Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Is it safe to 301 redirect old domain to new domain after a manual unnatural links penalty?
-
I have recently taken on a client that has been manually penalised for spammy link building by two previous SEOs.
Having just read this excellent discussion,
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/lifting-a-manual-penalty-given-by-google-personal-experience
I am weighing up the odds of whether it's better to cut losses and recommend moving domains.
I had thought under these circumstances it was important not to 301 the old domain to the new domain but the author (Lewis Sellers) comments on 3/4/13 that he is aware of forwards having been implemented without transferring the penalty to the new domain.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/lifting-a-manual-penalty-given-by-google-personal-experience#jtc216689
Is it safe to 301?
What's the latest thinking?
-
Thanks Karl.
-
Thanks Francis, that example is useful.
-
Ok, you'll probably be able to get the good links for your new domain then. Good luck with it all.
-
My skepticism is based on what I have tested myself by redirecting a single page with too many spammy links (I would say, an infected page) to a new page tanked the traffic of the website. If you scale that, redirecting a penalised old domain to a new domain may give you the same bad result. Simple logic on my part.
I would rather work on reviving that established same old domain. Keep going. Do what you are supposed to do - clean it, brand build it further, etc.
-
Hi Carson,
Thanks for your considered reply.
I was very interested to hear your opinion about unnatural links warnings via GWT and whether they can be necessarily interpreted as manual penalties.
As usual there are conflicting opinions and the particular wording in the warning I saw is different from the wording I have seen quoted in other examples on the web. It has a feel of being slightly more tailored ... although algorithms can do tailoring!
It seems logical that Google would use an algorithmic approach wherever possible in the interests of economy and consistency but there have to be sanity checks by real people so maybe GWT emails can be triggered by algorithm or human override.
The first sentence in both your "manual penalties" and also your "refreshing adjustments" suggest to me that it might not be possible to outmanoeuvre penalties by side-stepping (domain switching).
Maybe there's also an argument here that what's best for the user should be what's best for SEO?
What's best for the user must surely be not to confuse them or change domains so maybe that's the best approach also from an SEO POV.
Oh boy. I love SEO but I think I'll do some gardening tomorrow.
-
Hi Karl,
Thanks. The situation is I reckon > 90% low quality or spammy links. I estimate I might be able to get between 10% and 30% deleted with several days work but which still produces no certainty of a successful re-consideration request. There are only a handful of good links which I know I could get re-coded to a new domain. This is a small business so flogging a dead horse is precious money down the drain .
The domain is businessnamemainkeyword.com and I could host on businessname-mainkeyword.com i.e. only difference is the dash.
-
Hi Scott,
Thanks for your answer.
Undoubtedly the safest decision is to take no risk at all i.e. use no redirects. That might not be the decision with the most profitable expected outcome. What if you knew, with hindsight, that you could have used redirects with only a 2% probability of a minor adverse impact on the new domain? That could have been a big opportunity lost by taking the safest option..
Again, I'm trying to get away from hunches and better understand the size and nature of the risks (probably by reference to empirical data i.e. specific cases) to give the best chance of making the best decision.
-
Hi Francis,
Thanks for your answer. From what you say, you have seen cases where redirects have been fine but you're skeptical which is a slightly mixed message.
I am aware that there might be a risk of 'infecting' the new domain. I'm just trying to get some kind of handle on the level of that risk (if that is possible).
Would you say:
1. Don't touch a 301 with a barge pole under any circumstances or
2. You should be OK under 'these circumstances' or
3. It's pot luck or
4. No need to worry about the consequences of 301s because Google will give you a fresh start. They know your motive for ditching the old domain and will filter the bad links from impacting the new domain, recognising you're a business that's been established for 1,000 years (from your business name, address, telephone number, company number etc.). Yeah, I know that last bit is probably my idealism getting the better of me.
How to quantify the risk to make the best decision?
-
Hi Ewan,
This is a question that probably deserves a blog post at some point, along with a number of related questions about link-based penalties. I've been gathering info for some time, and have seem many instances of redirecting sites that have been penalized. I wish I could collect data on penalized sites more scientifically, but we work with what's available.
Manual Penalties
Manual penalties appear to carry through to new domains almost instantly when redirected to pages housing the same content. Google appears to use a number of signals to make sure that the redirect is to the same site and not to a competitor.
Some Googlers have claimed that if you received an "unnatural link" warning in WMT, it's manual. I'm not entirely convinced of this, but it's now harder than ever to differentiate between manual link-based penalties and Penguin algorithmic adjustment. That brings us to...
Refreshing Adjustments (Penalties)
Panda, Penguin, and a few other updates are a little different. We've seen instances where a user makes a big change (a complete redesign for Panda, or redirecting the entire site); the trend seems to be a brief recovery followed by a drop once the algorithm refreshes.
The obvious up-side here is that if you were going to recover from the penalty anyway, you may start to recover a bit sooner and don't have to wait for the next refresh. The downside is that it's a lot of work to do correctly, and it might be a very short-lived change.
--
Generally, I'd say it's best to clean up the site and keep going on the same domain. If you have a lot of bad links pointing to a specific page, you may want to 410 that page and start a new one, then mention this in your reconsideration request. Otherwise, it's the old process of removal (keeping notes) and using disavow if reconsideration and clean up prove insufficient.
-
The best thing would be to clean up the bad links, file a reconsideration request and then 301 the old domain to the new one...that is if you have some good links to the old domain. If you only have spammy links then starting afresh would probably be easier.
-
We were in a similar situation and opted not top take the chance. We started from scratch and did not 301. Better safe than sorry.
