Should I buy an established domain that has lost it's high PR due to being offline for several months?

[martybuch23]

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?

[OlegKorneitchouk]

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.

[martybuch23]

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?

[OlegKorneitchouk]

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.

[donford]

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

[martybuch23]

It is very helpful, thank you Don!