Need seo advice! At a fork in the road!

[orion68]

Hi,

I m having a difficult time deciding what steps to take next, about my marketing strategy. I have 2 e-commerce sites for more than 7 years, one of them got a google link penalty back in september 2012 and lost 80% of organic traffic. I have worked on the bad links, got some of them removed and others disavowed. After 5 months of hard work and getting high quality links from authority sites related in my industry, I received a message from google saying that the manual spam penalty was revoked. This was in feb 26th. Since then I have got couple more high quality links and content to the site, but the organic traffic is still how it was prior to penalty revoked (at 20%). I still have no revenue from this site and i don't see what else I can do or how long I should work on it to see some improvement on traffic. My other site on the other hand is doing just fine but has some conversion issues. I m thinking of dropping all seo related activities for my first site and focus on the second one to see if we can have some increase on the organic traffic of that site. If I was to do a 301 redirect from my first site to the second one, what kind of effect will this have on the second site, would that be a negative or positive impact in terms of traffic? also thinking of moving the site from x-cart platform to magento. I appreciate any advice i can get here.

Thank you

Nick

[Hannah_Smith]

Hi Nick,

I think I'd echo what Alan said. Just because your manual penalty has been revoked doesn't mean you're not still suffering from an algorithmic one. As such I'd probably be inclined not to 301 the whole site.

Assuming your second site is topically similar you might consider reaching out directly to those high quality sites that are linking to you and asking them if they'd be willing to link to your other site instead.

Similarly you might consider moving the link worthy content to your second site and (assuming all the links to your content are 'good') just 301 those pages.

I hope this helps,

Hannah

[AlanMosley]

For the most part, I agree with Chris, but I would like to make a point on the 301.

Google may have said that the manual penalty has been lifted, but it does not mean that you are not still being penalized via the algorithm. doing a 301 may damage your second site.

I would 301 redirect only the good links, by looking at the referrer header.

As for 301s passing as much link juice as a link, I also seen the matt cuts video, but I don't read it the same way.

if you make a link to pageA, then redirect to pageB, you will lose link juice twice.

Matt was not very clear in the video, he did say that a 301 loses as much as a link does. A link and a 301 both a make a request to the server. I think the better way at looking at it is that every request loses link juice. Having a link to pageA then redirected to pageB is 2 requests, and 2 loses of link juice

[orion68]

hi thanks for your reply, so, since the penalty was revoked on the first site, it is ok to do 301?

301 will not transfer anything negative to the other site right ? last question, will the high quality links to the first site that i got in the pas few week pass any juice to the second site ?

thank you

[chris.kent]

Nick,

First off its a tough call to throw in the towel on a site, but the bottom line is if its not making you any money it probably needs the axe. Especially if you've got another site that has conversion issues. Those are things that you have way more control over. My vote is cut the first site and focus on the second. As for the 301 I would do it if the two sites were similar enough to seen plausible. According to Matt Cutts a 301 passes as much juice as a link. That's my two cents.

Chris