TulipTools Internet Business Owners and Online Sellers Community

How much do you lose when a site goes offline?

Question for those with knowledge in this area.  I put a site up in 1996/97  and lost interest in it around three years ago, but I kept all the content there. The site is offline now. I have no clue how long its been offline (months....). I actually just recently thought it might be time to try and sell it, and realized it was gone. I do have a full back-up and have considered hosting the content elsewhere, but wonder if its really worth it at this point.

Have I already lost all the value of the site because of this, or is there hope that 10 years worth of indexing, links and so on are not lost and can be regained in some amount by putting it back up?  Unfortunately Google shows only 787 links to the domain (which is a fraction of what it was), with 4,000 results (which is a fraction of what it was) when I search for the site name -- obviously with no results from my own domain, just references to it.

Can anyone tell me if I do get it back online (just as is) if I will actually gain any amount of the rankings I once had to try and get value out of the domain when selling it?

Thanks,

Vangie

If the indexed pages, site traffic, and inbound links disappear you lose most of the value unless it's a highly sought after generic domain (like pizza.com, fish.com, etc) but you can regain  some of the value by redeveloping the domain.

I'd definitely put the old site back up and let the pages get reindexed before trying to sell the domain.  The amount of value you regain will depend on the site's traffic and links when you put it up for sale .  The age of the domain will help you, and you'll also be helped if the missing pages were indexed by web.archive.org.  You'll receive higher offers if you sell the entire website not just the domain name.

I checked and Web.archive.org did index it last in August 2007. Thanks for the info, I really appreciate it. Guess it looks like I really should find a host and get it back online.