Bought a site with an old domain where to start?
-
Hi,
I recently purchased the site www.forexnews.com. The domain is more than 10 years old and used to have a ton of content and traffic. A couple of years ago it was purchased by another firm who took down all the old content and made it into a news aggregation site. I am going to try and build the traffic back up by adding back original content and leveraging the domain authority that the site has retained.
Besides doing some keyword research, building links, and writing original content is there any advice out there that the community can give me on what else to start with? Any resources that you can point me to which talk about this type of thing would also be appreciated.
Thanks
Dave
-
Hi Dave,
Thanks for the reply, the video content idea is a good one. My main concern right now is not differentiation as I am confident we can do that. I have built up a couple of other successful trading sites including Dailyfx.com when I was at FXCM, informedtrades.com (my youtube videos have millions of views), and more recently learnbonds.com.
While I know a lot about writing and promoting content I don't know a whole lot about the technical side of SEO. I know the basics, use the YOAST seo plugin etc but nothing more. Have you or anyone else reading this ever bought an existing site and if so what where the initial steps that you took to make sure that everything was setup correctly from an SEO standpoint? Any additional thoughts would be appreciated.
Thanks
Dave -
You're in a competitive space. How are you going to stand out? Since you're starting fresh I'd do a lot of short video content (under 4 min).
-
Dave, this is a very funny coincidence. I've sent you a private message about a few more details. Hope to hear back from you!
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How to handle broken images on an old site post migration?
I am working with a client who migrated their site prior to starting their SEO work with us. In a crawl of broken backlinks, I found some old image files with links. Ideally, I would like to redirect to an appropriate image, but I have no way of knowing what the image was because the page it was on is now dead. Does anyone have a way to identify and handle broken image files from a site that has already been migrated?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FPD_NYC0 -
Moving site to new domain without access to redirect from old to new. How can I do this with as little loss to SERP results as possible?
I've been hired to build a new site for a customer. They were duped by some shady characters at goglupe.com (If you can reach them, tell them they are rats--phone is disconnected, address is a comedy club on Mission in SF). Glupe owns the domain name and would not transfer or give FTP access prior to dropping off the face of the earth. The customer doesn't want to chase after them with lawyers, so we are moving on. New domain, new site with much of the same content as previous site. All that I have access to is the old wordpress site. I plan to build the new site, then remove all pages/posts from the old site. Is there anything I can do to salvage the current page 1 ranking? Obviously, the new domain will take some time to get back there. Just hoping to avoid any pitfalls or penalties if I can. If I had complete access, I would follow all the standard guidelines. But I don't. Any thoughts? Thanks! Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | c_estep_tcbguy0 -
Risks of moving a site back to an old domain
Hi Nearly 2 years ago our site was moved from a .co.uk domain to .media. Because this TLD isn't supported for DA, it's hard to measure whether linkbuilding campaigns (for example) are having a positive effect. The old site has a DA of 38 (even after 2 years of inactivity) and the new one is 1, but the new one has better Trust and Citation flow, for example. I'm now investigating whether it's worth moving back to .co.uk and I want to fully understand the risks involved. So far I know of the following potential risks: It's a lot of work so human error is a real risk Could create a redirect loop as the old site has 301 redirects in place to the new one It will take several months for metrics to recover Any thoughts on more risks, how these challenges can be overcome etc will be welcome. Or do I just set fire to the lot and create a new site with yet another 301 redirect from the .media site? What would you do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AxonnMedia0 -
GTM Migration from Old to New Verison as Old Version closing on 1st April
Hi Guys, Can you please tell me is it a correct configuration for tracking thank you page? In Old Version of Tag Manager - GA conversion Tracking, tag type - universal analytic, web property id - UA-12345678-9
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | devdan
