Hit By Penguin...Wait for recovery or do i change domains?
-
I have been working hard to recover from Penguin..and keep cleaning my backlink structure...and the site start getting value and now with Penguin update 5 or 2.1 the website again lost value.. Our website have huge no of backlinks and most of the website owners are not responding.
Shall I wait for recovery or can i change the domain with same content and dead the olde one?
-
Hi Manroop,
You posted this a while ago and I wondered what you decided to do in the end and what the outcome was. I'm interested as I, too, have been hit by Penguin. I've disvowed/removed links, but have not had any further joy - although I need to wait until the next Penguin update before deciding on next steps. Probably changing the domain is the next step.
-
I don't know that anyone can answer that question without deep knowledge of the site. I agree with Chris that starting from scratch is a big move. Have you attempted to disavow the bad links? It's your next reasonable step. Unfortunately, we're unclear on the Penguin data update cycle, so seeing a positive result from this could take weeks (or longer).
If (1) nothing seems to be working, or (2) you have no good links left after the clean-up, or (3) you simply can't risk waiting any longer - from a business standpoint - then, starting over may be your only option. Keep in mind that you don't want to 301-redirect the old site (you could transfer the penalty), so you really will be starting from scratch. You'll also be taking on a new domain name, which could have many implications (positive and negative). The best you can do at that point is try to re-point some of your old, good links to the new site and at least reclaim some of that link equity.
It's a huge decision, and you need to look at all the ramifications. I would also dig deep and be absolutely sure that Penguin is the only thing that's hitting you. If you do this, and it turns out there's something about the site/content itself harming you, you're going to have made a huge change only to end up in the same situation.
-
Hiya,
if they (webmasters) don't respond use the disavow keep track for the sake of proving you tried to get hold of them. It's a hell of a lot more work to start from scratch then to remove some bad links. I wouldn't recommend sitting on your hands as the problem wont go away by its self.
Unfortunately penguin is doing its job and making sure you don't have a rubbish back link profile so I recommend removing the bad links and getting some good content on your site to help get some great links.
Good luck.
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
-
Has anyone noticed an Adwords algorithm change early this month?
I was digging into one of my accounts and noticed that previous well-performing ads were not being shown this month. My settings are set to Optimize for conversions: Show ads expected to provide more conversions but whichever way I look at the data, ads that were doing well previously are now only being shown about 0.1% of the time. Has anyone experienced this before or know of a possible Adwords algorithm change?
Industry News | | Snaptech_Marketing0 -
Very odd behavior. Google is changing “%20” to “+” in my URLS
I just realized many of the links on my site are BROKEN when entered from a Google SERP. This didn’t used to be this way. I have no idea what’s going but I’m worried. It involves a folder of our site that has a space in it. Google is even displaying the proper “%20” in the SERP but when I click the link it replaces that “%20” with a + which breaks the link!! You can see this in action by typing in “brown jordan sheffield furniture” without quotes into Google. You’ll see our site come up first and displaying this link sheffieldfurniture.com/Other%20Furniture/BrownJordan.html but when you click it the link is broken! This is happening on many of our pages! Anyone know what in the world is going on?
Industry News | | SheffieldMarketing0 -
Google Penguin 2.0 - Coming soon
There is an interesting article on SEW that Google is going to update Penguin to the next major version - http://bit.ly/15Vkr6O So what do you think, what should we expect? And also, is there available updated webmaster guidelines?
Industry News | | ditoroin1 -
My site was hit by the Penguin Update, Now What?
My site is very young, having only been up for about a month and a half. Despite being nascent we were seeing a ton of organic traffic. Enter Google Penguin update.... Traffic is down 40% or so over the past week. So, assuming the damage has been done, the question is, what do we do next to start moving back towards where we were? If we're doing everything everything right do we just chalk it up to the fact that our site is very new and stay the course on original content and link building? I know you can submit your site for reconsideration which is something that we are going to do this week, but I wonder what else we can do to start edging back to where we were pre-penguin update. Maybe this would be a good Whiteboard Friday topic.
Industry News | | knowyourbank0 -
Anyone seen any dramatic changes in SERPs 18th Feb?
Hi Guys, Wondering if there has been an algorithm update or new Panda released today? Not seen any news in Google yet however noticed fair shuffle of all results in my niche, particularly in the top 3. The main take I've had from the brief research is that the brands in the niche have popped up a few spots and blogs / affiliate sites etc have dropped. Results noticed using Google.co.uk
Industry News | | shloy23-2945840 -
Hyphenated domains – good or bad?
I have a client who will be changing their domain name from www.brand.co.uk to www.brandglobal.com. There are concerns however that this might affect the searches for brand terms and variants. Hence, there is a suggestion for going for www.brand-global.com. I’m aware that search engines are smart enough to discern the brand name in most cases, but I’m wary if it would impact highly on the brand search terms and would it be a better option to go for www.brand-global.com instead of www.brandglobal.com? Any advice (or reference to discussions around this) would be much appreciated. Thanks
Industry News | | ravisodha0 -
How changing my domain name brought back rankings.
First I would not recommend doing this to anyone else, but my circumstances were extreme.
Industry News | | AlanMosley
Let me explain to those that did not read previous posts on the subject. I had a domain thatsit.net.au, I had never really promoted it as I used a keyword domain to rank in search engines but kept this domain mainly for email, but having said that it did rank ok considering, it ranked first for my business name at least.
A few moths back I decided to promote it and check the rankings, I was surprised to see that it ranked last for almost every thing,. Even my business name. Let me impress when I say last I mean in most cases absolute last and if not last very, very close to last.
I decided to get some links happening to move it of bottom, in my experiences a site that ranks that bad even a few links with show a big jump in rankings, it is easier to get from page 1000 to page 900 than it is to get from page 2 to page 1. The site had about 200 links and I pushed that up to about 1,000 but I was still at the bottom even for long tails searches where I was the only exact match on the internet.
asking for advice I got responses like you need better links and the such, this did not account for the sudden drop in rankings, as I knew the history I knew that thee was something deeper going on, I asked Google for reconsideration they said there was no manual action taken.
I should also mention I ranked very well in Bing all this time and still do.
By now I was getting paranoid that someone was stuffing me up somehow as a last resort I changed the domain name from thatsit.net.au to thatsit.com.au I did this about 10 days ago.
Today I searched for my company name and I came up #4 not bad from not being in the top 1,000 a few days ago.
Rankings are not where they used to be but I can handle that, I have 301’ed across all my links and have stated to change over the links I control, but as I still don’t know why the other domain would not move from the bottom as search results I am nervous that I may 301 over the problem.
I have never really done anything in the way of Black Hat SEO that would get me banned, maybe a bit of light grey over the years but nothing to worry about.
Anyhow I am non the wiser as to why things happened like they did. But I did want to report back to others that read the posts and thought that maybe I was imaging things.
I was never really depended on the domain ranking, what really bothers me is not knowing why the .net.au domain fell from rankiings and I still don’t know why.1 -
How long after making changes will position on Google be altered?
I'm curious as to how long Google updates take these days? I'm just getting back into SEO after 9 years and I recall back in the day there was a monthly "dance" during which page results were updated. Is it more frequent now? Thanks
Industry News | | celife0