Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
What are the pros & cons of recycling an old domain name?
-
Hi,
Old domain name is about books and book buyback. It had about 1000 pages at one time, been around since 2006, and still shows in Open Site Explorer as 86 links from from 46 domains, PA 43 DA 35, spam score of 4. The 4 evidently relates to low number of internal links and no contact info.
The domain name's ownership hasn't changed, but for the last year has either not been up at all or only the homepage in the last couple of months.
Now the idea is to maybe re-purpose it for place rating content... no more book content... totally different subject matter.
Is this an organic search advantage or would it be better to start fresh with a new domain name?
Is Google going to have a harder time seeing it as relevant for a new subject (with good new content) or seeing a new site as important?
Thanks... Darcy
-
Yeah, I'm somewhere in the middle on this one - as Richard said, an off-topic domain with low authority isn't going to buy you much. If you want the domain for the name or something, great - but don't expect much SEO benefit. Google has gotten pretty savvy about ignoring this stuff, as buying and redirecting domains has been heavily abused. I doubt you'd be at much risk here, but you'd probably see very little benefit.
-
Yes it does take some patience to find a nice domain that's relevant and has stats. I wouldn't 301 the other domain to the new domain as a new domain won't be able to handle that many new inbound links which is what your effectively doing by sending a 301 with links behind it to your new domain.
-
Richard and John,
Thanks for the suggestions. I took a look at Doc Cop... pretty cool. Thing is, it almost seems impossible to find something that would be both a good TLD and have age, a good link profile, trust.
Alot of them look like license plates or too specific or just impossible to shoe horn into this particular concept.
What about using a domain name that reads okay as a domain name and then 301 the bought domain into it? Totally crazy, or what?
Thanks... Darcy
-
Re-purposing domains is no where near as safe or effective as it used to be. Your asking for trouble if your going to completely change the topic of the website and expect easy ranking benefits from the old off-topic inbound links. (this is one of the footprints they used to recently de-index low quality PBN's because the sites topic had completely changed after the domain was re-birthed)
In saying that, I wouldn't start with a fresh domain either.
I would do my homework on domcop or register-compass and find an expiring/expired/deleted domain with great on-topic link metrics and start the new site that way. If your niche isn't that big then you may be able to find an on-topic domain with metrics like DA40 - PA45 - TF35 - CF40 for under $500. That would give your new site a huge kick start. Hunt for decent Trust Flow with good topical relevance. If you build a great site under a domain like that your rankings will come much easier than using a fresh domain.
-
Old domains can be good value, especially if you know their history which it sounds like you do. The biggest issue with old domains is tracking their history and making sure bona fides.
Is the old domain re-vamp consistent with previous domain use at all. ie the backlinks and anchor text relevant in any way?
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
-
"sex" in non-adult domain name
I have a client with a domain that has "sex" in the domain name. For example, electronicsexpo.com. The domain ranks for a few keywords related to the services offered. It is an old domain that has been online for over 10 years. It ranks well for local keywords. No real SEO effort has been made on this domain, so it is rather a clean slate. I am going to be doing SEO on this site. Will the fact that the word "sex" exists in the name have any sort of negative consequence. There is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING adult related or pornographic on this site. I would think that search engines are sophisticated enough to differentiate, but would potential customers with things like parental filters be blocked from viewing content? Is this hurtful in anyway? If so, would I be better off changing domain names? TIA
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | inhouseseo0 -
Domain name suffix impact on SEO
Hello there, We are about to launch a new website and were wondering what impact a specific suffix would have from an SEO point of view. We were thinking about going for a domain which ends in .london as oppose to .com We are based in London and sell world wide via our website. We are suggesting www.domain.london as oppose to www.domain.com I would appreciate your views... Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | roberthseo0 -
When i search for my domain name - google asks "did you mean" - why?
Hi all, I just noticed something quite odd - if i do a search for my domain name (see: http://goo.gl/LBc1lz) google shows my domain as first result, but it also asks "did i mean" and names another website with very similar name. the other site has far lower PA/DA according to Moz, any ideas why google is doing this? and more inportantly how i could stop it? please advise James
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | isntworkdull0 -
Pros and cons of video onsite or youtube
what are the pros and cons of placing videos on the native website as opposed to pushing the you tube channel? If I move the youtube and vimeo to the native website will i loose all the link juice? is there an easy way to have transcript of the audio as html in the site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bakergraphix_yahoo.com0 -
Weird 404 URL Problem - domain name being placed at end of urls
Hey there. For some reason when doing crawl tests I'm finding pages with the domain name being tacked on the end and causing 404 errors.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jay328
For example: http://domainname.com/page-name/http://domainname.com This is happening to all pages, posts and even category type 1. Site is in Wordpress
2. Using Yoast SEO plugin Any suggestions? Thanks!0 -
When should you redirect a domain completely?
We moved a website over to a new domain name. We used 301 redirects to redirect all the pages individually (around 150 redirects). So my question is, when should we just kill the old site completely and just redirect (forward/point) the old domain over to the new one?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | co.mc0 -
Different domains for multilingual website
Hey guys, A site that I'm currently working on as different domains for each website language. So for example: word1word2.com for the english version word3word4.com for the french version word5word6.com for spanish version .... Is it better to move all of the different languages to the same domain and use subfolders for each language /fr/... Please note that the domains being used bring in organic traffic as well as they are EMDs. Thank You.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BruLee0 -
SEO value in multiple backlinks from same domain and from various sub-domains.
A site has a link to my site as one of their main tabs, which means whenever a user clicks through to another page within the site, my link - being a main tab - is there. This creates thousands of links from this site. How does Google treat this? Do we have a rough formula estimate. In other words, assume it creates 1,000 backlinks would the SEO value be around the same as if I had just 2 link total as a main tab, but on 2 different non-related sites? Or, does it actually count fully as 1,000 links? Links from various sub-domains. Several .EDU's are linking to my site. Different schools within the overall same university. Example: nursing.abc.edu links to my site, but so does business.abc.edu. For SEO does that count as much as if I had links from complete non-related universities, or would Google evaluate that these links are related (since same main domain) and that will discount any links more than 1 to some extent? If discounted, then what do we estimate the discount to be? thank yoyu
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | knielsen1