Raising A PR 4 Domain From The Dead? - Case Study
- SEO |
I looked through the backlinks and found none of the usual bad links. No drug or gambling anchor text. No blog comments coming in. Just very natural looking links. What I did notice was that it had a bunch of really spammy pages on the site, but with no links coming into them. I know that recovering from a bad link profile is next to impossible, so if the site had bad links I wouldn't have touched it. But I figured for $12 I would see if it was possible to bring the site back from the dead so I bought the domain.
What I Have Done So Far:
- I bought the domain for $12
- I uploaded wordpress
- I looked at the wayback machine and made the site look as legitimate as I could
- I added 4 pages of content (all relating to the political organization)
- I created a new gmail account
- I verified the site on webmaster tools
- I saw that it had the Pure Spam penalty (as I expected)
- I filed a reconsideration request
- 24 hours after filing the reconsideration request, 3000+ pages from the site showed back up in the google index. This was all of the old spammy content that was on the page, plus one of the new pages of content that I created (but not the home page).
- 3 days later I received notice from Google that the manual penalty had been lifted.
- 1 day later the home page and the other 2 pages of new content started showing up in the Google index
- The Google index now shows 2700+ pages from the site (all but 4 of which no longer exist)
- Now, when I search for the political organization by name, my site shows up as #6 in the results behind a facebook page of the organization and several news stories about the organization.
I really didn't expect this to work. I figured I was spending the $12 just to see if it was a possibility, so I am in no way expecting anything. However, now that things have gone so well in the past week, I am wondering if this could actually work. So to anyone with experience in resurrecting domains, I ask the following:
- Will this page have any value going forward, or has Google wiped all authority away?
- Anything I should have done differently, or that I should do now to help the site?
- Is there a way to clean up the indexed pages so that it only shows my 4 pages and not the other 2,700?
Who says you can't earn money as an eBay affiliate any more? My stats say otherwise
Who says you can't earn money as an eBay affiliate any more? My stats say otherwise