Checklist after buying a pre-owned domain name

Question

I have purchased I preowned domain name. The old website is still indexed in google with the old content of the previous owner. I'm planning to publish a new website using the domain but in the next months.

What should I do to restore the state of the domain and start from a clean state? Is there a checklist on what should I do after buying a preowned domain with the intention to provide a different content. Is there a way to tell Google to forget the website and clear all history and treat the domain name as a new one ? What is the best practice to keep the domain without content (while building the website) without harming the SEO (since google already knows the domain so it will try to index the empty website). Here is what I have done already:

• Changed the name-servers ns1 and ns2 to my hosting and put a empty index.html file
• Added the domain to Google search console

Answer 1

What is the best practice to keep the domain without content (while building the website) without harming the SEO

That is a contradiction. Sooner or later Google and other search engines will revisit your website and reindex the changes if they haven't already. They will notice a change but it could be temporary. However if the situation persists they will logically come to the conclusion that there has been a change of ownership or direction and the benefits of previous SEO will be wiped out at some point.

You should put up some content to keep Google busy, even in a progressive fashion. They like sites that breathe and grow, not parking pages (= graveyards).

I would not recommend scraping the old contents from archive.org because while the domain may have expired the previous owner still retains copyright over what they produced during the lifetime of the domain name.

If you really have nothing to show for the moment you could set up a temporary redirect to another site that you own, so that the traffic is not lost. But it would be preferable to have a redirect to a relevant site (that is, more or less in the same niche).

There is no SEO without content.

Answer 2

If you have no contents in your site, Google will not index your site on your target keywords. According my experience, once before I had made only home page with empty 100 sub pages. Then, I submitted my site in google search console. And after about 2 weeks, I had finished page content writing in my sub pages. This is not harmful of my site indexing, my site gets 1st position of SERPs in my targeted keywords. Don't over worry, you can make page content after submitting to google search console.