Should I let 22-year-old website go or revamp it?
-
Hi,
I’m trying to decide whether to renew annual hosting for my old website and hoping a wiser brain than mine in these matters might be able to advise me.
The website was the home of a weekly website review column, e-newsletter, content writing tips and other web content/marketing related content so has lots of backlinks since 1997, though hasn't been updated for about 10 years.
The domain email address is listed on some spam lists as I suspect it was harvested from the site by crawling spambots. I haven't bothered trying to de-list as don't use the address or website anymore. The site has never been used for PBN or sending spam (at least not by me).
There's lots of good content in there, and some would still be relevant, but not sure if it's worth keeping for backlinks and for redirecting to my new website when it’s built. Plan to build a new WordPress website for my new writing as no longer in the content marketing business.
It's a country-specific domain so can't really sell it as need to own the business name to own the domain name. I no longer use the business name either as plan to set up new brand for new website.
But it might be useful to direct traffic to my new website domain once it's up and running if I cleaned up all the many broken links to expired websites in the databases of hundreds of website reviews.
It's all on archive.org but I'm still very attached to the old site, even if it's no longer useful from a business point of view.
Did a Moz check which showed:
Domain Authority
20Linking Domains
89Discovered in the last 60 days
1Lost in last 60 days
4Inbound Links
1.9kRanking Keywords
0My web host stats show the site gets between 300 and 500 visits a month. Had about 138,200 visits since October last year. And about 653,200 hits.
Is that amount of traffic worth the time and expense of pruning the site of hundreds of expired links and fixing up other glitches? It's very dated in design and layout and is written in .asp
I could send you the URL in private message if you would like to look at the website first.
Been agonising over this decision for months as budget is very tight but don’t want to lose the site if it might have future value.
Would greatly appreciate advice from someone who's up on this stuff as I've been out of the game for a long time and the deadline to renew the site hosting is very soon.
Thank you in advance for your time and help.
-
Thanks for that. You certainly know your stuff.
I'm beginning to wonder if it is worth keeping the old site alive as it might require a lot of work to clean up and be useful linking to my new website when it's built. Not sure its ranking and links will help my new website that much, or hinder it. Big decision.
-
Looks like there could be some spammy domains in the backlink profile, however, most of the linking domains are fine. The next step is for you to go through all these domains and see what kind of domains they are, and what is the nature of the backlink coming to your website. If it turns out to be a spammy domain, then you can disavow the whole domain through Search Console.
-
Thanks for that.Spam Score BreakdownPercent of Linking Domains with a Spam Score of:1-30%82.1%31-60%16.7%61-100%1.3%Linking Domains89Domain Authority20Spam Score2 %Not sure what that means? the domain is brizcomm.com.au Backlinks look legitimate but not sure I'm checking the right thing.
-
The fact that the domain is on spammy lists (I'm assuming email lists here) does not mean that the domain itself is in a bad shape. You can check the following:
-
See if the domain has any Manual Actions on Google Search Console
-
Check the MOZ Spam score
-
Check the backlink profile of the domain to see if any spammy domains are linking to your domain - this matters much more than the domain being on email lists. If you find the domain to be on some spammy websites, you can disavow them.
Also, keeping the domain does imply that there will be an upkeep effort/cost.
As for whether to keep it or not, it really comes down to if you can benefit from keeping or redirecting it. If so, then it's worth it.
-
-
Thanks very much for your response and advice.
I'm worried that the fact the domain is on so many spam lists will mean it could be a negative benefit to redirect to my new site when it's built.
I would also have to get it de-listed from spam monitors and fix up the site to remove the email address, among many other broken links in the database.
Nobody else could buy the domain as they would need to have a business in the same name to comply with my country's domain registration rules.
So confused about this and renewal expires next week. If I do let the hosting renewal lapse, I'm guessing I would quickly lose any search engine rankings the old site has gathered, though not sure if 20 is much of a ranking anyway.
I can send you the URL if it helps?
-
Sounds like the site is in decent shape. I'm pretty sure that if you let it go, it will be picked up very quickly by someone else.
I think you have a couple of options:
1- You can keep it and continue to maintain it on a minimal basis. This will allow you to link out to your new domain where appropriate.
2- Redirect it to a new site, or a section of a new site, provided it's in the same space. This would require you to keep the domain name without the hosting & maintenance expenses.
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
-
Is GSC data (branded clicks + impressions) a good indicator for how well your PR activity has performed for the year?
We are reviewing our creative / PR agency and are intending to use our GSC data as a way to assess their performance...
Branding | | Jacksons_Fencing0 -
How to measure adwords campaing success on an non ecommerce/leads website
Hello,
Branding | | teconsite
We have a website of a furniture company that runs an Adwords campaign. This company has a lot of distributors. They have several objetives: people explore the online catalog people visit the distributor page (where they can find the nearest distributor in his/her area) people share the pictures and info in social media. (For example: pictures in pinterest) people watch videos new distributors contact them to be a new distributor and so on. As this is not an eccommerce website they can not buy We have created objectives in analytics to meassure those engament results.
My question is how to measure this in Google Adwords...
