I just made the mistake of looking at a website that I sold a few years ago. It was PR7 when I sold it, and ranked well in more than one search engine for some valuable searches.
Now, the pages are so pimped up with widgets and the source code is so full of junk including keyword stuffing that it's no wonder the search engines have downranked it into invisibility.
And the human user's experience is seriously degraded, too.
The new owners got greedy and as a result they seriously wounded the goose that was laying golden eggs.
Sigh ... a very depressing site, er, I mean sight. I wish I hadn't looked.
My first proper site and got rid of 10 years ago. http://www.biology-online.org/2/5_mendelian_genetics.htm. I wrote that about 16 years ago, pleasing to see they've kept the URL structure, dictionary links etc. There can't be all that much content sitting on the same URLs after all these years.
They added a forum onto it and a bunch of other stuff... same template as they had 10 years ago though.
you made me look at one of my old ones... eeekk.. thin affiliate site.
the hours I spent building good pages.. all gone!
I think it is the focus on selling, and not on getting visitors that lets my old one down.
I checked one I sold about 6 or 7 years ago.
It's clearly changed hands and now selling disposable gloves! (it used to be about Bingo)
Couldn't agree more. Don't do it. Depressing.
not as depressing as seeing domain renewal confirmations for sites that were once great but died of neglect over the years without cashing out
> neglect
The only site I ever sold, the buyer asked if he could keep it parked on my server for a bit while he sorted out his own hosting. Fine, I removed all my own ads and contacts etc, and left it there. Two years of complete inactivity later, the domain expired. It still baffles me.