Abandoned site content question

pdxdvr

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A former client went out of business. Less than a year ago, they renewed their domain and hosting for 10 years. Their site has 3,000+ posts and traffic I wouldn't mind having.

I've tried getting them to hand it over or sell it to me, but they're just done and would rather the site just disappear than deal with transferring it.

I'm brainstorming things I could do with the content since they don't (seem to) care about it, plus I have a complete backup of the site.

Before they went under, I was doing an audit on the site and there are a ton of on-page SEO issues that could be fixed.

Since it'd be duplicate content (aside from minor edits made as a result of working through the audit I did) and I have no way of setting up 301s on the old site, is replicating the site on a different domain worth the time and effort?

Should I just let it die?

Or is there some other idea of what I could do with this archive of posts?
 
I'm thinking about the legality of it. Will they be upset if they find their content live? Will they even hunt for it, especially if it's on a different domain.

You could recreate it and give yourself a sitewide as the easiest and quickest route, and slap some ads in there and forget about it. It'd be an eventual trickle of cash and some link juice to a site of your choosing.

I wouldn't go through the process of an entire audit and fixing of items if you can't be sure.

Last year I did this with a very huge domain. It's probably PR 7 if it could be measured. The domain went to auction, I bought it and recovered the content that was relevant to my site and 301'd everything. The difference was I had the domain, they let the trademark expire around a decade ago, and the content hadn't been live for about that long. So in this case I wasn't concerned.

But yours will still be fresh in their hearts and minds. They might get sour about their failure and take it out on you. So I'd might go for it with some CPM ads. I wouldn't put a lot of time into unless it showed potential after years of sitting with nobody crying. By then you might even be able to get them to sell the domain.
 
Interesting topic this one.

I had a pretty niche site which I ran from 2000 until 2007, I lost the site due to a mix-up with the dev company. However now I am in the middle of restoring it from way back machine.

It comprises of over 5000 pages of content and the domain has quite a few nice links pointing to it.

My plan is to re-invigorate it gently and then either flip it or just monetise it. What I do with it will depend on traffic etc, will be interesting to see what you do!
 
Ryuzaki said:
I'm thinking about the legality of it. Will they be upset if they find their content live? Will they even hunt for it, especially if it's on a different domain.
Click to expand...

That's my biggest hesitation. They say they don't care about any of it, but won't make any of that official. I'd hate to put in any real time only to have them tell me to take it down. If I was able to make 100% sure that any brand mentions or links to other portions of the site are removed, I think it would be highly unlikely they'd find it.

Ryuzaki said:
I wouldn't go through the process of an entire audit and fixing of items if you can't be sure.
Click to expand...

My main thought with the audit is otherwise it's 100% duplicate content from another live, older domain. 99.8% after I remove brand mentions. If I do the audit and touch some stuff up here and there, it'd still be 98% duplicate content, but at least it's formatted the way spiders want. I really have no idea if that would make a difference really, but without the domain, backlinks, and original content, I wouldn't expect too much traffic to find the duplicate site anyway.


Stephen, did you end up with the domain? Or are you recreating on a new domain like I'd be doing?
 
I would not take over that way honestly. Maybe you want to offer them some money? maybe that is the step they are waiting for you to make?
 
If they aren't willing to hand it over or sell it to you due to hassle then I wouldn't use it. What if they have a change of heart in the future and want to use it again? It is THEIR content and not yours. Unless you can get written confirmation they are fine with you using it I wouldn't.

Instead you could rewrite the content or form your own content plan with whatever is so special about this lot of content. That way you can feel comfortable about not overstepping the mark or doing something that could upset others in future.
 
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