Can a domain name alone be considered SPAM?

[Tosten]

If someone has a domain that is spammy, such as "http://seattlesbestinsurancerates.com" can this cause Google to not index the website? This is not our domain, but a customer of ours has a similar one and it appears to be causing issues!

Any thoughts? Thanks for any input!

[EGOL]

ha ha...

That Seattle insurance domain is pretty clean if you ask me.  I don't think that Google would damn it.

How about cheap-viagra-Rx.info

Just guessing...  I don't think that google will kill a site because of the domain... but I think that only a certain type of person would register certain domains.  So, probably a pretty good bet that they will do something that gets a really spammy domain toasted.

[MattAntonino]

You'd have to have a lot spammier domain than that to think it could be penalised.  http://www.buycheapviagralevitraanduggbootsonlinefromchristianlaboutin.com would probably not get much love.

http://www.photographypicturesphotosphotographer.com probably would get pinged for spam ...

Otherwise, I think you'd be ok.

[louisrix]

In my opinion Google will look at domains as we humans do. If it looks spammy to us i'd tend to think Google may have the same opinion (or at least be a ranking signal) however, (a big caveat) the site may well host the best content in the world and have some uber immense backlinks and be an authoritative site in which case it should have no trouble in ranking.

A domain name in itself wouldn't stop Google letting it in the index - it's the structure of the site (make sure you're not blocking crawlers in robots.txt etc) and the quality of information hosted on it. So in short answer to your question - NO!