track type - transaction, Firing rule -{{url}} contains ordersuccessful.aspx, {{event}} equals gtm.dom In New Version of Tag Manager - Choose Product - Google Analytic, choose tag type - universal analytic, configure tag - tracking id - UA-12345678-9, track type - transaction, Fire on -Name - order successful page, type - custom event, Filter- Page url contains ordersuccessful.aspx, event equals gtm.dom If i remove event equals gtm.dom will tag fire and transaction details will reflect in google analytic? I am doing Manually configuration in new version of GTM as i have only few tags so just want to know if all tags successfully configured & I placed new GTM code on my website then google analytic will start reflecting data at same moment right, it will not take 24 hours right? Thanks! Dev0 -
Moving to a new site while keeping old site live
For reasons I won't get into here, I need to move most of my site to a new domain (DOMAIN B) while keeping every single current detail on the old domain (DOMAIN A) as it is. Meaning, there will be 2 live websites that have mostly the same content, but I want the content to appear to search engines as though it now belongs to DOMAIN B. Weird situation. I know. I've run around in circles trying to figure out the best course of action. What do you think is the best way of going about this? Do I simply point DOMAIN A's canonical tags to the copied content on DOMAIN B and call it good? Should I ask sites that link to DOMAIN A to change their links to DOMAIN B, or start fresh and cut my losses? Should I still file a change of address with GWT, even though I'm not going to 301 redirect anything?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kdaniels0 -
Lost 86% of traffic after moving old static site to WordPress
I hired a company to convert an old static website www.rawfoodexplained.com with about 1200 pages of content to WordPress. Four days after launch it lost almost 90% of traffic. It was getting over 60,000 uniques while nobody touched the site for several years. It’s been 21 days since the WordPress launch. I read a lot of stuff prior to moving it (including Moz's case study) and I was expecting to lose in short term 30% of traffic max… I don’t understand what is wrong. The internal link structure is the same, every url is 301 to the same url only without[dot]html (ie www.rawfoodexplained.com/science.html is 301′s to http://www.rawfoodexplained.com/science/ ), it’s added to Google Webmaster tool and Google indexed the new pages… Any ideas what could be possible wrong? I do understand the website is not optimized (meta descriptions etc, but it wasn't before either) .... Do you think putting back the old site would recover the traffic? I would appreciate any thoughts Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JakubH0 -
Site duplication issue....
Hi All, I have a client who has duplicated an entire section of their site onto another domain about 1 year ago. The new domain was ranking well but was hit heavily back in March by Panda. I have to say the set up isn't great and the solution I'm proposing isn't ideal, however, as an agency we have only been tasked with "performing SEO" on the new domain. Here is an illustration of the problem: http://i.imgur.com/Mfh8SLN.jpg My solution to the issue is to 301 redirect the duplicated area of the original site out (around 150 pages) to the new domain name, but I'm worried that this could be could cause a problem as I know you have to be careful with redirecting internal pages to external when it comes to SEO. The other issue I have is that the client would like to retain the menu structure on the main site, but I do not want to be putting an external link in the main navigation so my proposed solution is as follows: Implement 301 redirects for URLs from original domain to new domain Remove link out to this section from the main navigation of original site and add a boiler plate link in another area of the template for "Visit xxx for our xxx products" kind of link to the other site. Illustration of this can be found here: http://i.imgur.com/CY0ZfHS.jpg I'm sure the best solution would be to redirect in URLs from the new domain into the original site and keep all sections within the one domain and optimise the one site. My hands are somewhat tied on this one but I just wanted clarification or advice on the solution I've proposed, and that it wont dramatically affect the standing of the current sites.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MiroAsh0 -
Exact match domain or root domain for speedy SEO?
I am doing SEO for a website that has constantly rotating and only temporarily pertinent subjects on it. Let's say these information and subject cycles go for about 6 months. Assuming this would it be more effective to optimize exact match domains for each 6 month cycle or make a main domain with a few of the keywords and just target a page for each roaming subject? Advantage of the subject is I get domain authority to feed off of, advantage of the exact match is, of course exact match domains are a powerful tool to rank highly and it is only a medium competitive market, usually about 40 domain and page authority. What do you guys think? Do you have any techniques to dominate temporary and rotating markets?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarloSchneider0