: Bringing a site back online (with about 3000 internal pages) after two years? I've had a site that I've had turned off for the last year or two, and I restored it from database and switched

@Heady270

I had a site for a community organization that was down for about six months due to hosting issues. When I brought it back up, it was almost like starting with a fresh website from an SEO perspective. It didn't rank as well as it had for the organization's name. Google wasn't sending much long tail traffic to it.

Once the site had been up for a few months, Google seemed to start trusting it again. It regained its old rankings.

The only things that I can think of for you to do to speed the process are:


Demonstrate that the site is now reliable by keeping it up
Show that the site is growing by getting new content flowing in again
Show that the site is popular again by asking for some inbound links (especially places that used to link to the site but which might have taken the links down while the site was down)

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@Steve110

I don't think you'll get "black-listed" (if you don't suffer from duplicate content). Your rankings will depend on whether your site develops like a legitimate site in the next 3-6-12 month regarding traffic and backlinks.

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@Samaraweera270

If the links are to internal pages, then you should be good since it would just be considered a large site with a lot of content.

The question is if the inbound links you previously had still exist, and are considered authoritative & relevant to the content they link to. You could check the number of backlinks to get some idea of this.

I would suggest working with Google Webmaster Tools and submitting an updated sitemap to ensure all the links are crawled and indexed again.

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