I would be happy if i can get any help from experienced SEO and webmasters here on what I should do next. the present scenario is like this: Our client bought a domain name for his business from a previous ISP company. the previous company had done their deal of SEO and link building but they are mainly from ISP and internet related websites. My client is into an entirely different industry and hence the backlinks mean very much little to the website. On checking the log files for the past two month we found a lot of traffic from these ISP sites which are totally useless to the website. How do i stop these traffic as they are eating the bandwidth? contacting them individually is out of question as there are more than 200 hundreds of unrelated backlinks . the site is literally getting more than 300 uniqes per day but 95% of them are going to those non-existent pages of previous websites which in turn is redirected to the error page. Another issue is with google and Yahoo cache of the previous website. when I do a site:domain. com search in google i get back 1600 results out of which only 40 are our original websites. the remaining 1560 are that of the old site which is again irrelevant to us. I tried to remove the cache from google by going through their remove url system and during that period i pulled down the 404 page so that the url request will return a 404 error for google to pull down the cache. but google replied saying that such cache does not exist. any suggestions on what to do? thanx for any help in advance...
Unfortunately those are some of the pitfalls of using a previously owned domain. I wouldnt worry too much about the cached pages in google and yahoo since those will correct themselves in time. While the links to your site produce blind visitors and eat up your bandwidth, 300 uniques a day can generate some decent revenue. Since it would take you forever contacting all the sites that link to you and asking them to remove the link, i would try to make the best of teh situation and think of a way to monetize that traffic. If those links point to pages that are no longer available, perhaps use an error page that has advertisements that is relevant for those visitors. If you brainstorm you may be able to come up with a way to make money off those 300 uniques a day.
I'd rather have 300 untargetted visitors than none at all... And come on 300 people per day aren't going to use that much bandwidth unless they are downloading tons of large files. At most they are using like 150mb per day which is nothing really, especially if they are getting 404s and then leaving when they realise it's the wrong site. Slap some banner Ads on your 404 page and earn then an extra few $ per day?
i feel your idea of putting up a related page for the visitors is cool...i will think it over today... ok..the bandwidth issue is not a big thing...we are facing a problem of convincing our client towards the incoming traffic vs conversions. for ex. the following is the traffic stats for april 06. as you can see the avg. is 400 visitors but not much of them are meaningful visitors. so our client sees that his website is averaging 400 visitors but there are no conversions.... Day visits Pages Hits Bandwidth 01 Apr 2006 488 1306 6315 33.53 MB 02 Apr 2006 418 936 4544 29.04 MB 03 Apr 2006 495 1142 5962 44.61 MB 04 Apr 2006 428 1074 5519 36.17 MB 05 Apr 2006 480 1190 6030 38.50 MB today i checked with the log files from the server and found that most of the visitors are going to files that are not in the server at all - i.e. files which were hosted by previous owners - which in turn now return a customized 404 page.