In buying a dead website, we looked at how to find an abandoned website, make contact with the owner, and then buy their domain. Unless you like mind numbing tedium, you won't have relished that stage in the proceedings.

However, you are going to love this stage.

In this stage, we start creating content and shaping our masterpiece. But what content? Well, we can use some simple tools to prioritise and direct the content creation process.

Resurrecting A Dead Website

Let's look at the steps we will take in resurrecting our dead website.

Our site has no content on it, yet there are links to pages that used to exist. We must do one of the following to retain the value of those links:

1. Create an equivalent of the missing page with exactly the same URL. The links to that page will generate pesky 404s no longer.
2. Create an equivalent of the missing page with a different URL. Then redirect the original (missing) URL to the new one you just created. You may need to do this if the old page was using a technology you don't currently use on the site. For example, if the old URL was services.asp and you don't use ASP, you might create a services.html page and redirect the .asp version to the .html. Learn how to fix 404 HTTP errors.

But why concern ourselves with those inbound links at all? Because inbound links can be extremely valuable. The value of those links comes in two flavours. Firstly, visitors are carried directly to your site via those links. Secondly, any links to your pages have the potential to help those pages rank in the search engines. Referral traffic and organic search traffic all rely on inbound links, so don't lose them!

If the inbound links are to the root of our domain (i.e. links to www.ourdomain.com) we don't need to do anything, as those links will count for something as soon as we put a home page there. It's only links to internal pages that we need to worry about and create additional content for.

To find those web pages that we need to "restore", we'll need to start tracking our site.

Start Tracking Your Site

As soon as you take possession of your new domain, and its nameservers have changed over to point to your own hosting, you can start collecting data about your site. There are two things that I put in place immediately:

1. Google Webmaster Tools
2. Google Analytics

To do this we need at least one page for Google to index, and onto which we can place our Google Analytics code. I usually create a quick home page, put my Google Analytics code on it then and publish that. At this point, it's the data that Google Webmaster Tools collates for us that we are waiting eagerly for, and that may take a few days for Google to generate. In actual fact, the Analytics side of tracking is not so important here, but I like to include the code on the first page so that when I use it as a template for future pages, it's always there. Yes, we code HTML here!

Prioritising Content Creation

Google Webmaster Tools is a good tool to help us prioritise content creation. Remember, we have bought a domain that has no content on it. After verifying the site in GWT, Google usually takes a few days before it presents data about the site. There is a lot of useful information here, but the data that is like gold dust to us is a report that contains missing pages.

On the dashboard in Google Webmaster Tools, there is a Not Found link (in Crawl errors). Pages that used to exist but that are not found anymore are reported here. You might think that the Links to your site section might be a good place to start, but in my experience, Not Found has always provided more comprehensive results. Also, from a progression point of view, you can think of "not found" as "still outstanding", whereas "links to your site" includes all pages: those that are still missing + those you have created. As you reinstate pages on your site, the Not Found total should go down (providing that Google recrawls your site and updates the numbers and Google doesn't find anymore missing pages!).

In the Not Found section you will find a selection of pages that used to exist but that now generate 404s. Check out the Linked From column. This column displays very important information - the number of links each missing page has. We will make the assumption that "more links is better". That is, the more links a page has, the more "link benefit" it will receive. Using this assumption, we can then prioritise our content creation by focusing on those missing pages that have the highest number of inbound links.

On the site that I recently bought, there was one internal page that had 96 links to it. In reinstating a page with the same URL (my own content, though), I magically reinstated the value of those 96 links. Those 96 links were finally leading somewhere again and conferring some search engine benefit. Waste not, want not.

So what we need to do is sequence our Not Found data by descending Linked From order. Unfortunately, there is no easy way to do this, as when you export the table to Excel, the word "pages" is included in that column's data and so the data becomes character (I think...).

EDIT: Following tke's erudite instruction (see comments below), here are the steps you should follow to use Excel to present the list in the all important sequence. After you've got the data in Excel, delete the first row as it contains header information. Select the Linked From column and click Find & Select > Replace. Type "pages" and click Replace All. This replaces "pages" with... nothing. We can now sequence by this column corectly - yay! With that column selected, click Sort & Filter > Sort Largest To Smallest, and with Expand the selection selected, click Sort. Hey presto! A list of missing pages sorted by descending Linked From sequence is presented. We can now work down the list, reinstating pages that hold the greatest SEO/traffic value.

Thus, you can't sort by this column in Excel. We will have to eyeball the list and try to pick out the pages that have the most links. Obviously, this is easier if your list is short. For the record, I had 91 missing pages when I started, and as I fixed some Google found more. I estimate there to be around 100 or so.

Creating The Content

We can finally let loose our artistic flair! The Wayback Machine is our friend. Using the Wayback Machine, we can see what content originally existed on the now missing page. Important Note: we do not use the Wayback Machine to simply restore the content that used to exist! Instead, we use it to give us an idea about the subject matter covered so that we can create content about the same thing. For example, a page called resource01.html doesn't give anything away by its name. The Wayback Machine, however, shows us that PHP Tutorials used to live here. We can then shut ourselves in a little room and create our own PHP tutorials to publish on that page. No copyright infringement here, officer.

Now you just have to go ahead and create the missing content. In a perfect world, every page you restored would decrement the not found total in real time. Alas, you are waiting for the great Google machine to process your data and this is not instantaneous. The very first set of figures GWT gives you are just those that Google knows about at the time. In my experience, what usually happens is that GWT reports a list of not found pages, you go away and create those pages but the list increases! This is because as you are replacing missing pages, Google is finding more that weren't included in the first pass. So don't get disheartened, love.

Some Numbers For You

I've only had this domain for a short time now. What might be useful in a future post is to provide a timeline of progress to give you an idea of how quickly you can get things ticking over when you buy an expired/abandoned domain. Just to whet your appetite, here is a snapshot of my short history in Google Analytics (click to enlarge).

That's not a bad graph considering I only took ownership of the domain on the 22nd December 2009. And don't forget that the domain was dead and had been for a while. All that traffic is organic; no promotion has taken place.

Never mind those egotistical traffic stats, let's talk about mazoolah. I put some Adsense on this site and so far today it has made $4.71. If it continues to make that every day, then my ROI is 343% (over the year). A sound investment. And I didn't even buy this domain for its revenue earning potential!

And this is only the start.

Stay tuned for the bit where we gloat over our quick success. It's next!