Preserving website value	1.0/5.0 (3 votes total) Rate: Select 1 - Terrible 2 - Poor 3 - Average 4 - Good 5 - Outstanding
Barry Goggin November 03, 2008

Buying a domain with a website can often be a great investment. There are many domains that are poorly developed but indexed by search engines and available for purchase. The advantages of a search engine indexed website are easily lost upon transfer of ownership. Here are some ways you can preserve those advantages.

The website purchase

The first thing to check is that you are actually purchasing the website and not just the domain. You also need to make sure that all files will be transferred to you and that the seller has the right to transfer ownership of the files. For example some sites are made with commercial scripts or software and you should check what rights you will have to those scripts or software including upgrades. Also make sure you have rights to any databases or mailing lists. These may be key to running the website.

You can look up ownership of the domain using a WHOIS service and ask for a letter with the company letterhead and owners signature to check against the WHOIS information. You can use an escrow service to protect yourself during this time.

After the website purchase

It is important to maintain the continuity of the website by continuing to host the website without changing anything. Have a hosting account ready prior to completion of purchase. This helps in a number of ways:

• Preserves inbound links including deep links to internal pages
• Preserves indexing in search engines and therefore age in the index
• Continues to attract visitors and repeat visitors

Slowly make changes

The key to making changes to your newly purchased website is to do so slowly and with good prior planning.

• Identify pages which have inbound links
• Identify the paths visitors take if you have an e-business site
• Identify the pages visitors rate highly, spend most time on or visit frequently

These are the pages that are giving you the key value and you should preserve these for now. The most important thing is to preserve the address (url) of the page though it is wise to preserve the key content at this stage.

Which changes to make?

Adding quality unique content is always a good move. This will attract more links and make it more interesting for visitors. It may also attract new visitors through long tail searches as these pages get begin to get indexed.

If you need to change urls for any pages with inbound links, use a permanent redirect from the old page to the new page. This will help your visitors find the information they were trying to get by clicking on the link and it makes it transparent to the visitors. It also allows any page rank PR (sometimes called link juice) to be transferred to the correct page. Make sure the new page has content relevant to visitors and related to the text of the inbound link.

Navigation menus should be changed carefully as they may cause some short term problems with indexing if changed drastically. Again select use of permanent redirects will help.

Site design can be changed but again conserving as much of the critical content and links as possible.

What if the new website drops down or out of the search engine index?

In most cases if you have been making conservative changes then this will be temporary.

Do check for

• Duplicate content
• Bad redirects
• Loss of inbound links

Whether to submit a new site map or not is controversial but I generally have automatic mapping and submission enabled on my websites and have not encountered any issues.

Summary

Purchasing an indexed website will help you avoid the indexing and trust issues associated with new websites. You will also benefit from the trust and visitors built up from it’s age in the search engine index and from accumulated inbound links.

Careful planning and conservative changes will help protect your investment. I have successfully purchased and maintained website value using the steps I have outlined above and am confident you can to if you follow these guidelines.

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