Idle domain SEO

**dodolls** · 31 August, 2010, 19:36 PM

How hard is SEO going to be for a domain that has been idle for about a year? The site used to have PR2 before the contents were removed.

Thanks!

**Aquarezz** · 31 August, 2010, 19:40 PM

Age matters a bit, but there are a lot more other things that are more important. A website with the age of 6 months, with great onpage SEO, 5000 backlinks from authoritative websites might perform better in search engines than a domain that's 10 years old but has almost no content & backlinks

I'd just say, go & start the linkbuilding!

**dodolls** · 31 August, 2010, 19:49 PM

Originally Posted by Aquarezz

Age matters a bit, but there are a lot more other things that are more important. A website with the age of 6 months, with great onpage SEO, 5000 backlinks from authoritative websites might perform better in search engines than a domain that's 10 years old but has almost no content & backlinks

I'd just say, go & start the linkbuilding!

Great! So building a new site from scratch will not be an issue for the domain, right? Except for long tail keywords I guest.

**bhartzer** · 31 August, 2010, 22:29 PM

Building a site from scratch will not be a problem. But I would also expect to do your link building from scatch, also. You will need links.

**airforce1** · 1 September, 2010, 05:59 AM

Hi,

In my own experiences, this would not be a big issue. Just uploading new contents and building new back links using your targeted keywords as anchor text, especially from those high PR(above 5) authority sources. Google or other engines would pick up your new pages via the new inbound links.

have a nice day,

**Grouchy Smurf** · 1 September, 2010, 18:38 PM

inactivity shouldn't be a big problem as long as you're planning to start updating its content now

search engines love fresh content which is why pagerank is so important to get your site crawled and indexed quickly

the domain age should help your site get back on its feet quite quickly

**bogart** · 2 September, 2010, 06:44 AM

What do you mean by idle? Parked?

**dodolls** · 2 September, 2010, 16:08 PM

Originally Posted by bogart

What do you mean by idle? Parked?

The domain was renewed last month, but all the contents of the site were all removed long before the domain was renewed. I decided to clean everything after the site was defaced, and now I want to setup a new one. What's left of the site is the just default index page.

Now I'm afraid that I might just waste my time if I continue to rebuild the site after SEs have determined that the site contained nothing for a long time.

**bogart** · 7 September, 2010, 01:05 AM

Originally Posted by dodolls

The domain was renewed last month, but all the contents of the site were all removed long before the domain was renewed. I decided to clean everything after the site was defaced, and now I want to setup a new one. What's left of the site is the just default index page.

Now I'm afraid that I might just waste my time if I continue to rebuild the site after SEs have determined that the site contained nothing for a long time.

I think that the domain will come back as long as you post content and build links.

May not be much SEO benefit though if the site doesn't have any inbound links and the domain is not very old.

**Social-Media** · 10 September, 2010, 14:34 PM

Check Google Webmaster Tools after you get the new site up and running. Look specifically for 404 errors. It is very possible that the domain will still have old back links to old pages that no longer exist on the new version of the site. It is possible that sites that linked to the old version of your site have had broken links all this time since you took the site down. If you can identify such links and 301 redirect them to pages with similar content as the old page, your new site can regain credit for those links.