If I import GA objetives into adwords, I get conversions rates of 350% and even more, and the number of conversions is to high. For example. If one objetive is to visit Distributors page (the one where users can see a map and search for the nearest distributor), I find with a lot of conversions of this type. I was thinking in importing some objectives and giving them a value in $ and instead of evaluating conversion rates, evaluate ROAS. But I really would like to know, what you are doing with this kind of companies. How do you measure the campaign success when most of the objetives are measuring engagement. Please, could you give me any advice? Thank you!0 -
Hosted content vs Dedicated website (for large piece of content)
There is one question that keep bugging us and for which we are looking for a logical answer – to put it short, in which context(s) is it preferable to publish original content on a company website vs on a dedicated external platform with its own URL? To give a little more details: we an education company that provides languages course abroad and that functions like a specialised travel agency. Each trip is very specific – it depends on people's language level, objectives, budget, etc. – so we provide tailor-made advice for each of our students. Our site is not an e-commerce site, and a typical call-to-action is a request for a 1-to-1 interview with one of our agents, or a quote request for a language trip project. The top conversion for us is an enrolment for a language course abroad. We have a corporate websites structure where we have 1 website per locale where we operate, which means 14 websites in 7 different languages. We produce smaller pieces of content for these websites in a dedicated section – the rest of the website being mostly a presentation of our products, services and destinations – but here we intend to create a very large Quiz which will be based on multiple audio files. The content will be translated into multiple languages (likely 10 different languages) and will require some rather heavy development. We intend to add sections for scoreboards, stats, a log-in section (probably Facebook), etc. This sounds to us like something we should host on a specific URL, but then how can we make the most of the SEO benefits that we will (hopefully) get with such content? We plan to have an about section where we explain a little bit who we are, where we will probably link back to our corporate websites, but of course we want our project to live for itself and to be as far from commercial as possible – while still making the most of the SEO benefits. How can we do this in the most subtle / logical way? Would it be better to host our Quiz on our corporate domains? Thanks in advance for your advice. Maëlle
Branding | | ESL_Education0 -
Can you recommend a Content Delivery Network for hosting 20 videos across the website?
We want to host multiple videos across our website and are considering which CDN provider to use, with an average of 18.8GB per month for visitors, we are considering the following companies, some offer a free trial. https://www.maxcdn.com/pricing/ http://www.cdn77.com/pricing https://www.cloudflare.com/plans Does anyone have any other recommendations regarding CDNs for video streaming or have experience in this area as any advice would be much appreciated.
Branding | | Muhammad-Isap0 -
Making the most from a Press Release being featured on news websites
We have recently sent out a press release to targeted publications and have been lucky enough to be featured on a hand full of quality news websites which all feature links to our main URL. A minor draw back is some of the sites have just used the press release with minimal changes so we are a tiny bit worried about duplicate content issues but the sites are all high quality with a Domain Authority of 65+. Anyway I am wondering how best to capitalise on these. A few ideas I have:- 1. Go to our Company Google Plus page and +1 them. 2. Go to our Twitter profile and favourite the "tweets" that have been sent out mentioning each article. 3. Go to our Facebook page and "Like" the articles on each of the sites. 4. Setup a Squidoo page called "My Company featured around the internet" and link to the news pages. 5. Setup a Tumblr page called " MY Company featured around the internet" and link to the news pages. We are not sure if featured the links/urls on our "Press" section will undermine any benefit of link juice - we were thinking of doing a PDF of the pages and hosting the PDF on our site.
Branding | | JohnW-UK0 -
Considering Switch to old Domain - Any Bad Karma?
So here is the issue. I am working with a company that used to have a branded domain. Then they split the domain into two separate keyword rich domains and tried to change branding to match the keyword rich domains. This made for a really long brand name that is difficult to actually rank for as it is mostly hi traffic key terms and also created brand confusion because all of the social accounts still operate under the old brand name. We are considering a new brand initiative and going back to the original brand name as it better meets our business objectives (they still get traffic from branded searches under the old brand) and the old branded web domain. My question is if there is any added risk in going back to an old domain that has been forwarded for the past 2 years to the new domain? I know the risks and problems of a domain name change, but I am not as certain about the added complication of moving back to an old domain and essentially reversing the flow of 301's. Any thoughts? Cheers!
Branding | | prima-2535090 -
Video Hosting Question - host on website via wistia type solution or upload to youtube and embed?
I have a client that owns a Video production company. They have a lot of video examples of all their different types of services i.e. commercial production, TV broadcast production, business videos, training videos, etc. Where should I host their portfolio of videos, should I: A: Use a paid video hosting solution like wistia B. Upload to youtube or vimeo and embed to my own site The only videos titles with keywords that I could see bringing any type of conversions for their business would be their demo reels, for example: "Atlanta Corporate Video Production Demo Reel." The other videos would be the name of the video "Court TV: Cop On Trial For Killing Wife" and therefore wouldn't bring the kind of visitors that are searching for a video production service. This is why I'm curious about what the best hosting option is. Any advice would be a great help.
Branding | | RonMedlin0 -
Is it good/bad to place a press release on a third party website as well as your own?
I have read that if a Company issues a press release via a third part service (e.g. PR Web) it is best not to place the release on the company’s own website due to negative SEO effects. Is this the case? I‘d really appreciate others thoughts on this.
Branding | | E2E0