I Bought a Domain That Used to Sell Viagra. Here's My SEO Recovery Log.

Source: Dev.to

Background

I have loved math since I was a kid—not the performative kind of love, but a genuine fascination. Years later, I wanted to build a thing I wished existed when I was younger. That project became equation‑solver.org.

The Unexpected History

I bought the domain in a drop auction. It was ten years old, brandable, and had a clean‑looking name. A few weeks after launch, Google Search Console lit up with impressions—in Russian, Ukrainian, Spanish, and other languages. The impressions weren’t about math; they were about pharmacies, Cialis without prescription, and generic drugs.

Opening the Wayback Machine showed year‑after‑year snapshots of the site selling those products. I am not going to pretend I fixed it in a week.

SEO Recovery Process

1. Full audit – I audited everything. Ahrefs showed thousands of toxic referring domains.
2. Disavow – I filed a disavow.txt with thousands of domains.
3. Rebuild from zero – No rescue of old URLs, no 301 gymnastics. I started fresh with a clean site architecture.
4. International targeting – Implemented hreflang for nine languages from day one, all with structured data.
5. Patience – I waited. This is the part every SEO blog skips: recovery is not instantaneous.

The pharma‑related impressions are essentially zero now. The site now ranks for math‑related queries.

Key Takeaway

Domain history is not a line item; it’s a fundamental factor that must be addressed head‑on.

Current State of the Site

With the SEO drama mostly behind me, I can finally talk about the thing that matters: the free, step‑by‑step equation solver that covers most of what a student sees in school.

Features

• Linear equations – solved line by line; e.g., 0.2x + 0.5(100 - x) = 0.3 * 100.
• Systems of equations – both substitution and elimination methods.
• Quadratic equations – full derivation with discriminant analysis.
• Word problems – plain‑language handling of age problems, mixture problems, etc.
• Derivative calculator – shows the rule applied at each step.
• Interactive solving – paste an equation into the URL as a query string.
• Multilingual support – nine languages; the Turkish version is not a separate site but the same content localized.
• No sign‑up, no ads, no freemium wall – the entire solver runs client‑side.

If any of that sounds useful to you or to a student you know, equation‑solver.org is the link.

Future Considerations

I am undecided on whether to migrate to a cleaner domain or keep the current one. If you, too, loved math before it got turned into a standardized‑test‑driven platform, or if you have recovered a domain from a worse history than this, I want to hear your playbook. Drop it in the comments.