Journey: buying 10 dead sites for under $500 each and rebuilding them

Experiment running since February. Thesis: abandoned small sites with real link profiles are cheaper than building from scratch, and most of them died from neglect rather than penalties.

Bought so far: 10 sites, total spend $4,310
Rebuilt: 6
Recovered to pre-decline traffic: 3
Dead for good: 2 (both had link profiles I should have looked at harder)

Full spreadsheet of what each cost and where it is now, updating monthly. The interesting finding is that rebuild cost is wildly more predictable than recovery time.

The two dead ones are the interesting data. What did you miss on the link profiles?

Both had a single sitewide footer link making up 60%+ of referring domains. Looked like volume in the tool, was actually one relationship that ended.

That footer link pattern is everywhere in cheap flips. Always sort referring domains by links-per-domain first.

Are you rebuilding on the original hosting or migrating? Curious whether that moved recovery time at all.