Buying a domain usually feels like a fresh start. You check the spelling, the TLD, and the price. But we often forget one crucial factor: history.
I recently learned this lesson the hard way. I snapped up a domain originally registered in 2000. It seemed like a great catch—until the server logs started rolling in.
Day One: A Bot Invasion
Almost immediately after deployment, my traffic logs spiked. I wasn't getting real users; I was getting hammered by over 1,000 requests per day targeting URLs that didn't exist on my new site.
It turned out to be an army of bots aggressively scanning for pages that existed years ago. They were looking for the domain's past life, creating a massive "Direct Traffic" spike with near-zero engagement time.
Why This Hurts SEO
The problem wasn't just server load; it was how search engines interpreted the noise.
Because bots were constantly hitting these dead URLs, Yandex assumed those pages must still be relevant. Its crawler started furiously indexing these "ghost" pages, only to hit walls of 404 (Not Found) errors. My Webmaster Tools dashboard lit up with over 900 errors overnight.
The Solution: 404 vs. 410
Many developers rely on the standard 404 error for missing pages. In this case, that wasn't enough. A 404 tells a search engine, "I can't find this right now, maybe check back later."
To stop the bleeding, I had to switch to Status 410 (Gone).
A 410 response is definitive. It tells the crawler: "This page is dead. It is never coming back. Remove it from your index."
Implementing targeted 410 responses for these historic paths was the only way to silence the bots and clean up my SEO health. If you're buying an aged domain, don't just set up your new site—audit the old one and have your 410 strategy ready from day one.