Another Penalty Question - Should I Start from Scratch?
-
I've seen many questions on google penalties recently. Not really sure where to go from here. I realised a year or so we would be living on borrowed time with our link building methods. We have been really successful in the past and are keen to build a site that has a bit more longevity.
We have not received a warning from google but have lost pretty much all of our ranking for everything.
My question is with our backlink profile as it is. Building links from various blog networks for the past 3 years. Is it just worth rebranding and starting from scratch rather than trying to get over a million links removed?
We have a lot of content that I guess could be classed as spam. Should I really remove all of the content? or leave it running as we are still getting some traffic from other marketing activities.
Or should I just get a new domain and transfer all the decent content?
-
Hi David,
When did the drop in rankings take place? After the blog network deindexation? After the latest Panda release? After Penguin?
From the way you've phrased your question, it sounds like you know the answer already. You have a lot of spammy content, lots of problematic links, and want to do things, as you phrased it, for a bit more longevity.
It sounds to me it'll be more cost efficient to start from scratch, do it properly this time, building with long term goals and strategy regarding site design, content creation, and link building, than to clean up everything and work from there.
Hope this helps,
Mark
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
-
Just saw a competitor jump in rank by double digits, questioning my url structure choice now.
Currently I have for our big keyword oursite.com/big-keyword/ and clicking on a material type will be oursite.com/big-keyword/material-type/ Our competition has **theirsite.com/big-keyword/ **and when you click on their material type **theirsite.com/material-type-big-keyword/ ** The also have 20 some pages, while we have around 652 as a eCommerce site as well, not sure why they jumped so high in rankings, while their backlink structure is so small still and they have a DA half of ours. I'm in the middle of a site redesign and very close to restructuring the urls the way they have it, since it really seems to have worked well. How do you feel about that?
Technical SEO | | Deacyde0 -
Question about creating friendly URLs
I am working on creating new SEO friendly URLs for my company website. The products are the items with the highest search volume and each is very geo-specific
Technical SEO | | theLotter
There is not a high search volume for the geo-location associated with the product, but the searches we do get convert well. Do you think it is preferable to leave the location out of the URL or include it?0 -
Schema Address Question
I have a local business with a contact page that I want to add schema markup to. However, I was wondering if having the address with schema info on the contact page instead of the home page has any adverse effects on the rich snippet showing up in search. There's no logical place to add schema for a local business on the home page, so having it on the contact page—not in the footer or sidebar—is the only option.
Technical SEO | | DLaw0 -
Htaccess redirect with question mark
Hi I have a problem setting up my htaccess for a specific page that has a question mark in the link, and one that has a space in the link and also a question mark. So I would like 2 redirects in my htaccess like that: www.olddomain.com/page.php?page=pagename1 to www.newdomain.com/newpage1.html www.olddomain.com/page.php?page=page name2 to www.newdomain.com/newpage2.html I have tried with something like this but doesn't work: RewriteEngine on RewriteRule ^page.php?page=pagename1 "http://www.newdomain.com/newpage1.html" [R=301,L] RewriteRule ^page.php?page=page name2 "http://www.newdomain.com/newpage2.html" [R=301,L] Could someone tell me what exactly I have to change? Thanks
Technical SEO | | darkanweb0 -
Should I delete Google Places and start over?
My Google Places page is stagnant. It never changes its rank, doesn't find corresponding reviews on directory sites, disappears altogether after a few days for certain keywords and ranks poorly overall. We have had a horrible time getting our web presence to be uniform...name, address, phone, etc. Our business was previously a different name so all those listings were still active, we have had different doctors over the years...those were associated with the business name in different listings, we used a referral service that sponsored listings using a diffferent phone number, change web url in the past year so some sites indicated the wrong address. HUGE HEADACHE Are there any positives/negatives to deleting the Places page and starting over? Here is the page: http://maps.google.com/maps/place?hl=en&georestrict=input_srcid%3Ab1706925095a8afa Thank you for your help!
Technical SEO | | PMC-3120871 -
I have mulitple domains that are both drawing traffic and that I should only have doing that. my question is how do I make one go away?
First off I am VERY new to his SEO stuff and If you guys could be so kind as to help. I was setting up my first campaign for my web site and when i entered it into the URL search it came back with having 2 web sites that it searched. Both are mine but one has the "www.website.com" and the other just has the "website.com" how can i fix this so i just have one? thanks in advance for your help
Technical SEO | | madabouthats0 -
I have a SERP result thats started returning a dud URL all of a sudden, any ideas why?
SERP "French Furniture" in google.co.uk The URL thats started to be returned P7 is <cite>www.thefurnituremarket.co.uk/ categories.asp?cat=</cite> The meta description is relevant however our CMS system 'ecommerce templates' has some code in it to return a dynamic meta description dependant on what catergory is being searched. It seems that the meta description is being populated from our french furniture category but the URL is not dynamic.. This has only started happening this past week. usually the url http://www.thefurnituremarket.co.uk/french_furniture.asp is returned. in WMT is is nicely indexing with 5 links... on it's own... Any ideas?
Technical SEO | | robertrRSwalters0 -
Duplicate content question with PDF
Hi, I manage a property listing website which was recently revamped, but which has some on-site optimization weaknesses and issues. For each property listing like http://www.selectcaribbean.com/property/147.html there is an equivalent PDF version spidered by google. The page looks like this http://www.selectcaribbean.com/pdf1.php?pid=147 my question is: Can this create a duplicate content penalty? If yes, should I ban these pages from being spidered by google in the robots.txt or should I make these link nofollow?
Technical SEO | | multilang0