What would you do if you purchased this website?

[TrustButVerify]

I just purchased a site in the sporting goods niche that had been shut down for the last year. The site was doing well but shut down due to disagreements with the partners. Site used to gross over 100k-200k a year but based on a warehouse/fulfillment business model where product was stocked. Site is 8 years old, DMOZ listed and ranks pretty well for many of it's terms. The site over the last 5 years was getting 20k-40k unique visitors a month and still does to this day. The most popular keyword only gets about 800 uniques a month out of that 20-40k so it seems the rankings are spread out over a wide range of keywords (plus point).

The price was very cheap, enough so that I didn't hesitate much in purchasing it.

I'm getting ready to put adsense on the site just to see what I can make off of that.

Does anyone have any e-commerce type stores where all the "buy now" links take them to an affiliate site to purchase? Would I be turning my site into a "thin affiliate site" which google hates?

[leadegroot]

If you do go the affiliate link route, be sure to botblock them. Not risky - the engines don't penalise you for blocking them from areas of your site

(If 'botblock' is unclear, it means the link the user clicks on is e.g. my domain.com/out/123 and the page that lands on runs code to 302 the visitor to e.g. mymerchant.com/producturl.html. *Then* you put an entry in robots.txt to ban bots from visiting the out/ directory)

[TrustButVerify]

Sounds interesting, never thought of that before. I suppose the only thing you would have to be aware of is a manual review. But I think most manual review issues would be based on making sure your site is relevant for the keyword.

[ian]

The WooCommerce Wordpress plugin has an option to link to affiliate products instead of keeping a product inventory. It's easy to use too. Might be worth a look?