Migrating EMD to brand name domain. Risk of Penguin Penalty?
-
We would like to migrate from an EMD to a brand name domain, since our service offer has become much broader than indicated by the current EMD. The current domain name is a money keyword.
Do you believe there is a big risk of suffering a penguin penalty if we go ahead with the domain migration, due to large share of anchor texts containing keyword of old domain name?
Quick facts about our site:
-about 500.000 pages indexed by google- PR6
-
10 years old
- 1200 linking root domains
- 30% of linking root domains contain our domain name with domain ending as anchor text
- 5% of linking root domains have just the domain keyword as anchor text
Any thoughts?
Thanks -
Marie, thanks a lot for clarifying.
-
Hi,
"To clarify, our link profile is very clean, but naturally people used the keyword from the domain name and the domain name to link to us.
It really comes down to the question:
How will google penguin value anchor text to the old domain and will 301 to new domain increase the risk of a penguin penalty."It's not the exact match anchor text that makes the Penguin algorithm affect a site. If you have natural links and those links contain exact match anchor text then that's a good thing.
The reason why the percentage of exact match anchors is stated by many to be a risk factor for Penguin is because sites that have built spammy links generally, in the past, did so with exact match anchors. For most sites that have not had manipulative backlinks made, the most common anchors will be variations of the url and brand name. If you've been building your own links in the past though, the most common anchors are often keywords because that's what used to work. So, many people assume that Google looks at the percentage of keywords as anchors when deciding whether Penguin is going to affect the site. I don't believe that that's what happens though.
Penguin is way more sophisticated than that. The goal of Penguin is to find self made links and devalue them. The reason for this is that Google wants only links that are truly natural citations to count towards rankings. For some sites, if there's the odd self made link then when Penguin rolls around they probably just lose the link equity they once had. But, if there are LOTS of self made links detected then this sends a signal to Google that your links cannot be trusted and your site will not be shown as highly in the SERPS.
So, if the links are natural then don't worry about it, even if they do contain a keyword as anchor.
-
It probably depends on the anchor. If the EMD was bluewidgets.com, then 'http://www.'bluewidgets.com' or 'bluewidgets.com' or 'bluewidgets' type anchor should be ok. If there was a high level of 'blue widgets' I would start to be a little concerned.
-
To clarify, our link profile is very clean, but naturally people used the keyword from the domain name and the domain name to link to us.
It really comes down to the question:
How will google penguin value anchor text to the old domain and will 301 to new domain increase the risk of a penguin penalty.Anybody with experience of migrating an EMD? Anybody experiencing Penguin shortly afterwards?
Certainly would be useful to consult with someone specialized in penguin recoveries who has dealt with a very large volume of penguin cases and learn about their impression of this risk.
-
If you are seriously concerned about a penalty which could result in your business having to close it's doors, you should probably be seeking out help from an agency rather than looking for free advice here. If the situation is that dire, then getting an audit and quote from an agency will probably be your safest bet at this point.
-
Thanks Bradley.
Yes we plan page level 301 redirects from old to new domain and will follow best practices for domain migration.
I am afraid changing anchor text clean up of EMD may have only limited success in our case since many links are very old and some sites may not be maintained anymore. However targeting especially the 5% links with keyword as anchor text may be good idea to try.
Having to disassociate the old domain and losing 10 years effort of clean link building would probably mean that we would need to close down the company as our segment is too competitive to get a new domain quickly up in the rankings. So therefore I really want to understand the associated penguin risk as well as possible.
-
Migrating to a branded domain is probably the best step to avoid a penalty at this point. Get away from the EMD and over-optimized anchor text ASAP.
If your domain is penalized, it won't be your branded domain - it will be your EMD domain. It's hard to say if it could be penalized in the future, but it hasn't been yet, so you might be OK.
I assume that you'll 301 redirect all pages on the EMD to the new branded domain. You should be prepared to put in a lot of effort to clean up the anchor text of the EMD link profile, or completely disassociate the old domain in the event of a penalty.
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
-
Linking from & to in domains and sub-domains
What's the best optimised linking between sub-domains and domains? And every time we'll give website link at top with logo...do we need to link sub-domain also with all it's pages? If example.com is domain and example.com/blog is sub-domain or sub-folder... Do we need to link to example.com from /blog? Do we need to give /blog link in all pages of /blog? Is there any difference in connecting domains with sub-domains and sub-folders?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Penguin and 301 redirects...
