Some Questions About An Expired Domain I Bought

So, i bought a domain for $900 on Godaddy auctions. It has a good PA & DA, and very relevant backlinks. I Set the site up, created social profiles and i posted a few articles on it.

Now my questions:
1. How long until they start appearing for the keywords? (anywhere in the top 100) because right now it doesn't show even if i search by the site name. (It's not penalzied, since i can see everything with "site:").
2. The domain i bought hadnt been active for more than 4 years, does it mean its worthless?
3. What should my next steps be?

Thanks in advance!

OP, asking some pretty rudimentary questions, given that you've just dropped so much on a domain... Bit worrying.

Do you have any experience in restoring websites/domains. How did you populate the website? Is a scrape of old content? Are all the URLs still the same structure?

The best way to keep the original link juice is to retore the old content from waybackmachine, after that, you can add your own relevant content on this site, otherwise, you have a good chance to slowly loose the backlinks, if this happens, the $900 is going to be wasted...

What i did was i built a new wordpress website on it. I got a plugin that redirects all 404's to 301's.

darkminir said:

What i did was i built a new wordpress website on it. I got a plugin that redirects all 404's to 301's.

Click to expand...

301's to where? Where did you get the content?

Maxim Alston said:

301's to where? Where did you get the content?

Click to expand...

I wrote content myself.

Example, the site had old links pointing to site.com/something-related-to-the-topic. I redirected all those pages to site.com /something or the homepage.

If the stats are that good, you could easily turn it into a money site by having patience and posting more content.

I've had websites with good content start ranking on the 7th-9th pages of Google within a month and a half.

If you really want to do redirects, find the pages that have the most powerful backlinks and put your 301/401 redirect on that page.

900 dollars to be asking such basic questions. Hope the backlinks are strong.

darkminir said:

I wrote content myself.

Example, the site had old links pointing to site.com/something-related-to-the-topic. I redirected all those pages to site.com /something or the homepage.

Click to expand...

Is the new content you created and redirected those pages to at least similar subject matter to the old content?

You would be better off recreating the old URL structure exactly, scarping the old content from waybackmachine, and not redirecting anything.

$900 is a pretty expensive domain, man.

Maybe a good idea to ask these question prior to buying higher ticket domains. But still its all a learning process.

Now my questions:
1. How long until they start appearing for the keywords? (anywhere in the top 100) because right now it doesn't show even if i search by the site name. (It's not penalzied, since i can see everything with "site:").
Ideally you want to be restoring the domain with the old content at least on the homepage. Let it sit a couple of weeks, then gradually start adding new content and updating it.

2. The domain i bought hadnt been active for more than 4 years, does it mean its worthless?
Its best to try and buy domains that were recently active and with a low amount of drops

3. What should my next steps be?
You want to try and do 301 redirects on the URL level. Meaning example.com/hairyarmpits.html should be 301 redirected to a similar page like example.com/hairyarmpits-ultimate-shaver