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.
Should I redirect my Google Update Effected Domain to brand new Domain?
-
Hey Moz experts, I had a domain which was really doing better but after the Humming Bird update my traffic was decreased up to 90%. There are plenty of posts on my existing blog, Now what should I do? I mean should I redirect it to a brand new domain or Copy all the posts to a brand new domain and delete my existing domain? Note that the Old domain has PR1, DA 19 and PA 30.
-
Thank You for such a nice and descriptive answer, you're 100% right and I did not received any manual penalty from Google. I even tried to add up new content but it does not made any difference so I thought to transfer all the content to new domain. By the way you've got semrush premium account? and how much useful is that?
-
Imran,
I looked at semrush.com and it looks like you had a spike of traffic in August 2013 and then it quickly died back down. I also looked at your backlink profile and I see that the overwhelming majority of your links are from blog comments. It's okay to have some blog comments but you don't want that to dominate your backlinks. You also want to be sure that you're using your actual name for the anchor text of the link (and you are, so that's good). I also noticed that you have some links from other sites linking to you, like androidcentral.us. Since you also own that website, you're effectively creating your own little link network, which could become an issue, if it's not already.
The quality of the content is also lacking. There are a lot of grammatical issues and that may be because English isn't your first language. Your English isn't terrible, but Google wants high quality and unfortunately the level of English on your site won't be considered high quality.
What you should do is work on getting more high quality backlinks and diversifying your backlink profile. I checked a few of your pages on copyscape and they didn't turn up any duplicates found. Assuming this content is actually 100% unique and not just spun/rewritten from another source, you should also have someone fix up the grammatical issues. If the content is spun/rewritten from another source, start adding new content that is completely unique and original. You also need to remove the "Example Widget" text in your sidebar ASAP. That makes your site look incomplete.
If you haven't already done so, please check Google Webmaster Tools to make sure you didn't receive a manual penalty from Google.
-
And one thing more, almost 2 weeks ago, I also changed the permalink structure which encountered in so many 404s but then I manually edited all the links and made some redirection changes to my .htaccess file.
-
Hey Philip thanks for your response, My domain is ohguideme.com, over the recent months i have made so many changes to its look and almost have edited many posts and even deleted some of the poor posts that I thought were of poor quality but then there is still no improvement in rankings. I even paid a guy who was boasting that he will recover my site but nothing happened. Do you have any suggestions or tips? What should i do with it???
-
I have not heard of any websites receiving a penalty from Google due to the Hummingbird update. In my opinion, there is something else going on that affected your rankings. I would not recommend you delete your domain and redirect posts to another domain. That isn't solving the problem. That's just a way to try and avoid the issue. Like I said, a penalty can follow you to your new domain.
Are you referring to the androidrootcental.com website in your tagline? Or is this a problem with another website?
-
Well I still don't know why was my site hit by Humming Bird update and it was in Mid-August, My site content was original but I guess it was due to poor internal backlinks.. So what should I do now? Delete my existing domain and transfer all the posts??
-
Matt Cutts has said that a penalty CAN follow you to your new domain if you just simply recreate the site on a new domain exactly as it was on the penalized domain.
Do you know why you were penalized? Was it for duplicate content, poor site quality, spammy backlinks, or something else? When did your rankings drop? Mid-August?
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
-
How many pages for a new site for Google to sink it's teeth into
Hello, I've got a high traffic site I'm building. Is 20 articles enough to start or should I start with 40 or 60 to not flop? I've got good internal linking. I've got: 3 10X articles
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW
17 cornerstones so far. Worked hard so far. Do I launch? or wait for 40? 60? I know thousands is best. Competitors have much more. Thank you, Bob0 -
Old brand name being suffixed on Google SERP listings
At the end of some of our listings in Google search results pages, our old brand name is being suffixed even though it is not in our title tags. For context, we re-branded several months ago, and at that time also migrated to a new domain name. Our title tags have our current brand name suffixed, like "Shop Example Category | Example©". In the Google search results, but not in Bing nor Yahoo, about half of our pages have titles whcih instead look like this: "Shop Example Category | Example© - oldBrandName". The "dash" and the old brand name are not in our title tags, but they are being appended, even when our title tags are fairly long. For example, even with titles at 54 characters (421 pixels), the suffix is being appended. BUT, not with our longer title tags. We are actually OK with the brand name being appended if our title tags are on the shorter side, but would prefer that our current brand name be appended instead of the older one. I realize we could increase the length of all our title tags, and perhaps we may go that route. But, does anyone know where Google would be getting the old brand name to append onto the URLs? We've checked and it is not in our page source (the old brand name is used in our page source in some areas of text and some url paths, but not in any kind of meta tag). Per Google's guidance (https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-do-not-put-organization-schema-markup-on-every-page/289981/) we only have schema for the "Organization" on our home page, and not on every page. So, assuming this advice is correct to not add schema to every page, how can we inform Google of our current brand name so that it stops appending our old brand name on pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoelevated0 -
Why does my old brand name still show up on organic search but as my new brand name and domain?
