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
-
Ridding of taxonomies, so that articles enhance related page's value
Hello, I'm developing a website for a law firm, which offers a variety of services. The site will also feature a blog, which would have similarly-named topics. As is customary, these topics were taxonomies. But I want the articles to enhance the value of the service pages themselves and because the taxonomy url /category/divorce has no relationship to the actual service page url /practice-areas/divorce, I'm worried that if anything, a redundantly-titled taxonomy url would dilute the value of the service page it's related to. Sure, I could show some of the related posts on the service page but if I wanted to view more, I'm suddenly bounced over to a taxonomy page which is stealing thunder away from the more important service page. So I did away with these taxonomies all together, and posts are associatable with pages directly with a custom db table. And now if I visit the blog page, instead of a list of category terms, it would technically be a list of the service pages and so if a visitor clicks on a topic they are directed to /practice-areas/divorce/resources (the subpages are created dynamically) and the posts are shown there. I'll have to use custom breadcrumbs to make it all work. Just wondering if you guys had any thoughts on this. Really appreciate any you might have and thanks for reading
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | utopianwp0 -
I've seen and heard alot about city-specific landing pages for businesses with multiple locations, but what about city-specific landing pages for cities nearby that you aren't actually located in? Is it ok to create landing pages for nearby cities?
I asked here https://www.google.com/moderator/#7/e=adbf4 but figured out ask the Moz Community also! Is it actually best practice to create landing pages for nearby cities if you don't have an actual address there? Even if your target customers are there? For example, If I am in Miami, but have a lot of customers who come from nearby cities like Fort Lauderdale is it okay to create those LP's? I've heard this described as best practice, but I'm beginning to question whether Google sees it that way.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RickyShockley2 -
Alternative HTML Structure for indexation of JavaScript Single Page Content
Hi there, we are currently setting up a pure html version for Bots on our site amazine.com so the content as well as navigation will be fully indexed by google. We will show google exactly the same content the user sees (except for the fancy JS effects). So all bots get pure html and real users see the JS based version. My questions are first, if everyone agrees that this is the way to go or if there are alternatives to this to get the content indexed. Are there best practices? All JS-based websites must have this problem, so I am hoping someone can share their experience. The second question regards the optimal number of content pieces ('Stories') displayed per page and the best method to paginate. Should we display e.g. 10 stories and use ?offset in the URL or display 100 stories to google per page and maybe use rel=”next”/"pref" instead. Generally, I would really appreciate any pointers and experiences from you guys as we haven't done this sort of thing before! Cheers, Frank
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FranktheTank-474970 -
To index or de-index internal search results pages?
Hi there. My client uses a CMS/E-Commerce platform that is automatically set up to index every single internal search results page on search engines. This was supposedly built as an "SEO Friendly" feature in the sense that it creates hundreds of new indexed pages to send to search engines that reflect various terminology used by existing visitors of the site. In many cases, these pages have proven to outperform our optimized static pages, but there are multiple issues with them: The CMS does not allow us to add any static content to these pages, including titles, headers, metas, or copy on the page The query typed in by the site visitor always becomes part of the Title tag / Meta description on Google. If the customer's internal search query contains any less than ideal terminology that we wouldn't want other users to see, their phrasing is out there for the whole world to see, causing lots and lots of ugly terminology floating around on Google that we can't affect. I am scared to do a blanket de-indexation of all /search/ results pages because we would lose the majority of our rankings and traffic in the short term, while trying to improve the ranks of our optimized static pages. The ideal is to really move up our static pages in Google's index, and when their performance is strong enough, to de-index all of the internal search results pages - but for some reason Google keeps choosing the internal search results page as the "better" page to rank for our targeted keywords. Can anyone advise? Has anyone been in a similar situation? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FPD_NYC0 -
What NAP format do I use if the USPS can't even find my client's address?
My client has a site already listed on Google+Local under "5208 N 1st St". He has some other NAPs, e.g., YellowPages, under "5208 N First Street". The USPS finds neither of these, nor any variation that I can possibly think of! Which is better? Do I just take the one that Google has accepted and make all the others like it as best I can? And doesn't it matter that the USPS doesn't even recognize the thing? Or no? Local SEO wizards, thanks in advance for your guidance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rayvensoft0 -
Killing 404 errors on our site in Google's index
Having moved a site across to Magento, obviously re-directs were a large part of that, ensuring all the old products and categories linked up correctly with the new site structure. However, we came up against an issue where we needed to add, delete, then re-add products. This, coupled with a misunderstanding of the csv upload processing, meant that although the old urls redirected, some of the new Magento urls changed and then didn't redirect: For Example: mysite/product would get deleted re-added and become: mysite/product-1324 We now know what we did wrong to ensure it doesn't continue to happen if we weret o delete and re-add a product, but Google contains all these old URLs in its index which has caused people to search for products on Google, click through, then land on the 404 page - far from ideal. We kind of assumed, with continual updating of sitemaps and time, that Google would realise and update the URL accordingly. But this hasn't happened - we are still getting plenty of 404 errors on certain product searches (These aren't appearing in SEOmoz, there are no links to the old URL on the site, only Google, as the index contains the old URL). Aside from going through and finding the products affected (no easy task), and setting up redirects for each one, is there any way we can tell Google 'These URLs are no longer a thing, forget them and move on, let's make a fresh start and Happy New Year'?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seanmccauley0 -
Ajax Content Indexed
I used the following guide to implement the endless scroll https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/docs/getting-started crawlers and correctly reads all URLs the command "site:" show me all indexed Url with #!key=value I want it to be indexed only the first URL, for the other Urls I would be scanned but not indexed like if there were the robots meta tag "noindex, follow" how I can do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wwmind1 -
Removing a Page From Google index
We accidentally generated some pages on our site that ended up getting indexed by google. We have corrected the issue on the site and we 404 all of those pages. Should we manually delete the extra pages from Google's index or should we just let Google figure out that they are 404'd? What the best practice here?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dbuckles0