Expired domain issue - any expert here?

[kamgae]

In a nutshell, I bought an expired domain:
- a fresh drop
- decent traffic prior to the drop
- good backlinks
- no spam
- niche relevant

What I did was:

1. Restored the website using archivarix
2. Waited until old traffic was restored
3. Published a few product reviews using archivarix CMS

Once these product reviews started to rank well I migrated the website to WordPress. All articles and URL structure were retained.

After the migration most of the pages started dropping off and none of the product reviews are in Google index anymore.

In GSC "Links" tab - the "Top linking sites" count went down from 250 to around 30.

There is nothing that could potentially be blocking indexing or causing issues form the technical side.

All of the keywords I try to rank for are easy.

Any idea why this expired domain just died and how to help it?

 

[tazarbm]

commercial / buyer keywords are never easy to rank, just saying....

To your question... it might be the fact that you're targeting product reviews. There have been at least 6 google updates targeting product review sites in the last 2 years, and if you're not abiding by google's (insane) guidelines you'll probably not rank a single product review page

Here's a list of google's updates, go through each one of them to see how you have to bend over and kiss google's hands and feet in order to make money with product reviews:
https://developers.google.com/search/updates/ranking

 

[HustleTong]

Would you mind sharing the ratio of info articles to that of affiliate content?
A batch of info articles could revive the site if it doesn't have anything to do with links

 

[kingvegeta]

In a nutshell, I bought an expired domain:
- a fresh drop
- decent traffic prior to the drop
- good backlinks
- no spam
- niche relevant

What I did was:

1. Restored the website using archivarix
2. Waited until old traffic was restored
3. Published a few product reviews using archivarix CMS

Once these product reviews started to rank well I migrated the website to WordPress. All articles and URL structure were retained.

After the migration most of the pages started dropping off and none of the product reviews are in Google index anymore.

In GSC "Links" tab - the "Top linking sites" count went down from 250 to around 30.

There is nothing that could potentially be blocking indexing or causing issues form the technical side.

All of the keywords I try to rank for are easy.

Any idea why this expired domain just died and how to help it?

Did you found any solution?

 

[terrycody]

what it shows now when you site:yourdomain on Google?

 

[kamgae]

Would you mind sharing the ratio of info articles to that of affiliate content?
A batch of info articles could revive the site if it doesn't have anything to do with links

I started off with around 150 old non-commercial pages. After 3-4 months, once the domain got it's old traffic back I slowly started adding product reviews (15~) using Archivarix CMS.
They'd seemed to rank well until the website was migrated from Archivarix CMS to WordPress.
All articles and URL structure were retained.
The product reviews then started getting deindexed and I could clearly see the issue in GSC as the "Top linking sites" count dropped from around 200 to 30. It seems that Google all of a sudden started considering this domain as a fresh new one.
I am 100% sure it has nothing to do with the theme or plugins used on the website.

what it shows now when you site:yourdomain on Google?

I can see the root domain along with 100+ other articles in Google index


Overall, I don't always struggle the same setting up new domains. It's really difficult to draw any conclusions and I wonder if there is anyone having experience resurrecting expired domains?