Old domains are great for SEO, especially if the name is relevant to your current topic and the domain has some age on it. Domains with some years on them are going to get stronger, faster. Not that a new domain couldn’t eventually outrank it, but until that new domain gets some time on it, it’s just how it is.
There’s a few ways you can go about using your aged domain to pass along SEO value to your new site.
1. Lazy.. If you want to just do the work once and worry about it minimally, I would suggest a landing page. An SEO-rich one page site with a lot of relevant, properly formatted, well written content linking back to your new website.
Target this page for some niche keyword that is relevant to your main website’s topic.. For example, if your site is about chocolate bars, target your landing page for a relevant keyword with little competition, such as “world’s most delicious chocolate”. This is most likely a pretty easy keyword to be ranking for, and link that site back to your main site. Poof. You have a site that is well ranked for a relevant topic referencing your website. Powerful. Do this for 2-3 keywords and build as many of them as you can stand to.
BUT. Do not just leave the content there to rot away. Practice (or hire somebody) writing good SEO content and update that landing page ever so slightly regularly. This will keep Google coming back regularly checking for new content and keep them from potentially devaluing your content because it’s stale. Google loves new stuff to read and that’s how you keep them happy.
2. Blog. Blogging regularly ensures new content for Google. If you get good at writing good SEO copy and you can do it 1-2 times per week or even 1 time every 2 weeks, Google will love it. This has multiple advantages over a landing page; first it allows you to cover an array of topic and build on as many relevant keywords as you can stand to (the main advantage to landing pages, is that managing too many blogs can take longer than your full time work). It also opens the door for social marketing, if people enjoy your posts, they may +1 it, Facebook, Twitter, etc about it and this just builds on the website’s (and even that specific page’s) link authority. This allows you to potentially rank your main site for whatever keywords you want to.
There’s several other options, but you get the gist of it. There’s a couple of things to remember for whatever you do.
1. The links to your aged site. Your links tell Google what OTHERS think your site is relevant to. If you have 100 links that say you’re an industrial supply company, that’s probably what Google’s going to file you under and it’s going to make it a bit harder to rank it for something completely unrelated like “world’s best chocolate”. So you’re going to want to build on that site’s links (you’re going to want to either way) and get Google looking at its topic as being a bit more relevant. The existing backlinks are a great bonus, though.
2. No matter what, you’re not going to get away with not coming up with good quality SEO content. Google is going to love whichever site has the most, the most updated, the most recent and the most well written content. A landing page can outrank an old, stale, irrelevant blog with horrible content. There’s a trillion of those on the internet.
3. If you can get another host, that will make it even better. Google looks at everything about your backlinks, including where they come from as far as where that website’s server is located, it’s IP address and other websites on that IP address. It’s worth the $4/month to host your old domains elsewhere, get them different IPs on different servers from a different companies. If Google notices all of your backlinks are coming from 1 server on 1 IP with the same company, network, nameservers and everything.. They can devalue your backlinks. Google wants OTHER people linking to you. Not you linking to yourself.
There’s several things you can do with aged domains. These are just the methods that I would personally use. Now how you come up with the content, how you entice people to socialize your pages.. That’s where your creativity comes in and you ponder that endless question, “what is this blog going to be about.”
REMEMBER TO DO ALL OF THE ON-SITE SEO FOR YOUR AGED DOMAIN! YOU WILL HAVE TO WORK 100X HARDER ON CONTENT, LINKS AND SOCIAL MARKETING IF YOUR WEBSITE IS NOT ITSELF OPTIMIZED FOR THE KEYWORDS YOUR CONTENT, LINKS AND SOCIAL MARKETING ARE TRYING TO RANK IT FOR!
