Should You Recreate The Old Site Or Make It Fit Your Niche?

So you found a truly great expired domain for either godaddy auctions or flippa What is the best way to get the most with that domain?

a) change the content/theme so that it matches that of your money site

b) keep the content/theme the same as it was before and "force" a link to your money site despite the unrelated content (the benefits of which are that you are more likely to keep the authority links pointing towards your domain)

If I had to choose between the 2 then I'd choose option A and repurpose the domain into something that was relevant to my money site.

I do this because I have found links from related sites to be more effective in terms of rankings than those from unrelated sites.

BUT, I also like to try and take a hybrid approach to both get relevancy and to try and reduce the risk of the links being removed by the authority sites linking to a domain. So, for example, I recently picked up a domain that was originally the website for a nutritional conference but I was looking to promote my jobs/careers website at the time. Rather than make the site solely about careers, I instead created a homepage article that was all about the career prospects of a nutritionist because this is, after all, the type of people who would have been going to the original conference.

Thus, I managed to work my link naturally into the article and get the benefit of having relevant keywords throughout and especially in the page title (as I mentioned in my report, this makes a difference in the power of the links you build). Mostly, though, this is not possible so I just make a broad website on my expired domains to do with one topic or another.

Sometimes it is feasible to keep this broad topic relevant to the original site in some shape or form and it comes down to where the backlinks come from. For example, a while ago I found a domain that had a link from the World Health Organisation but it was mainly about preventable diseases in poorer countries. So instead I built a general health website on this domain and linked to a health related site of mine. I really wanted to maintain the relevancy of the link I had from the WHO and try to pass this through to my money site.

One word of caution for anyone thinking of using the exact content taken from archive.org to rebuild the site that was there before; I would advise against this as the original owner does still technically own that content and there is always a small chance that you could get into a legal dispute. It is simply not worth the risk.

I hope this has cleared things up a little. Remember, these are my opinions and how I work and there is no perfect solution. I just try to stay under the Google radar.