Any Tips for Reviving Old Websites?

[CopBlaster.com]

Hi,

I have a series of websites that have been offline for seven years. Do you guys have any tips that might help restore them to their former SERPs glory?

Nothing about the sites themselves has changes since they went offline. Same domains, same content, and only a different server. What has changed is the SERPs landscape. I've noticed competitive terms that these sites used to rank on the first page for with far more results now. I have also noticed some terms result in what seems like a thesaurus similar language results from traditionally more authoritative websites instead of the exact phrase searched for. This concerns me because I could see a less relevant page outranking me just because it is on a .gov domain with similar vocabulary even though the result is not what people searching for the term are most likely searching for.

The sites have also lost numerous backlinks but still have some really good ones.

[seotoolshelp5]

Hi, There are two tips

1: update your old articles

2: Upload new articles

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[Optimal_Strategies]

Hi,

As previously stated by seotoolshelp5 with addition of

1. Check for any issues with dead links leading to this websites

2. Check crawling errors

3. check website speed and improve it if necessary

4. Prioritize mobile version (if you don't have one, create it)

That's all for now what I can think of.

[Paddy_Moogan]

Hi there,

I'd suggest a few things:

1. If you have old analytics data or log file data to show you which content performed best when the site was last live, take a look at that and prioritise restoring and updating the content which worked well previously.

2. Go through the content and update with fresh information, data, images, links etc to give everything a freshen up. Don't worry if content is still relevant and evergreen, but just do some checks to make sure.

3. Once you've updated the content and you're happy with it, generate some new XML sitemaps and submit to Google Search Console to prompt Google to crawl the pages again and get them into the index.

4. In addition, perhaps submit the homepage and a few key pages to Google Search Console for crawling and indexing.

5. Once the pages are indexed, keep an eye on Search Console to see how pages are performing and use this data to update the most popular pages.

6. In terms of links, if you can restore any valuable lost ones by reaching back out to the websites, letting them know that the site has relaunched and seeing if they can restore the links, that may give it a nudge too.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

[CopBlaster.com]

Thank you for the replies. They give me more hope because I was thinking along similar lines.

I certainly plan on reaching out to the authors of old articles that lost link, but I am not so sure sometimes. One of the old websites specifically got its coverage from being controversial so I am not sure if they unlinked due to it being down or due to complaints from people pointing out how they were helping it by linking to it. I have been noticing articles like https://moz.com/learn/seo/backlinks and I would hate to risk losing mentions on high quality sites by drawing attention to new editors that might just delete the articles entirely.

Another question I have related to mentions is mentions in books. I have noticed a site of mine showing up in Google Books from a couple of published books discussing it. Does that help SEO like a brand mention on a high quality site?

I would think that Google would consider sites mentioned in published books to be more authoritative than ones just mentioned in blogs or news stories.

[Paddy_Moogan]

That's a good question and I'd agree - I imagine that references to your website in published books online could be treated similarly to mentions across the web. Whether Google gives it any extra weight or not is unclear, but I'd agree that the implication is that a mention in a published book could carry some weight.

[Kelly-Anne]

If you are reviving an old website make sure it is mobile friendly. Then you will need to refresh the content and update page titles and meta descriptions. Also make sure you add new content regularly.