What to do when you buy a Website without it's content which has a few thousand pages indexed?
-
I am currently considering buying a Website because I would like to use the domain name to build my project on. Currently that domain is in use and that site has a few thousand pages indexed and around 30 Root domains linking to it (mostly to the home page). The topic of the site is not related to what I am planing to use it for.
If there is no other way, I can live with losing the link juice that the site is getting at the moment, however, I want to prevent Google from thinking that I am trying to use the power for another, non related topic and therefore run the risk of getting penalized. Are there any Google guidelines or best practices for such a case?
-
I suppose that technically if you really wanted to come clean you could ask the currently linking domains to remove their links since the subject of the site has changed. Those that don't, you could disavow.
I'm not saying to do that or not, and I don't know if I know anyone who would but it's an option.
-
I am not too sure about it. I've seen one project in the past where a site most likely was penalized after the same kind of scenario and it was much less pages that were indexed. The site didn't rank for over a year for it's own domain name.
Also I am not sure about the thousands of indexed pages, if I can just let them become 404 errors or if I should do some redirect. Or perhaps should I remove the pages from the index via WMT?
-
I can't imagine Google would "think" like that and can't see any reason why they should penalize you. Same like moving to a new house; old furniture out; new furniture in.
You are lucky with the age of the domain and the root domains linking to you.
If possible, use http status codes correct http://moz.com/learn/seo/http-status-codes
-
As soon as you update the content Google will re-index and re-rank the site so you'll lose anything that was built up by the current content anyway.
If the linking domains are completely irrelevant to your new content they are likely to hold very little weight.
Finally, as the domain ownership is being transferred and the content completely changed you will almost certainly lose any domain authority that has been built up over the years.
Basically, I'm pretty sure that Google will treat this as a completely new site. You won't be punished for trying to use the current sites ranking but you won't benefit from it either!
Hope this helps.
Steve
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
-
Facets Being Indexed - What's the Impact?
Hi Our facets are from what I can see crawled by search engines, I think they use javascript - see here http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/lockers I want to get this fixed for SEO with an ajax solution - I'm not sure how big this job is for developers, but they will want to know the positive impact this could have & whether it's worth doing. Does anyone have any opinions on this? I haven't encountered this before so any help is welcome 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Ranking 1st for a keyword - but when 's' is added to the end we are ranking on the second page
Hi everyone - hope you are well. I can't get my head around why we are ranking 1st for a specific keyword, but then when 's' is added to the end of the keyword - we are ranking on the second page. What could be the cause of this? I thought that Google would class both of the keywords the same, in this case, let's say the keyword was 'button'. We would be ranking 1st for 'button', but 'buttons' we are ranking on the second page. Any ideas? - I appreciate every comment.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brett-S0 -
What's with the Keyword Apocalypse?
Hi, 9 of my tracked keywords have dropped by over 20 ranks since last week. The nastiest drops in ranking are by 36, 38, and 46 places. For the last month I have been chipping away at the duplicate content with 301 redirects and was expecting my keyword rankings to improve slightly as a result of this; not the opposite. I don't have any manual actions logged against my site and am at a bit of a loss to explain this sudden drop. Any suggestions would be most welcome.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McCaldin1 -
Thousands of Web Pages Disappered from Google Index
The site is - http://shop.riversideexports.com We checked webmaster tools, nothing strange. Then we manually resubmitted using webmaster tools about a month ago. Now only seeing about 15 pages indexed. The rest of the sites on our network are heavily indexed and ranking really well. BUT the sites that are using a sub domain are not. Could this be a sub domain issue? If so, how? If not, what is causing this? Please advise. UPDATE: What we can also share is that the site was cleared twice in it's lifetime - all pages deleted and re-generated. The first two times we had full indexing - now this site hovers at 15 results in the index. We have many other sites in the network that have very similar attributes (such as redundant or empty meta) and none have behaved this way. The broader question is how to do we get the indexing back ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | suredone0 -
Google's serp
Hello Guys ! I will appreciate if you will share your thoughts re the situation i have. The homepage for one of my sites is one last page of google's serp, although internal pages are displayed in the top 10. 1. Why ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Webdeal
2. What should I do to correct the situation with the homepage ? regards0 -
Looking for good examples of website's geotargeting
I am looking for some examples of sites that handle their global presence well (geotargeting and languages), ideally from a single .com domain thanks! Stephen
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | firstconversion0 -
Get Duplicate Page content for same page with different extension ?
I have added a campaign like "Bannerbuzz" in SEOMOZ Pro account and before 2 or 3 days i got errors related to duplicate page content . they are showing me same page with different extension. As i mentioned below http://www.bannerbuzz.com/outdoor-vinyl-banners.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit
&
http://www.bannerbuzz.com/outdoor_vinyl_banner.php We checked our whole source files but we didn't define php related urls in our source code. we want to catch only our .html related urls. so, Can you please guide us to solve this issue ? Thanks <colgroup><col width="857"></colgroup>
| http://www.bannerbuzz.com/outdoor-vinyl-banners.html |0 -
Sitemap not indexing pages
My website has about 5000 pages submitted in the sitemap but only 900 being indexed. When I checked Google Webmaster Tools about a week ago 4500 pages were being indexed. Any suggestions about what happened or how to fix it? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0