Back in the late 90s I founded SearchGoat.com Inc. I started the site it was a directory that specialized in having a zero tolerance on adult content. The quality control got to be too much so we axed that part.. Back in the hay-day .com boom I was pulling in good money from the old cash cow (or goat as it were) but you all know what happened when the bubble burst. Advertising dried up, there was no AdSense, content targeting had to be done on your end which made coding all the more fun. Those of you who have been in the business this long will remember. By 2002 the site was costing me more to operate in hosting than it was making so I took it down, leaving only a static page saying the site was shut down. In fact advertising was so bad, I shut down my entire network of sites. Well I kept the domain. A few months ago I noticed that the site, tho having been down and out for some 5 years with nothing but that one html file was still getting some traffic and somehow had a PR2. I thought this odd so I made up a static page and put a google searchbox on it. I couldn't find the old logos so I did a hatchet job in photoshop quick and dirty. Back in the day we had indexed over 300 million pages. So here's my question, seeing as how it is an old directory would it still have some value to outgoing links? Am I sitting on top of an abandoned gold mine or just some old relic that's worth about as much as a used napkin? Your advise please
The age of a domain itself doesn't mean anything really unless your site has been in top rankings with good keywords for a while. To make the domain valuable in the eyes of Google, you will have to build quality backlinks, which also help increase your site PR.
It is worth something but, remeber just a url alone can make no difference. You need nice design, PR, PS, backlinks, alexa, and a big budget to make it worth more. It is quiet possible to achive the above even for a new domain in few months.
total rubbish. you dont know what your talking about. website and domain age mean a lot in SEO a good url does mean a lot. i have ranked #1 for a keyphrase with no marketing, backlinks or anything els except for a domain name which contained the keywords. My opinion is get a directory up and running and optimise for some specific sets of keyword phrases. choose your market and cater for them alone. then get some paid inclusions possibly featured listings or paid inclusion only and get your directory up at the top again. .
It's probably not worth a lot even though it is seven years old as it has nothing in Google, about 70 links max, so the lack of maintainance will have undone most of the good work the age of the directory had. If you'd maintained it even to some level then it could have had value, and as one or two people will tell you with a little effort and some money perhaps you can make it worth something even now.
In my opinion, I do believe the search engines favor older sites vs. newer ones. In addition, it's probably retained a lot of the backlinks you had previously. I would suggest that you rebuild the directory, and do some heavy promoting.
Sell it to me. I will revitalize it. It will be the greatest comeback since John Travolta signed up for Pulp Fiction. Seriously though, I think that domain has so much potential as a comeback kid from the old school days of internet. You could play on that theme and really do something. Forget the past, focus on the future. The busted bubble has stitched itself up, licked its wounds, and is and has been ready to kick some ass again.
my advice is to install on it a directory script and see how Google likes it... I think you have something there.