Advice on Expired Domain

I picked up a two word EMD with a dash off the drop lists, its's in the travel/activities niche.

Site was established for over a decade and has lots of valuable backlinks. Still gets 15-100 uniques per day and earns on parking revenue.

I'm rebuilding the site but with WP instead of ASP and 301 redirecting the links.

Domain stats

TF 33 CF 44

PA 43 DA 50

There is a catch, it appears the previous owner passed away and let everything go to waste, the site was hacked and it has lots of spam pointing to it. I've added it to WM tools and my reconsideration request was approved by big G.

There is a lot of crawl errors stemming from spam on other hacked sites.

The site was super thin on content and had over 3,000 activities listed. This won't fly in today
s landscape so I'm filling out the content and rebuilding it with 300-500 word articles with a view to expand on more detailed content.

I'm also unsure how much the spam from the hacked sites may affect SEO, will Google
ignore it providing I do something about the broken links? I.e disvow tool or just keep marking them as fixed until they go away (as I've read is the best course of action).

I'm not getting any errors about spam in WM tools at present.

Secondly, it's a dashed domain which isn't ideal as I'll likely leak traffic and revenue to the non dashed version which is available for sale and parked with PPC. ads

So what do you guys think? Plough ahead and build out a money site or air on the side of caution and test it out as a PBN?

If everything works out I can consider the non dashed version or just 301 the whole site to a better domain. What would you guys do with this domain? Am I crazy to invest this much time/money on it?

If there's a dash, it's not an EMD.

Submitting a reconsideration request on a manually penalized domain is like:

"Oh hey, I know this awesome escort girl, she used to have HIV, but she got cured and she is all fine now!"

I wouldn't touch any EMD/PMD with whatever history. All of them have been SEOed on purpose and thus cannot be considered clean at all.

Nargil said:

If there's a dash, it's not an EMD.

Submitting a reconsideration request on a manually penalized domain is like:

"Oh hey, I know this awesome escort girl, she used to have HIV, but she got cured and she is all fine now!"

I wouldn't touch any EMD/PMD with whatever history. All of them have been SEOed on purpose and thus cannot be considered clean at all.

Click to expand...

you could still use rubber

darulez said:

you could still use rubber

Click to expand...

That's just around 80% safe I believe.

Nargil said:

If there's a dash, it's not an EMD.

Submitting a reconsideration request on a manually penalized domain is like:

"Oh hey, I know this awesome escort girl, she used to have HIV, but she got cured and she is all fine now!"

I wouldn't touch any EMD/PMD with whatever history. All of them have been SEOed on purpose and thus cannot be considered clean at all.

Click to expand...

Haha. I know.

From reading around it seems to be a coin flip on whether or not you can fully recover from a site hack. Aside from all the spam from the hack there's some juicy links and what was bad is long gone.

Maybe I should just pull the original site from archive, strap on a rubber white hat and index it to see what happens.

It will make some money for me regardless but it's a real shame because it's a site worth rebuilding. I'm just concerned about the history before I go any deeper.

Be careful with what you do - could affect sites rep. best to get in touch with a SEO expert?

Nargil said:

That's just around 80% safe I believe.

Click to expand...

I am sure that perecentage is depended of the place you stuck it into.

Go for a clean site, it would be a long struggle with such a domain