I registered and setup Kanye-West.info the other day. I basically copy/pasted lyrics from websites, installed a few SEO plugins, and left it to sit. Apart from hearing the blah blah blah my content is duplicate (I know it is), do you think that there having been a previous website on my domain 2 years back might help me in SEO in any way? He's got a few inbounds, but I think since the websites been offline for 2 years it was removed from the Google SERPs. http://web.archive.org/web/20060717182217/http://www.kanye-west.info/index.php
According to Google's latest patent, they would ignore links from old versions of a website. Although they state this in their patent, this filter might not currently be in place. Regardless, the previous links probably aren't very good or he wouldn't have shut down the site. So you will likely have to start fresh.
Thanks for the info. I was going to look into stealing his old content -- but I realized all his crap was copy/pasted too so no use there. His site did look pretty clean and I wonder where he was getting his news from, maybe it was from some RSS news feed or something?