Time for a new domain post-Penguin?

[Nobody1560986989723]

Hi there,

Quick overview of a client who came to us after having the vast majority of their link value slashed by Penguin.

• Client only has a limited 'recovery budget'
• Client had been outsourcing SEO to a foreign company
• The website was 'keyword stuffed' when we arrived
• Links were of poor quality, the company clearly majoring on quantity rather than quality.
• Client was ranking #4 or  #3 for a keyword which was bringing in sales.
• Post penguin, dropped to page 5 and then out of the top 100 for that keyword, losing 70% of sales.

The client, under our supervision has

• Rewritten spammy content so they work for human beings (so it now reads well)
• Gone through the website and is removing old/duplicate and low-quality content
• De-emphasised other pages for the target keyword so that only one page majors on it.
• After doing the above has submitted a reconsideration request (about 2 weeks ago, so I know there's time).

We are focussing on ensuring her content is written well and on building decent links to the site (i.e. to put some good-uns where the bad ones were).

We're into month 2 of the 'clean-up exercise' and the site is still only ranking #90 for the keyword.

Given the client's budgetary limitation, could it be more beneficial to consider a new brand identity and domain name to start afresh (without a 301 redirect) or should we just continue along the track we are doing with this client?

Thanks!

[Nobody1560986989723]

Hey Russ,

Thanks for your reply. I will do my best to answer your questions 'back at me'!

1. I was aware that the reconsideration request may have no impact and as the client doesn't recall receiving a penalty notice, I just got it done to ensure we were covering all basis. And for a couple of minutes used, I thought it would be worth checking.

2. I agree we need to do some link removal. One question on the back of that, and ensuring we do what is needed within the client's limited budget is, if the links/websites are no longer listed in Google (which from the partial data we have from the old company, many are not), does removing them hold any value as the links won't be passing signals of any kind if the site's not in the SERPs any more, right?

3. My only concern with this one is the risk of duplicated content. The client has already re-written the home page and is in the process of re-writing the others because of the previous company's spammy SEO approach. To get them to write another version is going to be too much for them. I'm definitely considering getting them on a fresh domain but don't want to inadvertently cause them more problems!

Thanks for the article, that came out during a time of illness so I completely missed it. Thanks!

[HiveDigitalInc]

Hi Martin,

First off, thanks for the great information you provided in your question - saves a lot of time when there is stuff to work with

1. The reconsideration request should have little to no impact if Penguin was the culprit. Penguin is algorithmic and does not require a recon request. Did the client get an unnatural links notice?

2.  If it was Penguin, you will need to do some link removals to clean things up. There is a great SEOMoz post on a case study regarding link removals and Penguin here.  There are also both services and tools that assist with bad backlink removals.

3. Determining whether to start anew is always difficult. My gut instinct is normally to start a parallel site (maybe the .org version of your existing domain). Go ahead and start working on that site while you clean up the other one. Eventually, you should be able to get out of Penguin's grasp, but there is no reason to put your entire web business on hold until that happens. Of course, you can supplement your traffic with increased adwords budget, or using local and products to your advantage.