Need help to prevent Pagerank Suicide

[Premiere]

I recently acquired a site from pre-release with a PR7. The site has lots of backlinks and listings with some traffic from google search.

I expect there is a fair chance PageRank will drop due to the pre-release vendor putting up the standard page banner of "this site is for sale" with advertising and 404 redirects for 30 days. I am wondering if anyone knows how to restore what might be lost confidence from Google during the transition period.

I have copied the old content from archive.org and renewed registration for 10 years. My goal is to keep the old links and PR intact as much as possible. It is not a fancy or highly targeted keyword site but I would like to do whatever I can to maintain it right now so I can begin adding some of my own real content later (no this will not become a junk PR7 submission directory).

Does anyone have similar experiences and ideas on how to prevent inevitable Pagerank suicide? This is uncharted territory for me.

Thanks for your comments!
%%- Wire

 

[DubDubDubDot]

I'm sorry to say that I have a lot of bad news for you.

Google will detect the lapse in registration. There is no way around that. PR resets to 0 and you get credit for none of the pre-existing links. Matt Cutts stated this some years back.

The next order of bad news is that you are now guilty of copyright infringement by stealing the old content, and you have painted a bullseye on yourself. While it is unlikely that the content owner will take a shot at you in court, it is possible. Especially if the content is now active on a new domain of theirs and they have the desire and resources to come after you. Again, unlikely, but keep it in mind.

And finally, renewing for 10 years doesn't help PR... at least that is my opinion. Some say otherwise, but I find that it tends to come from amateur webmasters. They might be right, but I haven't seen the evidence and legit SEO guys never talk about this.

 

[Archangel]

Sorry to say but I agree with the above post. I don't see the PR staying

 

[mwzd]

I wouldn't copy the content, but you're on the right track, development is mandated.

Even if you do lose PR, if the links stay, it will eventually come back. To what level probably depends on your content and links staying in.

Good Luck.

 

[Timewarp]

I don't think it's a total lost cause, you may still be able to keep some of the page rank.
Stick with development and also keep building new in-links.

 

[dropsdomains.com]

I have lots of domains that keep their pagerank.

All you need to do is put back relevant content as soon as possible. If google sees good content relevant to previous, pagerank stays.

Check archive.org for past content.

And check site in my SIG. There are PR5 and PR6 domains that are bought for 1000$ - 5000$ so when somebody is investing that much $, he knows what he's doing.

 

[shockie]

I have lots of domains that keep their pagerank.

out of curiosity, how many pagerank updates have they survived?

 

[dmi]

You will lose the PR7, no doubt about that. However, you can take advantage of all the links the site has. I would develop a content-rich website right away, wait a couple of weeks. Then buy some high quality links just to give it a boost... and you'll be the king.

I wish you best of luck.

 

[dropsdomains.com]

out of curiosity, how many pagerank updates have they survived?

Depends on number of links that remains. Reciprocal are lost but usually PR stays same 2 or 3 updates (somewhere around 8-9 months) and then goes -1 and stay. Remember there's tons of dofollow link needed to build PR5 so after drop to PR4, PR4 will not drop that soon.

DMI is right, links stays so it's easy to build socalled trustrank again even if pagerank is dropped. And trustrank determines google position.

 

[shockie]

thanks for sharing. :blink:

 

[r3born]

I do not think that all is lost. I doubt that you will be able to keep PR7, however I'm pretty sure that it won't drop lower than PR5 after next updates if the site has strong incoming links as you claim.
It should not drop to PR0 just because of a Whois change.

 

[Premiere]

I would develop a content-rich website right away, wait a couple of weeks. Then buy some high quality links just to give it a boost... and you'll be the king.

Good advice - get good content in there and see where it leads...

I have lots of domains that keep their pagerank.
All you need to do is put back relevant content as soon as possible. If google sees good content relevant to previous, pagerank stays.

Yes my main fear was that the 30 days of junk links from godaddy/enom/netsol parked page would upset the G lifecycle engine.

Even if you do lose PR, if the links stay, it will eventually come back. To what level probably depends on your content and links staying in.
Good Luck.

All very good advice from good contributors, rep added to everyone with constructive ideas. I was also recently contacted by someone looking to buy already so we'll see if that goes anywhere.

