Bought an old spammed domain..What to do ?

Hi guys,

I just realized that an EMD that I bought 2 weeks ago is in fact an old EMD of a guy who probably forgot to renew it. I was able to view his previous website with the TimeMachine.
In fact, I was looking for keywords idea and while I was checking for footprint of this competitor, I stumble upon a backlink to my new website. So I went to ahref and found that the domain has 100k backlinks, mostly crappy blog comments..

I just realize that now, as I didn't really start SEO for this domain on my side. But now that I have seen that, I don't even know if it's worth my time and effort to do SEO for this one when you see how spammed it is. Currently it's ranking on page 7 for the main KW, and probably better for some long tail as I made an Amazon sales yesterday with it.

Any advice on how I should handle the situation there please ?

Thanks

(Well at least now I'll check everything on ahref before buying a new domain, that was kind of stupid not to do this..)

Valkurm,

I would check how many backlinks are leading to the site for sure and if they are not good. If its only the one and the domain hasn't been manually penalized in general (and its important that you have this specific domain for your business purposes), then it might be worth breathing some life into.

On the other hand if you find that there are tons of bad links leading to it, that can be a major time suck to clean up. In that case there would have to be a pretty compelling business case (or personal reason) to use the domain.

Hope that helps,

Shawn

IF the domain is not blacklist and it still have a good strong pr and googe authority. than it is still worth your time. Use the tools that you got and see if it give you any serp benefits.

One day or other it may get blacklisted by google. You can take your backlink report and use Disavow tool to remove all your links and start building links to your site.

Thanks for the replies guys.

I tried to get the backlink list with Scrapebox, but I'm only getting around 1k results. So I guess a lot of them might be de-indexed ? I don't know.
When I check the domain with ahref I'm getting the following results, but I can't export everything with my subscription.
I think all links are blog comments and trackbacks.

Really don't know how to play with that one..

260000 nofollow backlinks i m not seo expert like others here but i think its useless domain use google tool to remove backlinks

I can't export everything with my subscription

Click to expand...

Check my thread here (method to get free report from majesticseo, up to 50k backlinks):

blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/black-hat-seo/569351-method-free-50k-backlinks-reports-majesticseo.html

Click to expand...

That is one spammed domain... you want to look at the anchor text % as well (you can do this with the free version of moz open site explorer).

I would probably just cut your losses now, you haven't made any significant investment into the domain yet and it might just suck up too much of your time down the line. if you really do want to keep it and go ahead with building out the domain then i suggest your remove most of those links with WMT.

Thanks Satyr85, trying that now.
I also looked at the external links with the Google Webmaster Tool, and it didn't list any of all these backlinks.
Anyway I put the 2k links I found with Scapebox on the disavow links.

Damn this guy. I found other pretty interesting EMDs and it's often old domains of this same guy, spammed to death too.

But yeah. I didn't put much SEO effort on my side with this domain yet, just worked on the content for now. I'll have a look and see how it goes, if I can't work it out I'll try to find a new good one.

Just got the 50k links reports.
26k are keyword
Other 25k is mostly keywords + tail / URLs / Generic / Name from blog comments

As pointed out by everyone, if you really wish to use the domain then get rid of all the backlinks and start building fresh backlinks for it. However it would be time consuming, so in case if you havent invested much in the site yet, go ahead and start fresh with a domain.