Should I buy an established domain that has lost it's high PR due to being offline for several months?
-
I'm considering purchasing a domain that has sat idle for several months. It was a company's domain that they have owned since the mid1990's but they went out of business. Previously, it had a PR 5 but has since lost it's PR as it has sat 'inactive' with a 'server not found' warning for the past several months.
That being said, is there any point in buying the domain (for SEO purposes)? Is there any recourse with Google to try and re-establish the site's credibility or would I be starting over from scratch?
-
It is very helpful, thank you Don!
-
Hi Matt
I had a domain that I have used personally off an on for over 8 years now. At one time I had the site in maintenance mode for about a year and half. The day I turned the site to live, I started immediately getting orders. This was due to the strong backlink profile I have built.Customers were comin in from those links 2 weeks later we were back in Google SERP's.
Hope that helps in your decision.
Don
-
In my experience, having an aged domain is a big bonus for ranking. If you say that there are only less than 30 links to a brand name, you should be able to change the link profile rather easily. If you had hundreds of links to an unrelated text, that could change the way G perceives your website relevance and make it more difficult to rank for your terms.
However, I've also seen sites rank very well from having getting 301 redirects from popular, completely unrelated websites. I would expect your to see something similar to this benefit.
Other factors that may affect the value of domain: length of blank site, change in registrar, theme of last site
So will it help, yes. Worth the cost? Depends on the price. There is a lot of speculation in the domain registration/dropped domains value of SEO and nothing concrete from G, but based on my experience, buying an existing domain > starting from scratch.
-
Good idea Oleg. So I just ran it through OSE and every inbound link has the anchor text of the company name which is not what I would be optimizing the site for. That being said, the quality of the sites linking to the domain are excellent. Interestingly, that aren't a lot (less than 30) for a domain that had such high PR (5). They obviously did not devote any resources towards SEO but did at one point achieve a PR higher than any competitive sites I would go up against with this domain.
That being said, obviously it's not optimized for the keywords I would focus on and has also lost it's PR. Would it still be worthwhile to pursue? I guess when trying to answer that question, I'm wondering if the site's history (15+ years old) is enough to give me a leg up and jump start the SEO process enough to warrant the cost, whatever that might be.
Any thoughts there?
-
Does it still have links pointing to the site? I would do a link audit and see the quality of links pointing to the website (quality of backlinks, # of backlinks, anchor text). If they are links you would want to your new site, then it might be a worthwhile investment.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
I analysis my domain (http://yourdigibuddy.com/) on moz domain analysis. But there is not data show and show message "No data here". What should I do?
_ I analysis my domain (http://yourdigibuddy.com/) on Moz domain analysis. But there is not data show and show the message "No data here". What should I do?_
On-Page Optimization | | MelissaDooley0 -
Duplicate Blog pages across different domains
Hey Moz Community, I have 3 Duplicate websites which more or less contain the same blog article ( they are copy & paste from the original website ). I am now in the process of changing my duplicate websites and I stumbled upon this problem: if I have to change the content for all the duplicate articles I have across my different domains it would be a very time consuming task and on the other hand I don't want to no index, follow the duplicate articles because I want to use them for SEO purposes. Should I only change the articles that brought significant traffic and no index, follow the rest ? What do you think ? Thanks, Anddrei
On-Page Optimization | | kiraftw0 -
Dates in URL's
I have an issue of duplicate content errors and duplicate page titles which is penalising my site. This has arisen because a number of URLs are suffixed by date(s) and have been spidered . In principle I do not want any url with a suffixed date to be spidered. Eg:- www.carbisbayholidays.co.uk/carbis-bay/houses-in-carbis-bay/seaspray.htm/06_07_13/13_07_13 http://www.carbisbayholidays.co.uk/carbis-bay/houses-in-carbis-bay/seaspray.htm/20_07_13/27_07_13 Only this URL should be spidered:- http://www.carbisbayholidays.co.uk/carbis-bay/houses-in-carbis-bay/seaspray.htm I have over 10,000 of these duplicates and firstly wish to remove them on block from Google ( not one by one ) and secondly wish to amend my robots.txt file so the URL's are not spidered. I do not know the format for either. Can anyone help please.
On-Page Optimization | | carbisbayhols0 -
Tools for seaching for keyword rich domains
Could I get some recommendations please for tools that will help me find keyword rich domains in my space. Also I did try out the Go Daddy bulk domain checker (just copy and paste domains into box) but it doesn't let me bulk search .co.uk domains. Any ways around that one?
On-Page Optimization | | Clicksjim0 -
Modifying Well Established & Well Indexed Content
I have a page that is very well indexed and has a 1st position ranking in google. It is the best landing page in my site. That being said, it's several years old and I honestly think it could be better. The images could be enlarged, the the images could have fancy box enlargements instead of just linking out to flickr, there could be more content about follow up projects that people have done. I'm noteably nervous about changing such a clutch piece of content on my site. I do want to improve the content for users, not just make it more SEO friendly (it's already SEO'd), but I'm afraid that any change could cause a set back in ranking. Am I being afraid of nothing, should I just go for it and improve my content, or should I be extra cautious when editing well indexed content like this? Thanks for the advice
On-Page Optimization | | CPollock0 -
How to fix duplicate issue among multiple root domains
Hello, I’m doing SEO for one E-commerce website which name is Lily Ann Cabinets & I’ve around 300 different root domains which having same linking structures, same design & even same product database for all 300 websites, but currently I’m focusing only on Lily Ann Cabinets website & trying to get ranking on some targeted keywords, but website is not performing well in Google.com For Example: http://www.lilyanncabinets.com/ (Main Websites)
On-Page Optimization | | CommercePundit
http://www.orlandocabinets.com/
http://www.chicagocabinets.org/
http://www.miamicabinets.org/
http://www.newyorkcabinets.org/
http://www.renocabinets.org/ So please can anyone tell that Will it create duplicate issue in search engines or may be due to this reason website doesn’t have good ranking in search engines, then how can I fix this issue? Do I have to make different structures for Lily Ann Cabinets?0 -
Using meta robots 'noindex'
Alright, so I would consider myself a beginner at SEO. I've been doing merchandising and marketing for Ecommerce sites for about a year and a half now and am just now starting to attempt to apply some intermediate SEO techniques to the sites I work on so bear with me. We are currently redoing the homepage of our site and I am evaluating what links to have on it. I don't want to lose precious link juice to pages that don't need it, but there are certain pages that we need to have on the homepage that people just won't search for. My question is would it be a good move to add the meta robots 'noindex' tag to these pages? Is my understanding correct that if the only link on the page is back to the homepage it will pass back the linkjuice? Also, how many homepage links are too many? We have a fairly large ecommerce site with a lot of categories we'd like to feature, but don't want to overdo the homepage. I appreciate any help!
On-Page Optimization | | ClaytonKendall0 -
Subfolder v Root Domain for attaining ranking
Hi, We are working with a site that we can refer to as: www.clientsbrand.com.au It has a subsection of our clients services at www.clientsbrand.com.au/keyword The client has now decided that this subsection is in fact the most important thing they should be trying to rank for. A large amount of the content that is already existing under clientsbrand.com.au/topic1 /topic2 /topic3 etc would fit naturally under clientsbrand.com.au/keyword/topic1 etc The root domain is currently not ranking for the keyword they wish to target. I am planning on moving a lot of this content to the subfolder to try and boost that silo and get things going for that keyword. As long as we 301 the old URL's to their corresponding new position are there any issues any of you see with doing this? I am worried there may be some traps for young players I have not considered. Thanks in advance for any responses.
On-Page Optimization | | MrPaulB0