-year-old discussion, for example:

https://archive.org/post/423432/domainsponsorcom-erasing-pri...

I think you should reach out to his relatives and ask them for their opinion. Then you can do this with a clean conscience.