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
-
On page report card instances of key terms in the body - I can't find them all
Hi guys, I'm using the on-page report card for a particular page which is returning 22 instances of my term, however when I check the source of the page, I can only find 6 instances across the whole page, let alone the body. The site is www.sportsbet.com.au, and the term "horse racing". I'm sure I'm missing something, would appreciate any explanation for this apparent discrepancy. Cheers, Jez
On-Page Optimization | | jez0000 -
My Images Aren't Indexed By Goolge
My site is indexed by google, and there hasn't really been much of a problem with my content, but now I am noticing that none of our images are coming up in the images searches of google. I mean none. I have even typed in the alt text of the image verbatim and nothing shows up. I use wordpress if this helps anyone. Any advice would be awesome, Thanks a lot.
On-Page Optimization | | Caseman0 -
Why there's a full-stop in the title of SEOMOZ's home page?
Hello, I see there's a full-stop (.) in the title of SEOMOZ's home page. Why is it so? Regards
On-Page Optimization | | IM_Learner0 -
5 websites, 1 root domain name: good or bad?
Hi guys, I'm new here, so this might be a basic question to the experts here! So here is my situation: I have 1 "umbrella" website (root domain name) that contains 4 different websites, for a total of 5 different websites. They are related, but we needed to brand each website differently to fit each strategy. Q: I have 23 domain names.. this means I have 23 sub-domain names?
On-Page Optimization | | Jacky_C
Q: Is this practice good or bad for my SEO?
Q: should I analyze each domain name/SD? Here are my 5 websites
RD: furisgreen.com
SD1: furcouncil.com
SD2: furfashions.com
SD3: naffem.com
SD4: beautifullycanadian.com Thank you for your help!!0 -
Rethinking company's monthly content production process.
I'm trying to rethink my company's content production process. I believe that we're stuck using a formula that works but can surely be improved. Our Current Process It essentially boils down to posting a certain number of content pieces per month for each client. After the pages are approved and live, there isn't much thought given to them. What We're Thinking After taking a step back, we realize now that a lot of these clients have sites with a tremendous amount of content that is rarely, if ever, revisited. In hopes of creating higher quality content and avoiding having to write that certain number of pieces per month, we're investigating alternative strategies to ensure each client has fresh content. What We're Looking Into Page Edits/Refreshes - I'm beginning to wonder if we can get similar gains by simply refreshing the content that already exists. We can include additional keywords and improve the content in a fraction of the time that it takes to produce a new piece. We're struggling to come up with a process for refreshing the content, however. Ideally we'd be implementing a process where content is revisited 6-12 months, but that still doesn't take care of the problem of creating too much new content. Simplified Version I believe that my company is creating too much content. Editing/refreshing seems like a better use of resources, but I have no idea how to implement a process and develop procedures. Questions What does your content production process look like? Do you produce a certain number a month, a quarter, as needed, etc? How do you go about refreshing your content?
On-Page Optimization | | SeoWebMechanix0 -
What's the impact of # in the main domain page?
After a little research I did in the Source Code of the root domain page of seomoz.org and searchenginejournal.com , I found that the first one contains no at all and that the other contains like 10 . I though that the was something relatively important on a web page for on page optimisation. Did I missed something? What's you opinion on the subject? Thanks for your help!
On-Page Optimization | | Louis-Philippe_Dea0 -
Canonical URL's - Fixed but still negatively impacted
I recently noticed that our canonical url's were not set up correctly. The incorrect setup predates me but it could have been in place for close to a year, maybe a bit more. Each of the url's had a "sortby" parameter on all of them. I had our platform provider make the fix and now everything is as it should be. I do see issues caused by this in Google Webmaster, for instance in the HTML suggestions it's telling me that pages have duplicate title tags when in fact this is the same page but with a variety of url parameters at the end of the url. To me this just highlights that there is a problem and we are being negatively impacted by the previous implementation. My question is has anyone been in this situation? Is there any way to flush this out or push Google to relook at this? Or is this a sit and be patient situation. I'm also slightly curious if Google will at some point look and see that the canonical urls were changed and then throw up a red flag even though they are finally the way they should be. Any feedback is appreciated. Thanks,
On-Page Optimization | | dgmiles
Dave0 -
Value of PDF's in SEO
I have a client who has a lot of information in PDF form. They think they should move some of it over into HTML pages so it indexes better. Is there a benefit to converting these PDF's into HTML pages? It seems to me that HTML pages would be good, IF they are relevant pages that could be used online.
On-Page Optimization | | lvstrickland0