-
I have seen a certain case I analysed who did 301 redirects. They were fine but I am still skeptical doing such move.
Personally, to 301 redirect a penalised site to a new domain may mean acquiring the spammy links from the old domain. I will not recommend it. If you think the old domain is no longer worth reviving then simply start a new website. This is a matter of calculating your resource spend vs benefits.
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 there any benefit to changing 303 redirects to 301?
A year ago I moved my marketplace website from http to https. I implemented some design changes at the same time, and saw a huge drop in traffic that we have not recovered from. I've been searching for reasons for the organic traffic decline and have noticed that the redirects from http to https URLs are 303 redirects. There's little information available about 303 redirects but most articles say they don't pass link juice. Is it worth changing them to 301 redirects now? Are there risks in making such a change a year later, and is it likely to have any benefits for rankings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MAdeit0 -
How to avoid Google penalties being inherited when moving on with a new domain?
Looking for SEOs who have experience with resetting projects by migrating on to a new domain to shed either a manual or algorithmic penalty. My questions are: For algorithmic penalties, what is the best migration strategy to avoid inheriting any kind of baggage? 301, 302, establish no connection between the two sites? For manual penalties, what is the best migration strategy to avoid inheriting any kind of baggage? 301, 302, establish no connection between the two sites? Any other input on these kind of reset projects is appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | spanish_socapro0 -
Several 301 Redirects to Same Page
Hi, I have 3 Pages we won't use anymore in our website. Let's call them url A, url B and url C. To keep their SEO strength on our domain, I've though about redirecting all of them to url D. For what I understand, when 301 redirecting, about 85-90% of the link SEO juice is passed. Then, if I redirect 3 URLs to the same page... does url D receive all the link SEO juices for URLs added up? (approximately)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | viatrading1
e.g. future url D juice = 100% current url D juice + 85% url A juice + 85% url B juice + 85% url C juice Is this the best practice, or is there a better way? Cheers,0 -
301 redirection pointing to noindexed pages
I have rather an unusual situation where a recently launched affiliate site does not have any unique content as its all syndicated content. For that reason we are currently using the noindex,nofollow meta tags to keep the pages out of the search engines index until we create unique content for the pages. The problem is that due to a very tight timeframe with rebranding, we are looking at 301 redirecting (on a page to page basis) another high authority legacy domain to this new site before we have had a chance to add unique content to it and remove the noindex,nofollow tags. I would assume that any link authority normally passed through the 301 would be lost in this scenario but Im uncertain of what the broader impact might be. Has anyone dealt with a similar scenario? I know this scenario is not ideal and I would rather wait until the unique content is up and noindex tags are removed before launching the 301 redirect of the legacy domain but there are a number of competing priorities at play outside of SEO.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LosNomads0 -
When should you redirect a domain completely?
We moved a website over to a new domain name. We used 301 redirects to redirect all the pages individually (around 150 redirects). So my question is, when should we just kill the old site completely and just redirect (forward/point) the old domain over to the new one?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | co.mc0 -
What are the effects of having Multiple Redirects for pages under the same domain
Dear Mozers, First of all let me wish you all a Very Happy, Prosperous, Healthy, Joyous & Successful New Year ! I'm trying to analyze one of the website's Web Hosting UK Com Ltd. and during this process I've had this question running through my mind. This project has been live since the year 2003 and since then there have be changes made to the website (obviously). There have also been new pages been added, the same way some new pages have even been over-written with changes in the url structures too. Now, coming back to the question, if I've have a particular url structure in the past when the site was debuted and until date the structure has been changes thrice (for example) with a 301 redirect to every back dated structure, WOULD it impact the sites performance SEOwise ? And let's say that there's hundreds of such redirections under the same domain, don't you think that after a period of time we should remove the past pages/urls from the server ? That'd certainly increase the 404 (page not found) errors, but that can be taken care of. How sensible would it be to keep redirecting the bots from one url to the other when they only visit a site for a short stipulated time? To make it simple let me explain it with a real life scenario. Say if I was staying a place A then switched to a different location in another county say B and then to C and so on, and finally got settled at a place G. When I move from one place to another, I place a note of the next destination I'm moving to so that any courier/mail etc. can be delivered to my current whereabouts. In such a case there's a less chance that the courier would travel all the destinations to deliver the package. Similarly, when a bot visits a domain and it finds multiple redirects, don't you think that it'd loose the efficiency in crawling the site? Ofcourse, imo. the redirects are important, BUT it should be there (in htaccess) for only a period of say 3-6 months. Once the search engine bots know about the latest pages, the past pages/redirects should be removed. What are your opinions about this ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eukmark0 -
301 Redirect - What happens to backlinks
Hello... One of my sites is losing rankings in G. I received the webmaster notification of unnatural links... My question is, should i do a 301 redirect of every page on my site to a new domain? If so, do the backlinks (which i believe are causing my rankings to drop) carry over? How about the good backlinks? Also, what would happen to the rankings i currently have on page 1? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Prime850 -
How long is it safe to use a 302 redirect?
Hi All, Lets assume there is site A and site B, both sites are live on the internet today as standalone businesses, but they sell very similar products. Site B has built up some link equity and will eventually become the domain for site A due to an organisational re-brand. For the time being however site A will remain, but site B needs to disappear temporarily, but not lose the link equity which has been built up against it. My current thinking is to 302 redirect site B to site A such that users and search bots accessing site B will be redirected to site A whilst leaving the link equity that exists against site B fully intact and allowing us to continue to grow it should we wish to. The question is, does anybody have a view on how long it is safe to use a 302 temporary redirect for? i.e., is 8-10 months to long. Thanks, Ben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BenRush0