Possible to buy long dormant sites?

[Grant]

Is it possible to buy up old websites and their domains if they are long dormant? I was on a nostalgia deep dive the other day and was checking out old sites that are still up online, but haven't been updated in like 20-30 years. I think it would be cool to buy up a domain for one of the sites and try to take it over. Is that at all possible? I suppose I wouldn't be able to get access to the actual site, as it's probably on some server somewhere.

Is it possible to buy these old sites? What if the owner is unreachable?

 

[Jason76]

I don't know where to find those sites, but I would like to buy some abandoned domains with SEO potential, even ones that have been expired. I think they could be built back way easier than could be done with some fresh domain. Well, I'm speaking as with SEO.

 

[Uncrowned Guard]

There is no reason you could not do so. Start with a domain lookup and see if you can pull an owner or look for contact information on the site. Odds are someone is paying for the hosting/domain, so getting a successful hit isn't impossible. Now if they are willing to sell, that is a whole different thing, and they might be higher in cost than you might expect. An old forum/website with thousands or millions of well-entrenched topics on search engines can pull in a solid AdSense income without any new content being added.

If there is no contact information on the site, and the domain lookup is getting you no reply, you can try to find the host server and contact them, but giving up customer information is going to be a hurdle that I doubt you will get over. You can always try the good admin@domian.com, webmaster@domain.com, support@domain.com, etc. etc. and just shotgun out emails, perhaps they even have a catch all email setup to grab them.

 

[Grant]

There is no reason you could not do so. Start with a domain lookup and see if you can pull an owner or look for contact information on the site. Odds are someone is paying for the hosting/domain, so getting a successful hit isn't impossible. Now if they are willing to sell, that is a whole different thing, and they might be higher in cost than you might expect. An old forum/website with thousands or millions of well-entrenched topics on search engines can pull in a solid AdSense income without any new content being added.

If there is no contact information on the site, and the domain lookup is getting you no reply, you can try to find the host server and contact them, but giving up customer information is going to be a hurdle that I doubt you will get over. You can always try the good admin@domian.com, webmaster@domain.com, support@domain.com, etc. etc. and just shotgun out emails, perhaps they even have a catch all email setup to grab them.

Weird to think that some dormant sites are still being paid to stay up. I'm going to have to do some research on the sites I'm interested in, and will see if contacting them will be possible. Thanks for the suggestions.

 

[Nomad]

You cannot buy a website unless you can find the owner and negotiate with him. You cannot buy a domain if someone is renewing it on time. I once sold a website to a man, the domain continues to renew every year but the website is dorman, there has been no updates in 3 years, I wish I could buy back that site and work on it.