Conserving Link Equity When Purchasing a Domain

[ProjectLabs]

Suppose you were interested in buying a successful blog with lots of powerful links and they offered to sell you the domain but none of the content. Do you have any tips for conserving the link equity when buying the domain?

(Note: about half of the inbound links are to the homepage and the plan is to relaunch the site with new content.)

[wojkwasi]

Redirect the old URLs to similar themed pages or home page to preserve some of the link equity. Think about a user's experience also if they clicked one of the links from those sources.. better to serve them something if it's in your control to keep them happy

[Spencer_LuminInteractive]

I couldn't agree with EGOL more. The best option is to place equivalent or higher quality content, discussing the same topic as the previous article on the URL.

However, I think there are some ways to buy yourself some times if you don't have all of the content that you need. This is how I might personally approach it:

1. Create "subject buckets" and divide the content into as many buckets as possible. If it's a well structured blog, then Categories and Tags are going to be extremely helpful for this.
2. Find the most powerful URL in each bucket and create an extremely high quality (likely lengthy) article on that URL in which you cover as many topics in that bucket as possible. (Also, pay attention to links that are generating a lot...or any...traffic. The URLs that aren't generating traffic have a much lower likelihood of being changed discovered and removed by a webmaster.)
3. 301 the other URLS in that bucket to the high quality post until you can get the rest of the content written. In some cases, (and depending on how varied the topics are) this might be more of a permanent solution that will a.) consolidate your link juice and b.) reduce your total page count (good post-panda).

Also keep in mind that rewriting content is going to be much easier (or cheaper in most cases) than having completely original content written. That being said, make sure the writers know they need to make the article "your own". I'd suggest a service called Vappingo. They don't publish their "re-write" rates on the site, but if you contact them they'll definitely help you out. I had them rewrite some sub-par content I purchased and was extremely impressed by the quality...and I'm picky about content quality.)

[ProjectLabs]

Thanks! Those are very good and helpful suggestions. One reason I'm optimistic is that a lot of the links are from large media companies that linked to the site in articles. As long as I put similar content there I think a good number of the links will remain.

Do you think Google will discredit all previous links if the all the content is deleted? We will be moving to a different hosting company and I am considering to keep the registrar the same company (but different registration information).

[EGOL]

The content must have been what made this blog successful.  That is what attracted the links... so if the content leaves the links will probably evaporate too.

I bought a website that had some great content that was not owned by the person who I bought the site from.  I allowed the site to go unchanged until I had enough same-topic  content to repopulate those pages (on the same URL) with articles that were just as good or better.

So, if I was buying this site I would do an inventory of inbound links and get to work on content that will fit those URLs.   I would try to delay taking possession until I had the new content ready - if possible.  If not, I would get short articles up ASAP and improve then quickly.