7 years old domain sandboxed for 8 months, wait or make a domain change?
-
Hello folks
The questions is, if a domain, 7 years old being sandboxed due to "notice of unnatural links to website" does it make sense to make a domain change (301 permanent redirect and make a "domain change" under google webmaster tools) to another, aged(!) domain name?
Website being sandboxed for over 8 months already and there is no chance to do anything with those "unnatural" links to website...Any suggestions?
-
Thanks! Interesting article.
-
Thanks, Sorry, it took me sometime to reply, I left on 16 and ust came back from abroad...
-
Unfortunately, there's no easy answer. I agree with Zsolt that this isn't a "sandbox" issue - it sounds like a classic (and severe) link-based penalty. The 301 can work, but it's not risk-free. Usually, you'll retain some of the link-juice and not carry the penalty, but the penalty does transfer in some situations. There's no good way to tell when and if it will.
I'm afraid you're right on reconsideration - you'd have to cut the vast majority of the bad links, and that's going to be very tricky. Your only other option, if the bad links are generally low-quality links (spammy article marketing, for example, as opposed to paid links), is to build strong, relevant links going forward and let the bad links fade out over time. That depends a lot on the severity and type of bad links, though.
If you've been waiting for things to change for 8 months and building decent links in that time, the 301 may be your best recourse. It's a bit of a last resort and it's not guaranteed to work, but it sounds like you may need to try it.
-
Also you can look at this as it is on this subject:
http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/getting-back-from-a-penalty-second-time-around
It took a very methodical approach to a reconsideration which i am sure Google appreciated, as cheesy as this might sound..... We all make mistakes, but it is if we learn from those mistakes that Google seems to care about..
-
Recently i remember Rand Talking in a white board Friday that the OSE Algo does not account for any spam metrics that Google does, it does gives a Trust ranking metric based on best practices and . The trust metric may be a good metric to look at.
I look up to page 180.... Any ideas if a link from page authority of "1" is "bad" link?
Not necessarily.... a 1 just means it has not been indexed by OSE i believe.
Also I am not sure that "Unnatural Links" automatically equates to a penalized domain link, it may just simply mean you got to many links from too many sources in too short of a time that could only be achieved by automation....
So looking for "penalized" domains could be a wild goose chase. I think you are in a pretty tough spot. The best course of action could be just wait longer and see if the penalty passes as links fall off that are "suspect"
-
Thanks...
it will be hard to find those bad links with this info:
| Page Authority | Domain Authority | Linking Root Domains | Total Links |
|
|
|
|
| 78/100 | 74/100 | 2,250 | 17,366 |
|
|
|
|I look up to page 180.... Any ideas if a link from page authority of "1" is "bad" link?
P.S. but it might be a good idea for guys at seomoz to implement some tool that will show those bad links... I think they can do this by looking for same sources of links for penalized domains....
-
Try to run opensiteexplorer here on seomoz.
This will expose your backlinks. Additionally, you may also want to try virante.com.
We just found out that we had some bad IP's on a shared server, so we decided to pay the difference for a brand spankin' new dedicated server.
Hope this helps and good luck Ferray!
-
I think Alan's theory is correct, but of course in theory
I would think as well that the bad links would not pass anything as he says they have already been discounted by G.
It appears you really do not have a choice.... And have little to loose with attempting the 301 as described, as you are already penalized.
At least if you do.... POSSIBLY the Good will follow, and the bad stay behind, but I am not sure if this is how it works though, but seems plausible. Also I believe penalties "drop off" after a while (1 - 2 years) as the "unnatural links" themselves will eventually drop off of G's index altogether.... Which will possibly drop the penalty.
Personally i would have a "Post 301 Strategy" in place to begin a link building campaign to this new URL that is high quality and informational in nature utilizing social signals heavily (BUT ETHICALLY ) and even stay away from White hat for a while as well until you establish a new "reputation" for yourself.
w00t!
-
yes, asked for reconsideration already, few times actually, that didnt work, and as I said if anyone knows how write a reconsideration email, which will make G people cry, I would pay for that
-
- All links dropped to position 200+
- Received notification from them: "notice of unnatural links to website"
- and yes, sent reconsideration to them, didn't work out.
If anyone can write a reconsideration email, which makes G people cry, I would pay for that
-
So do i understand you have already asked for reconsideration?
I have reason to believe that if you 301 your links, bad news wont follow you, but that is just my opinon I have no way of proving it, just a exprience I had, I could be completely wrong.
My thinking is that your bad links have been discouned already, your domain has ben punished, your 301 will not get credit for bad links only the good ones.
Changing is always a headache, but if you dont you will always wonder if you ae doing as well as you should.
-
How do you know it is penalized?
Did they notify you?
Have you asked for reconsideration?
-
doesn't penalized domain loses its PR? as our domain still has PR4...
-
Tried to explain to G... didn't work out... stuck here with penalized domain trying to figure out if to try and continue the hard work of creating press releases and articles to this penalized domains in hope that it will be break out from the penalty or just start from scratch and do all this work on new domain...
if moving to new domain, cant do that without 301... another question if there is anything good or bad in doing this, like getting all previous PR to new domain or getting this domain penalized right away, or maybe just neutral as we will have to make all SEO from the scratch...
still need to decide what to do..
-
You need to ask for a reconsideration if you cannot get those links removed.
