Bringing a large news site back on line - anything to look out for?

[AISFM]

Hi,

I'm advising an online news site site that has been completely offline for almost 6 months, and is now looking to start back up again. The site seems to be completely gone from google's cache.

This might mean moving to new hosting, but with the same URL.

The archive has about 7000 original articles. Most of these are date specific news, although there are some longer investigative pieces that are more timeless.

Is there any difference (from an SEO/digital marketing perspective) between putting the whole archive online at once, or gradually republishing the old articles?

Is there anything I should be aware of, when restarting a website of this size?

Thanks  - Chris

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Chris,

First thing is I'd look at the Wayback machine and make sure you followed the same URL structure of the old site and look for any oddities.

Does the site have an old Google Webmaster Tools account? You might want to poke around in there and make sure there aren't any old URL removal requests or anything else that could potentially cause problems with the relaunch. if you don't have a GWT account, be sure to set one up.

Quite honestly, if these articles existed before, I don't see any advantage to releasing them slowly vs all at once. In fact I'd prefer all at once especially if articles linked to one another.

Finally, I'd make sure there were no penalty issues on the old site, and address them if there were. You don't want to bring any of those back to life in the process