Starting fresh on a older domain

Hi,
This summer I was given an assignment in college for internship to make an online portfolio. I am given an older domain, which was used by another student beforehand. After reading certain posts in this forum regarding robots.txt and penalizing by search engines, I thought I should better ask beforehand about what I am going to deal with next. These are my queries:

1. Maybe, the last one to use the domain might have used certain "bad methods" to get quick results in SEO. And this may have resulted in penalizing of the website from google. How can I know about my website status for a certain "search engine".

2. He might have used the content by copying it from some other website. Now, I am under charge of that domain, will changing the whole content into my original will make crawlers enter my website quickly?

3. Are their any precautionary steps or rules that I should take right now( regarding the use of older domain name), before even starting anything?

4. I have to make sure that everything is on right path, I am willing to put my efforts and time before I actually start preparing for the website. Are their any articles or specific tools that I should add to my inventory "relate to using older domain only".

I may have other queries later on, I will post them here. But the queries I listed above are sticking on my head for far too long, and I thought I should get some advices from people who are already working in this industry for so long. Right now, all I have are people in India who call them "SEO gurus" who want to take this opportunity and charge me hefty.

Thanks in advance
Tushar Relan

Don't you just hate click bots?

anyway call/E-Mail up google! Google is one of those awesome companies that always help you out, if you tell em' what happened and have someway to prove it, they might just reset the penelties!

1. Is the old content still available ? Or when did the content get get removed?

2. You mention "bad methods"... ? Please explain.

3. Does the older domain name show up in current search results ?


If the content has not been visible for sometime "3-6 months"... Then none of this may matter.

If the site content is still visible, you need to look at the site " log files" before taking it down to see if there is any search engine indexing activity.

If not, the domain name may be on a black-list for whatever bad behavior ? If the previous user was utilizing some sort of black hat techniques, or worse yet, the site was put on a list for distributing either malware, hacking tools or virus's.

If the site does currently show up in search results, then that should not be an issue.

Before you can make any plan of action for using an older or previously used domain name, you need these answers.

It you can't determine or if the answers are not there, not much you can do, assuming will only waste time and in more case just be a waste of time and energy.

Me personally, if this info is not available, I would create a few test pages with some unique content, publish them, make sure the robots.txt file is not blocking crawlers, setup access to log files or stats, manually submit the URL to several search engines, then start monitoring.

What ?

When you answer based on a whole lot of assumptions ( click bot )... Unless of course YOU were the previous user of the domain name ... Were you ?

If the content has not been available to search engines for 3-6 months, then there may not be an issue here... But we don't know that yet.

First off, no I hate people that try to exploit google for web traffic
but yes that is an assumption, he said this was a project for collage so it might not be 3-6 months yet.

Okay, I will try to answer your questions one by one:
1. Yes, the old content is still available, I haven't touched a thing.

2. Bad methods: Well, I called him and asked him how he managed to get his website on nearly 2nd number on Bing and yahoo. He didn't replied me back, so I am not sure what he did. On viewing the source code of the page, I didn't saw any use of 'meta' tags or other on-page SEO elements such as 'alt' parameter on images. Also, after reading his project report, I am pretty sure, he never used correct means of off-page SEO such as blog submission, forum posting, Social network bookmarking, etc. So, the things left are irectory submission, hidden content, 301/302 re-directions, classifieds. Also, I used the sentence 'might have used certain bad methods'. I am not sure about it, its just a prediction. I just wanted to make sure, nothing illegal or cut-copy-paste stuff have been done before on the website.

3. Yes, the older domain shows up on 2nd number on the search list at Bing and Yahoo. I checked for it on Google, but till 10th page, I don't see it. By the way is their any tool / software, which shows us "our website search engine ranking for a current search keyword"? Earlier, I was manually searching for the domain name.

Your other predicaments details:

1.No, content is visible for the last month, as it wasn't removed.

2. By log files you mean the folder which is present in the directory of the server? I opened it, it was empty. Though, if you meant other log file, please revert back . I am a beginner in SEO, and it is my first project. But I hope you understand, we all have all sorts of questions in our head, when we are performing SEO for the first time.

So, the site shows up on two search engines, then it can be said that nothing is wrong as yet, right?

Thanks for putting valid inputs, I am glad I got this domain which is previously used by another person. It helped me clear lot of assumptions that a new timer should make.

Well, you say ranking high ...

But you didn't put the terms for where it's ranking.

If you are searching for the domain name itself, it actually should be on the top of the search results unless there is something wrong. Or the users name ( should be on the site )... This is not an uncommon mis-conception of "ranking high"...

In real terms, if you're referring to searching for the domain name, it should be on page #1 if not in the # 1 position, but it has no real value because people rarely search for a domain name... If they do, it means they may have forgotten the spelling and that is the only reason for searching by domain name, otherwise they just type the domain name in the URL and go there.

It appears as though ( based on information provide this far )... The previous user did nothing wrong, and you should not worry about it.

Since search results are still showing up, then the search engines are still actively monitoring the site ( this is a good thing ).... You need to nothing now, but update the content.

I might suggest that, if you want to maintain decent rankings, structure you new site just like the old site.

You may also want to develop all of your content off-line, and publish it all at once.

If you take the site down, then out up all new content, you may trigger the search engines to drop and start all over...

If you don't want to keep the same structure, then you should investigate and learn how to use 301 redirects to inform the search engines of the changes in structure.

Log files are usually kept on servers, access to them is hosting provider independent, some offer access, some don't. If yours does not, look at google analytics, put their code on your site and they will give you the same basic information about who is visiting your site, how often, as well as some keyword information and how google is indexing your site.

Thanks for the immediate replies. Really appreciate it.