picked up a five letter .com at a drop auction in march for about ninety quid, for a side project i have still not built. felt like a bargain at the time.
first week it did six thousand requests a day. there was one holding page on it.
the previus life of that name was a website to watch movies for free, one of the ones that gets rebuilt on a new domain every few months. what that means in practice, in case anyone is sat looking at an auction list right now:
\- google still has thousands of the old urls in its index and keeps coming back to check them for months
\- scrapers and aggregators keep hammering the old paths, none of it human, and it all lands in your logs and your stats if you are not splitting bots out
\- the contact form on a holding page got about forty submissions a day, all junk, until i put turnstile in front of it
\- two emails from a rights outfit addressed to a name that has never been mine, which are fine to ignore, but not fun to open on a sunday
\- the name was on a couple of the public blocklists, which mattered because i wanted to send mail from it eventually
what helped. serving 410 gone on the old paths rather than 404, because 410 says deliberately removed and google stops asking sooner, thats the theory anyway and it did seem to speed things up. a cloudflare rule dropping anything that matched the old url pattern before it reached the origin. search console on day one, mostly so i could see whether there was a manual action sitting on it, and there was not, which was the thing i had been worried about all along.
six months on it is down to a few hundred stray requests a day and mail delivers fine. it does settle, it just takes a lot longer than you want it to.
the lesson, and i say this as somebody who should have known better, is check the wayback machine and google the name in quotes before you bid. two minutes of work. how long did it take yours to calm down?
Source: r/WebsiteStarters · by /u/hakala71