So you just bought a new PR2 domain name from someone and it’s sitting in your account. No site, no content, nothing but the name. Now what. There are some quality links to the domain right now, and some pages exist in the search engine databases. But it’s only a matter of time before you get found out. Like the sentries in Minority Report, the spiders are always scrabbling about, looking for good content. Or in your case, dead content.

If you want to keep the page rank you just paid for as well as the physical links, you need to act quickly. Google may be slow to index, but they’re quick to drop if they find bad info. Within the first week of ownership, if possible, get started building the basics of the site, focusing on the pages with an existing page rank. Even if the content that you’re putting up is different from what the engines expect, it’s better than a dead link.

Now for the patchwork. Find out what sites currently link to these pages by performing a “link search” on Google. Identify the referring pages, and try to match the content that the page is expecting. You might even contact the owner’s of the site to strike up a relationship with them. More happy links make for a happy spider.

Next, try to preserve the existing page links in the major search engines. This can be tricky, especially if you are using a different scripting language than the previous owner. Try to find a cache of the pages on Google, Yahoo, or http://www.archives.org/ and grab as much of the original content as possible. If it even remotely relates to your new site, throw it up there and do what you can to make the links point to your new page.

Matching the links is the toughest part of the job. Copy and paste the links from Google or Yahoo into Excel, and be prepared to do a lot of string manipulation. Ideally you can take all of the existing search results, such as http://www.crankyrants.com/?p=194 and tie them with the critical information from the original page, such as title, tags, or content itself. If you’re site is database driven, you can then format the spreadsheet accordingly and push all of the information into a table. Now when any of the search engines come looking for an article or page, you at least have some of the familiar information waiting for them. Given enough time, you can then go in to backfill any content if you would like, further strengthening the pages.

The final step has already been mentioned, but it’s worth bringing up again. Outside links to the site. Very important. It’s hard enough to acquire backlinks these days, so if at one time a site had a quality link to your new domain, try your best to re-establish the relationship. If the link to your site is still present, just make a note of the location. If the link is now gone, email the webmaster and offer services or minor links to keep the link going. These are all key elements that went into the building of the page rank for your new domain, and everything you can do to maintain it will only help in the long run.