You need to explain what happened (Did you hire an SEO firm who got these "unnatural" links.) Explain exactly what happened and if you were inexperienced when you did this, there are lots of SEO firms out there that claim they use "100% White Hat Tactics" Which in most cases is complete BS as a white hat tactic is not thousands of links in a day..... No matter how you want to spin it. (Before anyone screams at me yes there are perfectly rational explanations for a thousand links in a day sometimes.... Sometimes....)
There is a CHANCE (small chance) Google will take this info into consideration and give you a "reprise" or second chance...
I am not sure I would 301 a penalized domain to a new domain, but of course understand this may be un-avoidable.
Sorry for your troubles
w00t!
-
Great question, honestly, i haven't got a good answer
-
Thanks Zsolt
I see. The problem is that this website was pretty high in SEO results before the penalty happened, and this domain has too many links – tens of thousand, it is just impossible to discover which links are "bad" and even more harder to remove them... The domain authority is 72 which is pretty high as I see it, PR 4...
so if this is not a sandbox, there is no reason to wait for website to get out of it by himself, so, does it worth to move website to a new domain, as I understand 301 should pass PR, not sure about authority rank...
-
The case you mention is not sandboxing but penalty due to bad links. Sandbox only occurs with totally new domains in the first few months. Maybe you or the previous owner of the domain have purchased bulk links and google discovered it. You should remove those links and ask for reconsideration in google webmasters.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
When domain a buys domain b (whose links direct to c), does domain a has links redirecting to domain c ?
Hi, I really need to know what happens when a company or domain (a) acquires another company with domain (b) with its links pointing to yet another location (c). Does company a then have redirects to c?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Yeshourun0 -
A client rebranded a few years ago and doesn't want to be associated with it's old brand name. He wishes not to appear when the old brand is searched in Google, is there something we can do?
The problem is there was redirection between the old branded site and the new one, and now when you type in the name of the old brand, the new one comes up. I have desperately tried to convince this client there is nothing we can do about it, dozens of news articles crop up with the two brands together as this was a hot topic a few years ago, but just in case I missed something I thought I'd ask the community of experts here on Moz. An example for this would be Tyco Healthcare that became covidien in 2007. When you type tyco healthcare, covidien crops up here and there. Any ideas? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Netsociety0 -
Changing categorisation effect on SEO
Hi I work on an ecommerce shop & we've discussed changing some of out categories. We have one named cupboards & lockers, but want to split this out, so we have Cupboards then Lockers so customers can browse through our main navigation like this. For SEO I know initially our rankings will be affected, but long term moving categories up a level will be an improvement & will be more relevant - has anyone does this before and could provide any advice? Becky
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Launching a new website. Old inherited site cannot be saved after lifted penalty. When should we kill the old site and how?
Background Information A website that we inherited was severely penalized and after the penalty was revoked the site still never resurfaced in rankings or traffic. Although a dramatic action, we have decided to launch a completely new version of the website. Everything will be new including the imagery, branding, content, domain name, hosting company, registrar account, google analytics account, etc. Our question is when do we pull the plug on the old site and how do we go about doing it? We had heard advice that we should make sure we run both sites at the same time for 3 months, then deindex the old site using a noindex meta robots tag.We are cautious because we don't want the old website to be associated in any way, shape or form with the new website. We will purposely not be 301 redirecting any URLs from the old website to the new. What would you do if you were in this situation?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | peteboyd0 -
Changing domain for a magento store
Hi all, wondering if i could gather some views on the best approach for this please... We currently have a magento site up with about 150,000 pages (although only 9k indexed in Google as product pages are set to no index by default until the default manufacturer description has been rewritten). The indexed pages are mainly category pages, filtering options and a few search results. While none of the internal pages have massive DA - seem to average about 18-24 which isn't too bad for internal pages, I guess - I would like to transfer as much of this over to the new domain. My question is, is it really feasible to have an htaccess with about 10,000 301 redirects on the current domain? The server is pretty powerful so could probably serve the file without issue but would Google be happy with that? Would it be better to use the change url option in WMT instead. Ive never used that so not sure how that would work in this cause. Would it redirect users too? As a footnote, the site is changing because of branding reasons and not because of a penalty of the site. Thanks, Carl
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | daedriccarl0 -
Domain Factors
Now that Page Rank seems to have been 'put out to graze' by Google with no further PR update planned, what would you say is the 'main factor' when looking at a domain? Is it Moz DA? or Moz Links? or Majestic TrustFlow? Or none of the above or is it a combination of the above?! Many thanks Andy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TomKing0 -
Should I Roll Back Domain Change?
A couple years ago I changed domain names and switched platforms for my site. The traffic dropped dramatically (80-90%). I've tried to get inbound links changed, clean up on-page stuff, but nothing is making a big change. I think most of the problem is loss of link juice with the 301 redirects from the old domain to the new one. Would I be risking bigger losses by switching back to the old domain name?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iJeep0 -
Domain with a Virus History
Hi, I have a domain that I am working on that has a past we did not know about. Doing a bit of research it appears that back in 2010 the domain had a link to a virus or had a virus on the domain – because of this certain anti virus sites are blocking the domain. Interestingly Google, Norton, Firefox say the domain is fine.... IE, Kaspersky and a few still block it. I am going through and manually searching and trying to get them to agree the site is safe BUT I am having a problem with mywot.com. They refuse to take down the “reviews” staying its a virus site. Anything I can do? Any suggestions? Any legal action we can take? Is there anything else I can do or should be doing to check else where? Thanks in advance Fresh Fire One
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnW-UK0