
Ask HN: Reusing a Domain - astatine
We picked a domain for a new service some months ago, after some simple sanity checks. It was used earlier but had been inactive for some months and did not appear in any blacklists. We built the service, took the domain live and now we find that this domain gets 25K-50K requests per day for links which (presumably) once existed on this domain. A very large majority of those come from Googlebot. I presume Google thinks that too many pages fail on this domain with a 404 and hence lowers it in the search rankings (lots of red flags in the search console). We are contemplating handling some of those with a 301 redirect to a valid (but unrelated) page, return a 410 to hopefully tell Google that the page is no longer there or serve a dummy page to avoid the 404s. Clearly all of these will not help a human user who found one of these links via search and who is best served with a 404 page having an explanation. Has anyone else had a similar situation and&#x2F;or have suggestions to handle this? Also, is there a way to check such things in advance before a domain is bought (for future reference)? Thanks!
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dazc
Your dummy page idea with an explanation may be the best and most authentic
way of dealing with this situation rather than just returning a 404? It may
also have some minor positive affect on your rankings too.

I'm sure google say having lots of 404's doesn't harm your rankings but it is
a waste of googlebot resources that can be better served crawling your site
rather than a bunch of dead ends.

There are plenty of resources showing you backlinks to a given domain name.
Some are paid and some free.

A couple of decent free ones:
[https://neilpatel.com/backlinks/](https://neilpatel.com/backlinks/)
[https://domainstats.com/](https://domainstats.com/)

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astatine
Thanks for that! Will check out those - will help in getting new domains!

