New domain or flagged domain?
-
New client had a domain get flagged by Google and disappear from search rankings. He left is old website company and wants us to design new site using the flagged domain. Are we better off using a new domain or try to resurrect the flagged domain?
-
No. You have to avoid redirecting to the new domain. If you do, the bad link juice will follow you.
I know for sure that's the case with the "unnatural link warnings" that Google has been sending out. I have no evidence its the same with Penugin, but it is very likely to be so.
Some people suggest using multiple redirects with multiple hops, but I have no experience with that.
-
Thanks for the responses. This is the exact information that we were looking for. This is a client of ours that decided to build a different, competing website with another company. They made it up the rankings right off the bat due to link farming and then they completely dropped off Google altogether.
Most likely we are going to go with the new domain.
If we redirect the bad domain to the new one, will any bad link juice come with it? They really want to keep the domain.
-
What Klarke said, but also let your client consider a reconsideration request with google after the redesign.
Google can sometimes be forgiving, and I believe that if you are seen to make a genuine effort to change/clean up your site you can get back to where you were.
A lot of the time spammy links when noticed by G are simply devalued and this is what causes the drop in rankings and a lot of the time what seems like a never ending penalty can be lifted the next day.
With the addition of google bringing in the link reporting tool into WMT your client could also have a chance to wash thier hands of the spammy links.
-
Depends.
If it has alot of bad links, it might be better (and alot faster) to start over on a fresh domain with legitimate whitehat tactics.
If you have fewer links to clean up and alot of good links, then I'd try to resurrect.
If you have 50/50 good and bad links, my preference again is to start over on a new domain. From experience, it is MUCH easier to get GOOD links updated to point to the new domain than it is to get BAD links removed as sites which allow themselves to be spammed with easy links or sites which accept low quality content are often not actively managed or maintained.
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
-
Is new domian redirection to old domain make risk for my site ?
i have site with Da about 30 and i have many project on it if i register a domain for each project and after that redirect to my site is that bad for my site and my site seo ? for ex: my project is : mysite.com/helloword i register helloworld.com or domain like that helllo-world.com and redirctet to mysite.com/helloworld
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MidnightShop791 -
Is domain redirection a good method for SEO?
I have a question and need suggestion from you guys. I’ve searched for my question on Google but don’t get exact information what I need. Maybe I can’t search perfectly.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | kamishah
Let me explain my confusion:
I’ve checked backlink profile of a website. He is not using his main domain while doing comment backlink. He put his another domain while doing comment backlink. The another domain redirect to the main domain. Why he use another domain while doing comment backlink?
Is it helpful to get better rank on Google? For example: My Main Domain = solutionfall.com
Another Domain= xyz.com (It redirect to solutionfall.com)
He just uses xyz.com while doing comment backlink. Thank You so much1 -
Exact match domain - should i use one
i have the domain "region"familyholidays.co.uk for an upcoming site. i was pleased as its memorable and tells the user what its about. i am targetting keywords such as: region family holidays region family hotels region famliy cottages region family campsites is it something i should avoid because of potential penalties. i will be adding plenty of good content and doing all the offsite things but dont want to start with a handicap with an emd? thanks neil
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | neilhenderson0 -
Secondary Domain Outranking Master Website
IEEE is a large professional association dedicated to serving engineers. The IEEE Web Presence is made up of flagship sites like IEEE.org, IEEEXplore, and IEEE Spectrum, mid-tier sites like Computer.org, and smaller sites like those dedicated to specific conferences. It is unclear exactly when this started - but searches in Google for [ieee] currently return ieeeusa.org before ieee.org. This is troublesome, as users are typically looking for IEEE.org with such a general query. ieeeusa.org is a site that has a much narrower focus - it is dedicated to public policy. IEEE.org is one of the strongest domains - I am thinking that this is a glitch of some sort. I am removing a stale sitemap that is referenced in robots.txt (though again, I'm not seeing any issues with other pages - its just two queries that are trouble: [ieee] and [about ieee]. And its noticeable in analytics 🙂 http://ieee.d.pr/hMg0/YhklCw7Z What do you think? 🙂
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | thegrif3290 -
Rankings dropped, should I start a new website?
Hello, my rankings dropped last year (penguin update) - I think it was April 2012 and the website went from 300 visitors per day to 10 per day. This probably happened because I bought links, but I also did a lot of manual and natural SEO (at that time). After the drop, I didn't know what to do... so I did some manual SEO, blog comments, forum posts, article publications (lets say 60 links in total - with diverse anchor texts - brand keywords, etc) and then I paused working on the site to see if there will be any changes... and 1 year latter, there are still no changes. My site used to be in the top results of the first page and now it is totally out of Google. http://getmoreyoutubeviews.com Should I move on and start a new website or do something to fix this one? Thanks Alex
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | buysocialexposure0 -
Getting a link from an internal page with PR 2 of a domain with PR 5 is how much effective?
My website got a link from an internal page with PR rank of 2 but the domain has the PR rank 5. For example - A domain www.example.com with PR rank 5 and internal page www.example.com/extra/1 PR rank 2. I got a link from the internal page, will I benefit from main domain Page rank 5? Thanks, Sameer
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | KaylaKerr0 -
Moving from www.domain.net to domain.com?
We're thinking about moving our domain from www.domain.net to domain.com as we just acquired the dot com domain. www.domain.net receives roughly 20million pageviews per month and gets about 90% of it's traffic from search engines. What is best to do in this situation? Should we start using .com instead of .net? 301 redirecting traffic to the .com from .net? Should we drop the www in front?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mschianoyo0 -
What's the best way to set up 301's from an old off-site subdomain to a new off-site subdomain?
We are moving our Online store to a new service and we need to create 301's for all of the old product URLs. Being that the old store was hosted off-site, what is the best way to handle the 301 re-directs? Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | VermilionDesignInteractive0