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
-
Moved brand's shop to a new domain. will our organic traffic recuperate?
Hello, We are a healthcare company with a strong domain authority and several thousand pages of service related content at brand.com. We've been operating an ancillary ecommerce store that sells related 3rd party products at brand.com/shop for a little over a year. We recently invested in a platform upgrade and moved our site to a new domain, brandshop.com. We implemented page-level 301 redirects including all category pages, product detail pages, canonical and non-canonical URLs, etc.. which the understanding that there would not be any loss in page rank. What we're seeing over the last 2 months is an initial dive in organic traffic, followed by a ramp-up period of if impressions (but not position) in the following weeks, another drop and we've steady at this low for the last 2 weeks. Another area that might have hurt us, the 301 redirects were implemented correctly immediately post launch (on a wednesday), but it was discovered on the following Monday that our .htaccess file had reverted to an old version without the redirect rules. For 3-4 days, all traffic was being redirected from brand.com/shop/url to brandshop.com/badurl. Can we expect to recover our organic traffic giving the launch screw up with the .htaccess file, or is it more of an issue with us separating from the brand.com domain? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eugene_p
Eugene0 -
Changing Brand and Domain Name - SEO Impacts
Hi everyone I'm hoping a few of you can help me out... We're an online-one retailer and we're currently looking at rebranding.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | piazza
This is for commercial reasons: Our current name is difficult for customers to spell It's not wholly representative of what we now offer We want to push offline and social marketing to help increase or DA In a nutshell, our current name implies 'cheap' and we're moving more upmarket.
Our DA is only 10, and a re-brand will make our brand more marketable.
A stronger brand and DA will help us climb up the rankings quickly - last year we ranked no 1 for a relatively competitive term before dropping a few places. In terms of current traffic: 30% is via SEO (we have a low DA but rank ok for certain phrases) 70% is via adwords We had our website redesigned last year and it performs well.
The idea is to have a new brand logo and colours and move to a new domain.
We will keep all our existing products and content. Please could anyone let me know the implications of this move?
What are potential pitfalls, and what will we need to do to alert Google?
I have read about 301 redirects, would these be required? As always, any help is very much appreciated. Many thanks Abs0 -
"sex" in non-adult domain name
I have a client with a domain that has "sex" in the domain name. For example, electronicsexpo.com. The domain ranks for a few keywords related to the services offered. It is an old domain that has been online for over 10 years. It ranks well for local keywords. No real SEO effort has been made on this domain, so it is rather a clean slate. I am going to be doing SEO on this site. Will the fact that the word "sex" exists in the name have any sort of negative consequence. There is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING adult related or pornographic on this site. I would think that search engines are sophisticated enough to differentiate, but would potential customers with things like parental filters be blocked from viewing content? Is this hurtful in anyway? If so, would I be better off changing domain names? TIA
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | inhouseseo0 -
Can we have differnt Domain name and Busienss name?
Can we have different domain and Business name for website? I want to create real-estate website. I want to registered domain name ‘Nycityhomes.com’ and want to my business name (in logo as well) is ‘Sunny Associates’. Can we do that for local SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlexanderWhite0 -
Penguin 2.0 Recovery - Penguin Update Rerun yet or not
I have been hit by the penguin 2.0 update some five months back. I believe that I have an algorythmic penalty applied to my sites. While the work to cleanup etc has been done, there is certainly no recovery. I also notice a lack of recovery stories. In fact I think anyone affected cannot recover because a recalculation has not happened? Does anyone think that a recalculation of the penguin 2.0 penalties has happened? If so why do they think that.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jurnii0 -
Help needed for a domain
I have a small translation agency in Brazil (this website), totally dependent on SEM. We are in business since 2007, and we were on top position for many relevant keywords until the middle of 2011, when the ranking for the most important keywords started dropping. In that time, we believed that we needed to redesign the old static website and replace it by a new modern one, with fresh content and with weekly updates, which we did, and it's now hosted on Squarespace. I took care to keep the old links working with 301 redirections. When we made the transfer from the static site to Squarespace (Mar/2012, see the attachment), the ranking dropping became even more serious. Today, we have less than 50 unique visitors per day, in a total desperate situation! To make things worse, we received an alert from Google on 23/September/2012 talking about unnatural inbound links, but Google said that "As a result, for this specific incident we are taking very targeted action on the unnatural links instead of your site as a whole", so we thought we didn't need to worry about. Google was correct, I worked many hours to register our website in web directories, I thought there would be no problem since I was doing this manually. My conclusions are: Something happened prior to Mar/2012 that was making us losing territory. I just don't know what! The migration to Squarespace was a huge mistake. I lost control over the html, and squarespace doesn't do a good job optimizing the pages for SEO. We also were also blasted by Penguin on September, but I believe this is not the main cause of the drop. We were already running very badly at this time. My actions are: a) I generated a DTOX report and I'm trying to clean up the links marked as toxic. That's a hard work! After that I will submit a reconsideration request. b) I'm working on the site: Improving internal link building for relevant keywords Recently I removed a "tag cloud" which I believe was hurting my SEO. Also, I did some redirections that were missing. c) I trying to generate new content to improve link building to my site. d) I'm also considering to stop putting all my coins on this domain, and maybe start a fresh new one. Yes, I'm desperate! 🙂 I would appreciate a lot to hear from you guys, expert people! Thanks a lot, MWcEdPa.png?1
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rodrigofreitas0 -
Removed Duplicate Domains, What Should I Expect?
Hi All, So I have been at my current company for 5 months now. I quickly realized that they previously bought multiple domains. The domains do make sense (they are mostly our products, etc). However they did not just redirect to our main website, instead, they were a direct copy of our main website. They had it setup so that when we made changes to our main website, www.mainwebsite.com, that the same exact change went to www.productwebsite.com. Basically we had about 7 of the SAME EXACT websites with a different root domain. So I explained to them the problem with having duplicate content on the web and how we are basically just self cannibalizing our online efforts. This problem is fixed now and I am just wondering if anybody has seen the results before? To tell you the truth we already do pretty well SEO-wise. Just wondering if this will make it even better? I am assuming that this will also take a little while to take effect? Thanks! Pat
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PatBausemer0 -
Is this Domain Change Worthwhile?
Hi- I have a client who has setup a new criminal law firm in the last few months. The URL is like: www.somenamelawyers.com ['somename' is the same # characters as their company name] I have run a successful AdWords a/c for them and many of the big traffic and conversion keywords include 'criminal lawyers'. From a SEO perspective, the long goal is to get traffic for 'criminal lawyers' and keywords that phrase match that. So I am considering migrating them to www.somenamecriminallawyers.com. I have researched this issue and understand the technicalities involved in moving. My question here is 'is this change worthwhile'. I think it is worthwhile because it really is in a sense rebranding them to be more clearly in a specific business domain, ie. criminal law. Also, they are a new outfit so they don't have a lot of backlinks yet. And mainly, they will get a SEO boost to their core keywords 'criminal lawyers'. Thanks in advance for your thoughts- Jules
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Juller0