Hi, I have several questions about starting a new domain due to Penguin. The site is: http://bajajlaw.com. Quick backstory: This site was hit every time Penguin rolled out. No clean-up was done until October 2015. At that time, I took over the project. My efforts include: (1) Remove'em, (2) manual removal, (3) and the Disavow Tool. The HP went from being at around #50 for the target KW (San Diego criminal defense attorney) to about #25. Never really moved higher than that. However, I redid the content for the internal pages (DV, Theft Crimes, etc.) and they are all ranking fairly well (first page or top of 2nd). In short, the penalty only seems to affect the HP, not the internal pages. Instead of waiting for Penguin to roll-out, client wants to move forward with new domain. My questions are as follow: 1. Can I use the same content for the internal pages and 301 from the old internal pages to the new? 2. Should I 301 from the old to the new domain for the HP, or not? 3. If I do a 301 from an internal page to a new internal page, does that have the same effect of doing a 301 from the old HP to the new HP? I have read various opinions on this topic. I'd appreciate feedback from anyone who has experience doing this sort of thing. Thanks. P.s. I'm inclined to wait for P4 to rollout, but given that nobody seems to know when that might be, it's hard for me to advise client to keep waiting for it.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mrodriguez14400 -
Domain switch planned - new domain accessible - until the switch: redirect from new to old domain with 307?
Hi there, We are going to switch our local domain oldsite.at to newsite.com in November. As our IT department wants to use the newsite.com already for email traffic till then, the domain newsite.com has to be accessible for public and currently shows the default Apache page without useful content. The old domain has quite some trust, the new domain is a first time registered domain (not known by search engines yet and no published anyhow). The domain was parked till now. I am aware of the steps to take for the switch itself, but: **what to do with the newsite.com domain until everything is prepared for the switch? **I suppose users or search engines find the domain and as there is no useful information available it harms us already. My idea was to 307 redirect newsite.com to the oldsite.at but the concern is that this causes problems as soon as we switch the domain and redirecting with 301 from oldsite.at to newsite.com? Do you have any objections or other recommendations? Thank you a lot in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | comicron0 -
Subdomains and Forwarding Domains
Will someone who has experience chime in on these two issues below: Do sub-domain links which link back to the main site count as a new link from a new site; or would they be considered more of an internal link? Basically, would a sub-domain link to the main site be like a link from a unique website, or treated like any other internal link on the main site? I am speaking in terms of link juice. Should we 301 sub-domains to the main site internally? Thank you, we really appreciate any input you have!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DJ1230 -
Duplicate page titles and brand name
Duplicate page titles and brand name. According to SEOMOZ in my one of web site .there are many duplicate title tags some of them are company names .my problem is Do i need to make unique tile tags for each pages with keywords and what about putting company name in each page. 2)Is it necessary to put company name (Brand name ) in each page.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | innofidelity0 -
How to tackle google penguin algorithmic penalty?
My Website ranking went down mid of april, I sent a Reconsideration request and the reply was : “ We reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the webspam team that might affect your site's ranking in Google. If you've experienced a change in ranking which you suspect may be more than a simple algorithm change, there are other things you may want to investigate as possible causes, such as a major change to your site's content, content management system, or server architecture.” My site was classic asp and i change that to a new word press theme I change the site structure and created new fresh content on the entire site focusing on user experience. But still no positive result in the ranking. I further did a test and created 3 new landing pages that target long tail keywords with low competition. Once these pages got indexed the start appearing on first page for couple of days and then gradually the started to go down in ranking now they are not in the top 10 pages. Now someone told me to buy a new domain and start fresh before i follow this route I would like to if anyone could help me should i buy a new domain and start fresh or should i wait till i start getting my ranking back My link profile according to open site explorer is 190 links from 74 domains and domain authority is 31. Can anyone help please
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | conversiontactics0 -
Penalties forcing us to move to a new domain
My ecommerce company has been under an unnatural link penalty for some time now. Over 2 months, removing 13,000 back links and submitting two reconsideration requests we have still been denied. We think the best route to take is to start a new domain. Does anyone have advice, resources, articles or anything else that can help us with this transition? Just a recap : we want to move our existing site to a new site and pass no negative "link juice". Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brads070 -
Domain with a Virus History
Hi, I have a domain that I am working on that has a past we did not know about. Doing a bit of research it appears that back in 2010 the domain had a link to a virus or had a virus on the domain – because of this certain anti virus sites are blocking the domain. Interestingly Google, Norton, Firefox say the domain is fine.... IE, Kaspersky and a few still block it. I am going through and manually searching and trying to get them to agree the site is safe BUT I am having a problem with mywot.com. They refuse to take down the “reviews” staying its a virus site. Anything I can do? Any suggestions? Any legal action we can take? Is there anything else I can do or should be doing to check else where? Thanks in advance Fresh Fire One
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnW-UK0