Hosting a website on an old domain
Posted: Sun Feb 02, 2025 4:43 am
There are various reasons why a new website owner might want to buy an existing working domain:
You have chosen a great domain name, concise and easy to remember. It is already taken, but at the moment it is for sale.
The current domain has already earned a good reputation with search engines, there are links to it, which means that the opportunities for promotion are more optimistic.
Or maybe you already have a normal working domain at your disposal. What are the pros and cons?
How to achieve multiple growth in traffic and sales food and beverage email list from your website?
Alexey Boyarkin
Dmitry Svistunov
Head of SEO and Development
Read more posts on my personal blog:
I have always been concerned about the issue of moving to a fundamentally new level. So that the indicators would grow not by 2 or 3 times, but by several orders of magnitude. From a thousand visits to ten thousand or from ten thousand to a hundred thousand, if we are talking about a website, for example.
And I know that such leaps are always the result of painstaking work in five areas:
Technical condition of the site.
SEO.
Collection of site semantics.
Creating useful content.
Working on conversion.
And at the same time, every manager needs an increase in sales and the number of applications from the site at the moment.
To get this growth, download our step-by-step template for increasing sales from the site:
Download template
Already downloaded
153442
New domain: here you do everything yourself, practically from scratch. At the same time, the new name will not be followed by possible sanctions and filters from search engines, and it will cost you less money.
Promoted domain: to help promote your web resource, you just need to think through the transition carefully and complete all the steps correctly and accurately:
The focus of your site should match the previous domain theme or at least be fairly close. That is, if you sell bicycles, and previously the chosen domain name was a pet store, then this is, to put it mildly, an unsuccessful option (even if we are talking about a domain with an impressive TIC).
You can choose and buy a domain name with a completely different theme and completely replace the content on it at your discretion (leaving the design the same). But you will then lose the trust index from search engines (they will simply reset it, perceiving the site as a new resource).
If you are moving a site from another domain address, do not forget to reconfigure the redirects with the new URL addresses.
It's good if the chosen domain previously had a site similar in structure to yours. Then, for example, you can completely preserve the CHPU of some previous pages.
It is necessary to adjust the link anchors in accordance with the subject of your resource.
Some keys can also be left (for the purpose of successful promotion), but practice shows that positions still worsen.
It is best to use a domain that has not been idle for the last 1-3 months, because in this case it loses a lot of weight in search engine rankings or even disappears from search results altogether.
Check the web archive to see what was recently on the selected domain, and whether there was a dead site hanging there.
Of course, you won’t be able to track the entire history in detail, but the current state of affairs is visible through Yandex.Webmaster and Google Search Console.
Carefully study the section "Diagnostics" → "Security and violations" for violations and threats.
You can check whether the domain name you have chosen is available using Whois services such as www.reg.ru/whois/ or www.whois-service.ru/.
And of course, check your link profile.
It would be useful to know that many providers practice the following scheme of actions: they give (offer such a bonus) a domain name to everyone who purchases a hosting service, which they register in their name. That is, the user will not be able to keep the domain if he suddenly decides to switch to another hosting. It is clear that this is done in order to retain customers, because no one wants to part with a site in the promotion of which a lot of money and effort has already been invested. Therefore, if you are promised a domain name as a gift, be sure to inquire who it will be registered to.
You have chosen a great domain name, concise and easy to remember. It is already taken, but at the moment it is for sale.
The current domain has already earned a good reputation with search engines, there are links to it, which means that the opportunities for promotion are more optimistic.
Or maybe you already have a normal working domain at your disposal. What are the pros and cons?
How to achieve multiple growth in traffic and sales food and beverage email list from your website?
Alexey Boyarkin
Dmitry Svistunov
Head of SEO and Development
Read more posts on my personal blog:
I have always been concerned about the issue of moving to a fundamentally new level. So that the indicators would grow not by 2 or 3 times, but by several orders of magnitude. From a thousand visits to ten thousand or from ten thousand to a hundred thousand, if we are talking about a website, for example.
And I know that such leaps are always the result of painstaking work in five areas:
Technical condition of the site.
SEO.
Collection of site semantics.
Creating useful content.
Working on conversion.
And at the same time, every manager needs an increase in sales and the number of applications from the site at the moment.
To get this growth, download our step-by-step template for increasing sales from the site:
Download template
Already downloaded
153442
New domain: here you do everything yourself, practically from scratch. At the same time, the new name will not be followed by possible sanctions and filters from search engines, and it will cost you less money.
Promoted domain: to help promote your web resource, you just need to think through the transition carefully and complete all the steps correctly and accurately:
The focus of your site should match the previous domain theme or at least be fairly close. That is, if you sell bicycles, and previously the chosen domain name was a pet store, then this is, to put it mildly, an unsuccessful option (even if we are talking about a domain with an impressive TIC).
You can choose and buy a domain name with a completely different theme and completely replace the content on it at your discretion (leaving the design the same). But you will then lose the trust index from search engines (they will simply reset it, perceiving the site as a new resource).
If you are moving a site from another domain address, do not forget to reconfigure the redirects with the new URL addresses.
It's good if the chosen domain previously had a site similar in structure to yours. Then, for example, you can completely preserve the CHPU of some previous pages.
It is necessary to adjust the link anchors in accordance with the subject of your resource.
Some keys can also be left (for the purpose of successful promotion), but practice shows that positions still worsen.
It is best to use a domain that has not been idle for the last 1-3 months, because in this case it loses a lot of weight in search engine rankings or even disappears from search results altogether.
Check the web archive to see what was recently on the selected domain, and whether there was a dead site hanging there.
Of course, you won’t be able to track the entire history in detail, but the current state of affairs is visible through Yandex.Webmaster and Google Search Console.
Carefully study the section "Diagnostics" → "Security and violations" for violations and threats.
You can check whether the domain name you have chosen is available using Whois services such as www.reg.ru/whois/ or www.whois-service.ru/.
And of course, check your link profile.
It would be useful to know that many providers practice the following scheme of actions: they give (offer such a bonus) a domain name to everyone who purchases a hosting service, which they register in their name. That is, the user will not be able to keep the domain if he suddenly decides to switch to another hosting. It is clear that this is done in order to retain customers, because no one wants to part with a site in the promotion of which a lot of money and effort has already been invested. Therefore, if you are promised a domain name as a gift, be sure to inquire who it will be registered to.