Bought an Old Domain, How to Handle 404's/Old Links

[animalstyle]

I'm building my new authority site on a domain which I bought via auction. The domain was used once before, as far as I can tell by a single owner. Looking at the wayback machine, I see a few site iterations as early back as 2004. It seems to have been abandoned around 2014 and offline/for sale since then.

As I've put my site online, I've noticed some legacy data popping its head up:

• Bing Webmaster Tools had an old sitemap already registered once I verified my account - I removed it.
• Google Search Console is showing a handful of 404 crawl errors for urls from the previous site. I just cleared them out.
• Showing some old links to the homepage and also some old urls. Some are leading to 404 pages.

This project is full, clean whitehat. I don't have any interest in recreating any of the old content or anything. Knowing that, would it be safe to just ignore any legacy links etc, or should I be actively disavowing or trying to combat them in some way?

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For what it's worth, I think the indexing progress is moving nicely. Maybe the existing links, previous domain usage, and going full HTTPS have some nice synergies.

 

[Jitsiereveld]

This project is full, clean whitehat. I don't have any interest in recreating any of the old content or anything. Knowing that, would it be safe to just ignore any legacy links etc, or should I be actively disavowing or trying to combat them in some way?

If you really don't want to recreate any old content or anything then you should be fine doing what you are doing. But I might reconsider not trying to save any worthy backlinks to certain pages that you could possibly repurpose to page for whatever you have there. Just to help with the SEO if it's worth it.

It seems to have been abandoned around 2014 and offline/for sale since then.

The main reason I mention to reconsider saving the backlinks that have quality link juice flowing to your site is to retain as much SEO as possible.

This link may be more helpful and there's several others if you search the forums.
https://www.buildersociety.com/threads/buying-expired-domains-in-niche-and-301.2592/

Hope that helps, good luck with the new domain.

 

[Ryuzaki]

If the old URLs are at least related to your current vertical, I'd 301 them to the closest pages you already have to preserve the links. If it's one or two, eh. If it's 50 decent links, yes I would go well out of my way to preserve them.

Otherwise you don't need to do anything. Just let them hit 404's.

 

[Golan]

Otherwise you don't need to do anything. Just let them hit 404's.

I would not miss ANY of authority that is just falling into your hands. I would create like a category in my blog or a few new pages or whatever, depending on your site structure, but they should not be very visible from the homepage although they totally must not be orphaned. And i'd write content for those pages at the mix of the old and your new site topics.

Example: the old site was about excavator rental, your site is about e-sigs.
You take one existing backlink, and it's anchor is let's say "hydraulic cylinders repair".
You create a new page about, let's say, e-sig components. Some technical stuff. Use your imagination for something like "atomizer is designed just like hydraulic cylinder bla blla bla". This way the backlink wouldn't be totally irrelevant, nor the page is irrelevant for your site.
Inbound link: 301 that existing backlink. Outbound link: any important page of your site.