A couple of our main domains have disappeared from Google
-
I work with a company that has way too many domains. Over the last year or so I have been working on consolidating them, and removing duplicate content. Yesterday I did Google search for a couple terms that we are normally number one for, and we don't show up anywhere in the first 300 results. I see no warnings in Webmaster, and I can see that this happend a couple days ago.
Here are the domains that have gone missing:
www.gaso.com
Desc: Tons of good info about Gaso Pumps
Tems: Gaso, Gaso Pumpswww.gasopumpparts.net
Desc: Part Lists for specific Gaso Pumps
Terms: Gaso Pump Partswww.IEQindustries.com
Desc: Company Website
Terms: IEQ IndustriesHere are some domins that still show up:
www.wheatleygaso.com
Desc: Searchable Pump Catalog with pump specswww.wheatleypump.com
Desc: Used to be a "duplicate" gaso.com, but mostly has links to gaso.com now.www.trenchless.org
Desc: An old incomplete siteWe also own a bunch parked domains that we created a generic landing page for, like:
http://www.gasopump.co/
http://www.gasoparts.co/Many of the sites are on the same VPS server, not sure if that is causing a problem. To me it shouldn't matter, we are not trying hide anything. The sites with content serve different purposes, but we are working at consolidating them to simplfy things. The landing pages are mainly meant to park the extra domains we have.
I am not terrible concerned as we are offering legitimate products and services, and we are trying to do the right things, but my client is very concerned.
My question is this, what is your best guess as to what happened, and what should I change?
Thanks in advance!
Torey -
Thanks Adam,
This is the strategy I have been wanting/planning to implement, I think this temporary drop will give me the opportunity I have been looking for to make it happen.
Torey
-
Hi Torey
For example lets say one of your websites pushed a particular type of pump (not familiar enough with the product vertical to know if that makes sense but bare with me), you'd want gaso.com/pumpa to be the landing page (page specifically dedicated to that pump type) that you direct the old domain that covered that pump too with a 301.
Gaso.com should come back, focus on it and give it sometime I understand that if this is a client site they are probably freaking out (also worth checking if perhaps they've just dropped into a Google dance and are not fully removed from the search results). Build it out with proper landers as entry points (this avoids all your search traffic coming into the main page which isn't ideal) and redirect the old websites to their appropriate internal page. This will give you a real boost over time.
If you need to explain the time process to a client let them know that this is a strategic investment in the future. The consolidation of the sites, and the time it takes for gaso.com to re-appear is about getting it done right to grow their results significantly in the long run, but work on consolidating the sites as soon as possible because it can be a real drag on both time and authority.
-
I agree with Adam. I grabbed a few random sentences from random pages on the site and there are lots of other sites publishing same stuff.
This might be just one problem. A person could spend lots of time digging into every possible issue... but since you seem to have a lot of gaso sites that made me think "short cut publishing".
-
What do you mean by "single landing pages?" Are you talk about pages under gaso.com like gaso.com/gaso-pump-parts, and then redirect gasopumpparts.net to that page?
Also gaso.com is our most "valuable" domain, but since it now seems to have disappeared from Google, should we invest our efforts there or choose a different domain?
Thanks again,
Torey -
If you have a lot of duplicate content (or overlapping content) on the same server it may not be a penalty but Google simply lowering the value of the properties due to a lack of uniqueness.
Make sure as you rid of old domains you are 301 redirecting back to the main site and continue to simplify your site and consolidate it into single landing pages. Also make sure none of these old sites are inter-linking in any method other than a 301 redirect as that would have a negative impact on your SEO.
In a way I wouldn't worry too much - it's kind of what you want a push in the right direction long term. If you are going to have secondary websites they need to be unique enough (by the nature of intent) to actually warrant their on place in the search engines. If you are really just having a slightly different spin to the same intent and content each time then Google is going to continue to lower the value of the sites across the board.
I've had the same thing happen to me with old clients that started back in the day that owning multiple domains made sense, a lot of them dropped off and the clients freaked. We streamlined the content into unique and hyper targeted landing pages and 301'd the old domains - within a few weeks not only were we back up and running but we were simply crushing our competition. We shot up in SEO across the board, our traffic was up almost 30% and our users were converting at a higher rate due to ease of use.
