Here's my stupid plan, I got 112 domains that are pretty well aged and not spammy. As far as I can tell, they have not been penalized for anything. At this point, I already got them, so there's no looking back now.
Most of these were once websites and around 10 years old. The theory is, I can use the Wayback Machine to rebuild the website, especially the pages that had links. I will check that by using the backlink checkers to see which pages had to going to them and focus on redoing those pages first. There are a few of these domains that have links coming from Wikipedia. Then I will fill out the site with additional content. The plan was to try to get about 50 pages indexed for each domain, but that no seems real hard.
I am still working on getting all the hosting set up. I am taking more of an assembly line approach and doing one task for all the domains and then going to the next task. I have been hoping I would get more efficient at doing each thing as I do it to speed it up, but I have gotten bored and started the next task with some sites.
Problems that I run into are:
- The site was WordPress, but the theme is no longer supported with the current version. It's not as easy and just bringing the old side back to life. I don't want outdated WordPress installations.
- A basic WordPress install with the default Hello, World post seems to be a hack target. A lot of the domains are getting traffic from Bing. It looks like they could have been doing well in Bing originally, but I can't rule out that the Bing traffic is designed to hide the hack attempts.
- Some of the sites were thin on content originally. The plan of getting to 50 pages doesn't seem doable in all cases, especially with some domains being Something.whatever and then SomethingS.whatever. I don't know how to make the plural domain much different. I will likely make some one-page sites that basically link out to the singular version, but that limits what I can actually do with it in a PBN. Really, I probably shouldn't have gotten those.
- Some domains are of places or things, like a hospital. However, the hospital was sold, maybe shut down and reopened, I don't really know the history, but I do know that it's not a hospital and what I can find about the address, is a different one now. I don't really want to bring back the old site pretending to be an operational hospital when it definitely isn't. I will likely pivot on these types of domains and just make it more informational about health. It would make it easier to get to 50 pages, but I doubt the history of the domain will be of much value.
- I can see blank placeholders in the Wayback Machine, which from the source, was Adsense JavaScript. I don't plan on trying to put that back on any of the sites especially since they would probably be denied now for thin content.
Overall, this could be a big waste of time and money, but there's only one way to find out.