14 year old Domain - Some Input please SEO Gurus

by M3C
6 replies
  • SEO
  • |
So..

We have a 14 year old domain, it's one we registered back in the early days of online marketing, it's had a number of incarnations of sales letters, blogs and so forth on it over it's life time, however we stopped using it around 4 years ago and just put a homepage on it saying "For Sale", leaving a very basic Wordpress installation behind that.

As it's such an old site, it has a few hundred links pointing to it from the old school days of reciprocal linking, mainly with just the URL.Nothing spammy and ZERO SEO work has every been done on it bar that.

Yesterday, I removed the "for sale" page and made the blog live again, we're considering using the domain for a major project and I wanted to do some analysis on it to see if it had any penalties and was 100% fit for purpose.

I used a bunch of the obvious tools like Moz and some free stuff to look at the links and they all came out with hugely different reports on how many links it had going to it. In addition I was suprised to see a few (not many) but a few crappy sites linking to it that I certainly didn't contact back in the day to link to us.

What I need is an expert with all the paid SEO tools to expertly analyse the domain name and let me know if Google still loves it.

Back in the day before there was much competition we ranked no1 , 2 and 3, for 3 huge keywords in the weight loss space, I notice none of those rank at all now , that's not suprising though as the content was , fore the most part removed.

What I was surprised was that the domain is a two word domain, the two words aren't something anybody would typically type in to Google, I can't imagine the search competition would be high but our site doesn't rank for the two words in the domain.

Which led me to think , perhaps it had a minor penalty from these spammy links going to it.

I don't want to post the domain up here but if somebody thinks, they can help us , I would be happy to pay for your services for a full analysis.

Any general advice appreciated.

Thanks.
#domain #gurus #input #seo #year
  • Hello,

    Have you been using Google Webmaster tools before? If yes, you may have received a penalty warning from Google.

    I do not think your website is penalized for spammy links. You are not ranking because your website has been inactive, outdated for years.

    But if your domain is not ranked at all, why still use the old domain? You can start fresh and it's a lot easier to work on your SEO efforts in a new domain.

    Mary
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  • Profile picture of the author M3C
    Hi, WMT says nothing specific , no manual penalty for sure.

    Reason we're considering using the domain is , it's a great domain.

    2 short words, that are memorable together.

    Aged.

    Lots of old good quality links to it.

    Perfect for our new site.
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  • Profile picture of the author MikeFriedman
    Just having two words in your domain name are not going to make you rank for that phrase.

    You do not need "an expert with all the paid SEO tools to expertly analyse the domain name". Just do this:

    Write a post with a bit of a unique title. Publish it. Let it get indexed and then check that the post is ranking for that exact title a few days after that. If you can find the post in the top 50 or so, the domain is likely not carrying any kind of penalty.
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    • Profile picture of the author M3C
      Originally Posted by MikeFriedman View Post

      Just having two words in your domain name are not going to make you rank for that phrase."
      :-)

      Out of context Mike.

      We have some 200+ links to it, all with that exact phrase in it.

      The domain is a perfect match for that phrase.

      There is ZERO competition for that exact phrase.

      I should have perhaps made that clearer. While I can expect, due to it's doormancy not to rank high for it, I would expect to see it rank somewhere but it's not in the top 100.

      What I am finding interesting is how out of whack the 3 main back link tools are. huge disparancy in their reports , one of the best believing 200 lnks were added to it yesterday, when I check out the links it's a link from 10 years ago.

      Not convinced I trust them one bit.
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  • Profile picture of the author M3C
    Heads up, your sig link to Spartan is broken.
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  • Profile picture of the author neteater
    my advice go sell it on flippa.
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