Hello mozers! I have quite the conundrum. My client used to have the unfortunate brand name "Meetoo" - which by the way they had before the movement happened! So naturally, they rebranded to the name Vevox in March 2019 to avoid confusion to users. However, when you search for their old brand name "Meetoo" the first organic link that pops up is their domain www.vevox.com. Now, this wouldn't normally be a problem, however it is when any #MeToo news appears in the media and we get a sudden influx or wrong traffic. I've searched the HTML and content for the term "Meetoo" but can only find one trace of this name through a widget. Not enough to hold an organic spot. My only other thinking is that www.vevox.com is redirected from www.meetoo.com. So I'm assuming this is why Vevox appear under the search term "Meetoo". How can I remove the homepage www.vevox.com from appearing for the search term "meetoo"? Can anyone help? AvGGYBc
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Virginia-Girtz3 -
If a page ranks in the wrong country and is redirected, does that problem pass to the new page?
Hi guys, I'm having a weird problem: A new multilingual site was launched about 2 months ago. It has correct hreflang tags and Geo targetting in GSC for every language version. We redirected some relevant pages (with good PA) from another website of our client's. It turned out that the pages were not ranking in the correct country markets (for example, the en-gb page ranking in the USA). The pages from our site seem to have the same problem. Do you think they inherited it due to the redirects? Is it possible that Google will sort things out over some time, given the fact that the new pages have correct hreflangs? Is there stuff we could do to help ranking in the correct country markets?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ParisChildress1 -
Redirect domain or keep separate domains in each country?
Hi all Hoping this might be something that can be answered given the number of variables 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IsaCleanse
My main site is www.isacleanse.com.au (Obviously targeted to Australian Market) and also www.isacleanse.co.nz targeted to NZ. The main Keywords im targeting are 'Isagenix' for both and also Isagenix Australia, Isagenix Perth, Sydney (Australian cities) and Isagenix NZ, Isagenix New Zealand, Isagenix Auckland etc.. for NZ The Australian site gets a lot more traffic and Australian market gets a lot more searches - I also have a section www.isacleanse.com.au/isagenix-new-zealand/ on the Australian site. The question is am I best off redirrecting the .co.nz domain completley to the Australian Domain to give it extra SEO Juice?0 -
Merging Sites: Will redirecting the old homepage to an internal page on the new site cause issues?
I've ended up with two sites which have similar content (but not duplicate) and target similar keywords, rather than trying to maintain two sites I would like to merge the sites together. The old site is more of a traditional niche site and targets a particular set of keywords on its homepage, the new site is more of an authority site with a magazine type homepage and targets the same set of keywords from an internal page. My question is: Should I redirect the old site's homepage to the relevant internal page on the new website...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lara_dar
...or should I redirect the old site's homepage to the new site's homepage? (the old site's homepage backlinks are a mixture of partial match keyword anchor text, naked URLs and branded anchor text) I am in two minds (a & b!) (a) Redirecting to the internal page would be great for ranking as there are some decent backlinks and the content is similar (b) But usually when you do a 301 redirect the homepage usually directs to the new homepage and some of the old site's links are related to the domain rather than the keyword (e.g. http://www.site.com) and some people will be looking for the site's homepage. What do you think? Your help is much appreciated (and hope this makes sense...!)0 -
How to stop Google crawling after 301 redirect?
I have removed all pages from my old website and set 301 redirect to new website. But, I have verified old website with Google webmaster tools' HTML verification file which enable me to track all data and existence of pages in Google search for my old website. I was assumed that, Google will stop crawling and DE-indexed all pages after 301 redirect. Because, I have set 301 redirect before 3 months. Now, I'm able to see Google bot activity on my website with help of Google webmaster tools. You can find out attachment to know more about it. How can it possible & How Google can crawl removed pages? You can see following image to know more about it. First & Second
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit0 -
How long does a new domain need to get a specific level of trust?
We are a small start-up in germany in the Sports and health sector. We currently are building a network of people in that sector and give each person a seperate wordpress blog. The idea is to create a big network of experts. My question is: How long is the period for google to trust a completely new URL? We set up each project and create content on the page. Each week the owner of the site puts up an expert article that contain keywords. And we set certain links from other blogs, etc. Also, do you think it is more important for a site to get say, 20 backlinks from anywhere. Or 5 backlinks from very trusted blogs, etc.?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wellbo0