%%- Wire

 

[FathomJH]

I recently acquired a site from pre-release with a PR7. The site has lots of backlinks and listings with some traffic from google search.

I expect there is a fair chance PageRank will drop due to the pre-release vendor putting up the standard page banner of "this site is for sale" with advertising and 404 redirects for 30 days. I am wondering if anyone knows how to restore what might be lost confidence from Google during the transition period.

I have copied the old content from archive.org and renewed registration for 10 years. My goal is to keep the old links and PR intact as much as possible. It is not a fancy or highly targeted keyword site but I would like to do whatever I can to maintain it right now so I can begin adding some of my own real content later (no this will not become a junk PR7 submission directory).

Does anyone have similar experiences and ideas on how to prevent inevitable Pagerank suicide? This is uncharted territory for me.

Thanks for your comments!
%%- Wire

Make sure you maintain content. The PR should come back somewhat. You won't see PR7 in 24 hours, but make sure you provide unique content, get some backlinks going and keep updating.

 

[dtxa]

I deal with pagerank domains on a regular basis and from my experience it's rare to lose a website's PR and your unlikely to lose this one anytime soon since the last pagerank update was 15 days ago. But there are 3 main things you need to do:

1. Do some link research and find inner/sub pages with pagerank and either do a 301 redirect to the homepage or put some relevant content on those pages and make sure you link back to your homepage.

2. Setup sitemaps and make sure you notify google so they can crawl all of your pages, you can do this easily with wordpress and you'll get the extra benifit of wordpress's "out of the box" page optimization.

3. Don't start selling links right away, yea it's tempting being able to charge $300 per month for a simple text link but you don't want google to think your yet another pr4+ link farm. Wait at least another 3-4 months before you start selling links and make sure you only sell to sites with a pagerank higher than 1.

Aside from text links, the best way you can monetize this domain is to take advantage of the domains trustrank which is a whole different topic but if you do some research I'm sure you'll find your answers

 

[Premiere]

Ultimately the end result was this:

Pagerank lost 1 point, to PR 6 after the April 1 PR update.
All links were 301'd with professional 301 redirect software built on top of joomla content.
No links were sold, but adsense was put on the front page (and that trust did translate into good monetization)
Sitemaps were handled in the typical manner with joomla.

Either way, PR6 is fine for my purposes, though 7 would have been nice. Perhaps this means Google is watching for pages that show up with the default parked pages for 45 days and penalizing them for not being indexable. Something to think about when buying pre-releases from now on.

 

[DubDubDubDot]

It is also worth noting that toolbar PR is not the true PR that Google uses for rankings. Not to mention that PR is just one aspect of the ranking.

I have a feeling a lot of webmasters are being taken to the cleaners thinking they are buying an expired PR3, PR5, PR7... and that clout carries over to them. When in reality the trust rank of that domain has been completely mowed down in Google's algorithm.

And as I stated above, Google themselves said that pre-expiration backlinks are no longer valid and you are starting over.

 

[Timewarp]

Thanks for the update Wire, it was interesting to hear what happened, PR6 is still nice. Let us know if there is any change at the next update.

On a related note I finally got around to developing a PR2 name I found at TDNAM last year... it was parked for a year but for whatever reason didnt lose PR.

 

[sashas]

Honestly, my experience with PR has been completely different.

I got a couple of domains over an year back - Feb 08, to be exact. Both had a PR of 5.

I had them parked until March 09 - an year and a half. Neither of these two domains lost their PR.

Last month, I built little wordpress blogs on them with quality content, submitted some articles to ezinearticles, set up a couple of squidoo lenses. Traffic on one of the domains shot up from 5 uvs per day to 50 uvs within two weeks, and that domain has already started ranking well in Google for decent keywords.

From my experience, being paranoid about Google doesn't help. PR can be hard to lose, and if you build up a good site quickly enough, you'll see the PR coming back (if it ever goes away, that is).

The best thing about expired domains is that they start ranking in Google almost instantly. Initially, the two domains I mentioned got 90% of the traffic through type-ins and referrals. Now they get over 70% traffic from Google (approx 50-70 uvs per day)