Rare SEO Case Study Enigma: Aged Domain Gets No Respect From Google

[kontentdruid]

I am in the midst of a relatively rare SEO case study that I believe should start resolving itself soon, but would love to hear the opinions of some veterans around here who may have dealt with something like this in the past:

I recently started work on an aged domain. Here's the background: Site created in 2013, 1500 natural inbound links acquired over the past 7 years. DA is now 63, DR is 60. Site receives maybe 1k a month in branded traffic. The website had ZERO content on it, save for a 6 word branded sentence description on the homepage.

I created a blog on April 1 and started pumping out high quality blog content. Since April I have published 25 blog posts, between 500-700 words each. I built a few links toward 1 blog post with a valuable keyword.

Since April, the site and blog traffic has been terrible! One blog post has gotten a few hundred visits since then but everything else has been non-existent. The blog and the rest of the site has barely gotten any traffic! I even built a few links in late April/ early May toward a high volume keyword blog post but still nothing.

If this was a brand new website then I would not be fretting at all, this would be normal. But this is a strong aged domain and the blog content is relevant to the brand. WHY is Google sticking this site in a sandbox? Anyone have experience with this scenario? In any event I am not taking any chances and will start pumping out much more content and build more links.

Curious if anyone has any other recommendations or timeline tips.

TIA!!!

 

[Elker]

Interested.

 

[Deleted member 1313244]

Sandbox is a myth, age is a relatively small factor in ranking algo, April is too soon.

 

[eternalwarrior]

@Nargil share your opinion.

 

[Fresh Ideas Marketing]

After an update 3 years back aged domains, that are expired were losing authority on new reg

 

[Mr Positive]

1) shoot some strong pbns and mix it with niche edits and guest posts 2) target easy keywords

 

[KelvyTheBlacky]

How's the keyword difficulty? Seems like the culprit here.

 

[Psh]

In my experience aged domains still have a sandbox period if you "restart" it, just not as intense as new domains.

 

[WebTG]

Expired domains always does not provide ranking boost. Once i had started a website on an expired domains and it did not show any evidence of its authority.

The domain was so strong that itvwas listed as official site on wikipedia and hundreds of other high quality contextual link.

Expired domainsnow areridiculisly expensive and now i dont buy them

 

[parabay]

Just have good content and wait is the real success defying factor tbh

 

[Jstrydor]

Interested.

Posting here because I want to follow this thread and hear what the general consensus is.

But I'm responding to you specifically because everytime I see you post in a thread it makes me think of my logo's evil alter ego. I really like it!

 

[MisterF]

Try putting out a 2k+ word article and see if that get's indexed quicker.

 

[AAW]

Not sure how a 7 years site has no content but few words and was ranking and get some 1000 visits a month! What are these visitors were doing in there? Enjoying the logo or the empty site?
something is fishy! Did you buy it recently? Could the seller was doing some BS and then he stopped when you bought it.
I would check your theme and on page SEO, meta tags and such, I have noticed that some wp themes are shitty and mess your the whole SEO.
It happened to one of my WP blogs, and as soon as I installed elementor plugin and posted two posts using elementor I started ranking for some kw even though I didn’t optimize the whole site for anything (yet) and this site or blog is over 3-4 years old. So what I’m trying to say: website theme and design specifically in WP is very important.

Fyi: I’m using bluehost and using some paid theme bought from BH, recently (in May) installed elementor and did two posts with elementor and the rest of the site is with the BH stupid theme.
Only elementor posts are ranking somehow and I have not optimize any post or the site for anything and AHREF showing that this site has 56 health score which is shitty! Go figure.
Now I’m at a stage of re-thinking my current BH bought theme and want to change the whole site to some elementor type theme and fix the health score but have no time to do it and this blog have 80-100 posts on it.

 

[kontentdruid]

In my experience aged domains still have a sandbox period if you "restart" it, just not as intense as new domains.

so youre saying by august il start seeing traffic

Expired domains always does not provide ranking boost. Once i had started a website on an expired domains and it did not show any evidence of its authority.

The domain was so strong that itvwas listed as official site on wikipedia and hundreds of other high quality contextual link.

Expired domainsnow areridiculisly expensive and now i dont buy them

The site was not expired, and has been alive and kicking and indexed w traffic since 2013!

How's the keyword difficulty? Seems like the culprit here.

