Buying a disused website and using their content - penalty risk?

[Bee159]

Hi all, I'm in the process of setting up a new website.

I have found various old websites covering a similar topic and I'm interested in purchasing two of these websites for their content as it is very good, despite those sites struggling to make ends meet.

One of these websites is still live, the other one hasn't been live for 2 years.

Let's say I bought these websites for their content, then used that content on my new domain and made sure the two websites where this content came from were offline, would I run a risk of getting penalised? Does Google hold onto content from a website even if it is now offline?

[Roman-Delcarmen]

The answer is very simple, if you want to use the content of other website, and you are the owner just need to use Rel="canonical"

The process for dealing with duplicate content is to use the rel=canonical attribute. This tells search engines that a given page should be treated as though it were a copy of a specified URL, and all of the links, content metrics, and "ranking power" that search engines apply to this page should actually be credited to the specified URL.

The rel=canonical attribute should be added to the HTML head of each duplicate version of a page, with the "URL OF ORIGINAL PAGE" portion above replaced by a link to the original (canonical) page. (Make sure you keep the quotation marks.) The attribute passes roughly the same amount of link equity (ranking power) as a 301 redirect, and, because it's implemented at the page (instead of server) level, often takes less development time to implement.

Regards

[Bee159]

Thanks for the reply Roman, I probably wasn't clear. I'll try to clarify:

Say there is a websiteA.com which was established for years but then was taken down and hasn't been live for a couple of years. If I bought website A then rolled lots of its content into a new website, let's called it websiteB.com would I be risking any penalties on the new domain?

Thanks.

[GastonRiera]

Hello Bee,

In my opinion, the non-risky way to use the other site content (owning that site) is removing that site from Google's index.
So, you should first (after buying those sites) apply noindex robots meta tag  and wait intill there is no result whem performing a site:website.com search.

Even though, be sure that other sites aren't using that content when you de index the first (and old) site. I've read some grey/black hat techniques that scrape web.archive.org looking for taken down sites' content.

Hope it helps.
GR.

[Bee159]

Brilliant, thanks Gaston