Think about it from the user perspective and you'll always win, streamline it, make it easy, make it accessible and the rankings WILL come. (Well worth reading Cyrus' post about that mantra: http://moz.com/blog/seo-satisfaction)
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
-
When domain a buys domain b (whose links direct to c), does domain a has links redirecting to domain c ?
Hi, I really need to know what happens when a company or domain (a) acquires another company with domain (b) with its links pointing to yet another location (c). Does company a then have redirects to c?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Yeshourun0 -
Google treats pages from main website and sub folder/sub directory differently?
Hi all, We have a sub directory like website.com/help/. This is a differently hosted and served content. So I wonder how Google treats pages from this sub directory. Will the same priority will be given for these pages compared to main website pages? Will there be any ranking difference when same page is from main website or sub directory. I mean like below page. Page from main website: www.website.com/page1/ Page from sub-directory: www.website.com/help/page1/ So which page will have more importance in search results?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Reporting Webspam to Google
We are in ecommerce, and there are a few review sites that are dominating the rankings for our products. The sites are very good - very well written content (2000+ words) and visually appealing sites. The 2 main culprits are clearly black hat. One site's backlinks are pure spam, and the other is buying footer and sidebar links. Will ratting them to Google have any impact? If not, any suggestions on how to compete? Our competing pages are product descriptions, and creating a 2000 word product description seems inappropriate. Also, all of these products are brand new, and due to extensive media spends, the search volume is very high. Since they are beating us to the punch by getting good content posted first, they are proving difficult to displace.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMHC0 -
"Null" appearing as top keyword in "Content Keywords" under Google index in Google Search Console
Hi, "Null" is appearing as top keyword in Google search console > Google Index > Content Keywords for our site http://goo.gl/cKaQ4K . We do not use "null" as keyword on site. We are not able to find why Google is treating "null" as a keyword for our site. Is anyone facing such issue. Thanks & Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vivekrathore0 -
Changing domain for a magento store
Hi all, wondering if i could gather some views on the best approach for this please... We currently have a magento site up with about 150,000 pages (although only 9k indexed in Google as product pages are set to no index by default until the default manufacturer description has been rewritten). The indexed pages are mainly category pages, filtering options and a few search results. While none of the internal pages have massive DA - seem to average about 18-24 which isn't too bad for internal pages, I guess - I would like to transfer as much of this over to the new domain. My question is, is it really feasible to have an htaccess with about 10,000 301 redirects on the current domain? The server is pretty powerful so could probably serve the file without issue but would Google be happy with that? Would it be better to use the change url option in WMT instead. Ive never used that so not sure how that would work in this cause. Would it redirect users too? As a footnote, the site is changing because of branding reasons and not because of a penalty of the site. Thanks, Carl
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | daedriccarl0 -
Domain Forwarding? Beneficial?
Good Morning! My father asked me about Domain Forwarding yesterday and it's impact on SEO. The example he gave was if he had website xyz.com and it was an educational website that sold anger management programs would purchasing the domain socialskills.com and pointing that domain at xyz.com help rank for social skills? My immediate answer was no it would not simply because Google doesn't associate any content with that domain, and Domain Forwarding is different that a redirect, which would apply if a website is already established. Am I correct in my thinking? Thanks guys!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HashtagHustler0 -
Aged domain and 301 redirect? (11 year old domain)
Hey everyone, I'm about to launch a new website for an accounting firm. They currently have a website, which has an 11 year old domain. They are doing very well locally for SEO, and i'm guessing it's because of the aged domain, as their website is very badly built, and contains almost no content. They would like to launch the new site with a simpler, easier to remember domain. If i launch the new site, point the aged domain using a 301 redirect, and do redirects for all of the old pages to the newer versions of them, is there a chance the company will lose their current SEO rankings? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RCDesign740 -
Buying a banned domain
Hello all, I've found a exact match keyword domain that I'm able to buy. Problem is that I'm under the impression it might have been banned by google, currently it is only showing adsense without content. The site can't be found using the cache: or site: parameters in Google and the PR is 0. What are your experiences on buying a banned domain and how can I double check if the domain is banned? This blogpost suggests I should not buy it, any other opinions? Thanks. Hellemans
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hellemans0