No Content vs Auto Generated Content in Domain Aging

**grynge** · February 11th, 2011, 7:45 PM

I am just curious to get peoples views, I haven't done a test but am about to embark on one.

I have a some xx year old domains, xxxx.com's that I bought through expired domains.

What do people think, is it best to just

A. leave the domain blank eg.. no files
B. put a blank website on eg.. standard wordpress install
C. put a coming soon maybe with a counter
D. put an auto generating website on eg.. wordpress with wprobot plugin
E. put a free css template with say 1 or 2 small pages of content
F. find any old original content from the site

Which one do you think will help the domain age better?
Which will make the domain more useful if you do plan on using it down the track
Will any of the options hinder the domain

any thoughts?

**jimmifli** · February 11th, 2011, 8:31 PM

My experience is that the content doesn't matter much. But links sure do. So a few links pointing to the root of the domain are a great idea. The implication is that there needs to be at least some content on the site for anyone to bother linking to it.

Aged links are great.

my $.02

**Fish** · February 11th, 2011, 9:52 PM

I would guess any old original content, and a few cheap links. Auto-blogging strikes me as a good way to climb the serps fast, but a bad way to age a domain. I hate the concept too.

At least with AOOC (new acronym!), you won't offend Google and get deindexed. You won't climb much, but at least you'll age the site and it will be primed to go whenever someone does get serious with it.

Of course, this is all my opinion and thus probably invalid (or so my wife tends to think). I would love to hear the results of your test.

**ScottJ** · February 15th, 2011, 3:42 AM

F. find any old original content from the site - some basic small amounts of unique text would be ideal and the odd link to get it indexed afresh would be the ideal way in my opinion.

**Clinton** · February 22nd, 2011, 5:59 AM

I would go for E and F and I agree about the links. I believe that a key to reviving an expired domain is to restore old content and failing that to put up new content on exactly the same subject and page names. This needs to be followed with a few new (and "permanent") IBLs.

**Saul** · February 23rd, 2011, 11:18 AM

If you're gonna do F, mind the copyrights. Most of the time you don't have the right to use the old content, unless you've bought it with the domain name. If you've bought an expired domain name, you don't automatically have the permission to use the old content.

With that said, the best idea would be to recreate the content as close as possible to ensure you keep the old links. Any development on top of that is of course a plus. In my experience though, few old links disappear whatever you do with the content. Of course it depends on how important you think is to retain those links.

Just make sure you don't land any of them on 404.

**Clarkie** · February 23rd, 2011, 1:25 PM

I would have thought A, B & C are all pointless. The domain isn't going to age if there's nothing original or nothing there is it?

**Saul** · February 23rd, 2011, 5:09 PM

Why not? It will age, it cannot defy time. The real question is if there will be any use of that age. In a nutshell, two things are important - retaining links and avoiding being removed from the index. So anything you do should take that into consideration.

**crabfoot** · February 23rd, 2011, 7:25 PM

If there's a single page of complete drivel up, it counts as a website. If that site has been up for a while, it counts as age - so links from that page are useful.

But anything detectable as "parking" or non-use is likely to be noticed and defined as non-use. You need something else for the age to count with the search engines, because they DO NOT CHECK the actual age of domains.

**grynge** · February 24th, 2011, 3:55 AM

Can't really tell how the domain is aging till I use them for something but so far
12 year old domains expiring domains from godaddy, all .com's, all had no pagerank, all around 100 links. All had been parked at one time or another with godaddy. Domain names vary greatly but all 2 word micro niches

Site A Site with no content = page indexed, traffic 2 from se's, 72 from links, no loss of known links yet
Site B Site with vanilla wordpress no content = page indexed, traffic 5 from se's, 98 from links, no loss of known links yet
Site C Site with coming soon countdown no content = page indexed, traffic 8 from se's, 118 from links, no loss of known links yet
Site D Site with auto generated content = 98% pages indexed, traffic 75 from se's, 75 from links, no loss of known links yet
Site E Site with Free Template new content = all pages indexed, traffic 125 from se's, 54 from links, no loss of known links yet
Site F Original site content = all pages indexed, traffic 113 from se's, 120 from links, no loss of known links yet

So far new or old content doesn't seem to make much difference. As long as there is some sort of content.