I thought this too bc one blog post is getting traffic and the keyword has no competition. But the other blog posts dont even crack page 2 for long tail keywords. I think this blog post keyword is just too uncompetitive..

Try putting out a 2k+ word article and see if that get's indexed quicker.

Yea I was thinking this, ive got a 1500 worder going up tomorrow, will follow up on results

Not sure how a 7 years site has no content but few words and was ranking and get some 1000 visits a month! What are these visitors were doing in there? Enjoying the logo or the empty site?
something is fishy! Did you buy it recently? Could the seller was doing some BS and then he stopped when you bought it.
I would check your theme and on page SEO, meta tags and such, I have noticed that some wp themes are shitty and mess your the whole SEO.
It happened to one of my WP blogs, and as soon as I installed elementor plugin and posted two posts using elementor I started ranking for some kw even though I didn’t optimize the whole site for anything (yet) and this site or blog is over 3-4 years old. So what I’m trying to say: website theme and design specifically in WP is very important.

no, nothing fishy, the site has a niche brand product that people search for since 2013. theres nothing screwy about the WP theme, its a standard one by all intents

 

[Nargil]

I don't see a problem here really. That site is 3 months old. It doesn't matter what kind of backlink profile it has, it will always be picking up slowly at the beginning. Entire point of using domains like this is not to rank faster, but to save shittons of money on offsite SEO, because you don't have to buy links.

Also, since lockdown, Google has been having indexing issues. Then there was a core update.

I started new money site around April as well. 900 RD, 700 posts (many of them over 3K words) and so far it's shit as well. Don't really expect anything at all in the first few months.

Also, it doesn't matter whether the domain did expire or didn't. It had zero content on it, there was nothing to even age. All traffic it ever got was from a brand search. So we can pretty much consider it being deindexed until you started uploading the content. And that content has to age and pick up on authority.

It's not as easy as it used to be and definitely not as fast, but those domains work just fine. It needs time and Google needs to sort its shit out.

 

[safeSEOboost]

Site created in 2013, 1500 natural inbound links acquired over the past 7 years. DA is now 63, DR is 60. Site receives maybe 1k a month in branded traffic. The website had ZERO content on it, save for a 6 word branded sentence description on the homepage.

- number of links does not matter, what matters more is number of referring domain, which is? (few hundreds)
- DA 63 sounds unreal, you would need a few thousand RD; is it case of fake DA?

This being said repurposing an old domain does not mean you will get guaranteed traffic. The are many things to consider, niche (same?), quality of links, was it penalized at some point, are you making new links, etc.

 

[Zshan]

Expired domain too takes time to rank nowadays. Need to wait a bit more

 

[graySEO]

following

 

[youtube1001]

aged domain and aged content are two different things. Expecting new content to rank quickly on an old aged domain with previously no content is the issue here.

We don't know Google algo completely, it is possible there was link somewhere with google for it to see as zero content site for a long time. With new content, it will take time to get that out of that setup.

Also you say, it is brand name, so the links are brand links? Previously there was nothing telling Google what this site is about except its brand name. So in essence, you are almost starting from scratch.

On the other hand, if you have an aged domain and niche related backlinks with some content, the story would have been different.

Don't waste your time on buying new links just yet as it would look like you are buying links to a brand new site. Concentrate on getting some content up and get that aged first.

My 2 cents.

 

[Kingdomobi]

I don't see a problem here really. That site is 3 months old. It doesn't matter what kind of backlink profile it has, it will always be picking up slowly at the beginning. Entire point of using domains like this is not to rank faster, but to save shittons of money on offsite SEO, because you don't have to buy links.

Also, since lockdown, Google has been having indexing issues. Then there was a core update.

I started new money site around April as well. 900 RD, 700 posts (many of them over 3K words) and so far it's shit as well. Don't really expect anything at all in the first few months.

Also, it doesn't matter whether the domain did expire or didn't. It had zero content on it, there was nothing to even age. All traffic it ever got was from a brand search. So we can pretty much consider it being deindexed until you started uploading the content. And that content has to age and pick up on authority.

It's not as easy as it used to be and definitely not as fast, but those domains work just fine. It needs time and Google needs to sort its shit out.

I will like to add to this; OP did you check the posts/pages on GSC to see if it was indexed by Google? if it has, just give it some time, probably you will smile soon