Can I use content from an existing site that is not up anymore?
-
I want to take down a current website and create a new site or two (with new url, ip, server). Can I use the content from the deleted site on the new sites since I own it? How will Google see that?
-
Thank you. That is a great answer!
-
Hi there,
I would say that, taking William's point into account, canonicals might work in order to remove any possibility that Google would see the new site as copying the old one. That said, I can't guarantee that they could not either manually or automatically (manually would be much easier) note that the two sites are owned by the same person and that the domain change is a measure taken to avoid a penalty. The truly safest thing to do is to re-write the content and start afresh. The next safest is to remove the content from the old site, force a re-crawl / wait for Google to update its cache of the old site excluding the content, and then re-publish on the new site.
Canonicals will make this process quicker, but I don't believe it can be guaranteed that they won't result in Google making a stronger connection between the two sites, which might not go well. Again, this is only if there are enough similarities for Google to understand that this is not a scraper / scrapee situation but a situation where one entity owns both sites.
I'm sorry not to give a definitive answer.
-
After reading Jane & William's discussion--do you both agree that canonicals is the way to go? The site will be similar (trying to create a non-penalized site). The sites will have different ip's and servers but a lot of the same content. None of the same backlinks... I just don't want to do the work if it's going to end up hurting me worse. I don't see how I can get all those bad backlinks removed.
-
Really good point. Taking that into account, I might guess that an anti-manipulation method Google might employ is to grab registration details, hosting data, analytics codes, etc. and other identifying factors to determine whether the canonicalised content is owned by the same person. That is, canonicals between tightly-linked sites where the "duplicate" is penalised could hurt the canonical source, stopping people using this in place of the old 301 trick. If the scraper site has nothing in common with the source, Google does not pass on any negative metric from the duplicate.
This is just a theory too of course! I'd be confident assuming that they're taking precautions to stop this becoming a common trick. Awesome point!
-
The thought behind canonicals is this:
-
One of their uses is to fight against scrapers and such by still having the canonical tags in place when these spammy places grab your content.
-
If penalties passed through canonicals, then the penalties these scrapers have would effect your site terribly. This is not the case, in my experience.
-
So, unless Google has already implemented the human tracking that was discussed a few Whiteboard Fridays ago, this should work. And even with hardcore human tracking for penalities, I think its yet to be seen if this would focus on small sites trying to fix penalities as opposed to the large black hat spammers.
There is a bit of theorycrafting here, but in RoxBrock's specific situation, it looks like he has to pick the lesser of all evils.
-
-
The idea of using canonicals interests me, but I am not 100% sure it is risk-free. It used to be the case that you could 301 penalised websites and remove the penalty (we're talking 2010 and earlier here). Google is very keen on transferring penalties these days, so I would be surprised if they are leaving a loophole for canonical tags open like this, or if they will keep that loophole open for long.
You would ideally leave the site live and remove its content as William says - once you see that the cached version of the site no longer contains the content you want to move, you can feel free to take the old site down and put the content up on the new site.
We don't know what lengths Google is going to or will go to to avoid people being able to re-use previously penalised content (including good content from penalised websites) but the safest thing you can do whilst using this old content right now is ensure the old content has been deindexed before putting it up again elsewhere.
The actual safest thing you can do is re-write the content, but I realise this might not be possible.
-
Put the canonical tags in the old content, and point it to the new pages.
If you believe there are penalties, then 301ing is a little risky.
De-indexing content doesn't mean Google forgets it was there, they still have it cached, so this isn't ideal.
It looks like canonical may be your best bet.
-
So you suggest leaving the old site up and add the content to the new site with the canonical tag pointing to old site? Any other options you can think of?
-
You would need to keep the site live to speed up the de-indexation. Then block all bots through robots.txt and force a crawl.
Make sure this is what you want to do. There are other options for this situation depending on your intent. Canonical tags, for example, would not transfer penalties and still show Google where the good source of the content is.
-
Many bad links were built on the old website by a questionable SEO firm, so I do believe the URL has been hit, but not with a formal penalty.
In order to redirect the old web pages I would need to keep the website live which really does not serve my purpose--which is to use great content that was written in-house on a clean website with no backlinks (starting from scratch).
How would one go about "de-indexing" content?
Thank you for prompt responses.
-
301 redirect the old web pages to the new ones using an .htaccess file on the old website. This will show Google that the content has moved to the new web pages. Check out the link for more information: http://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection
-
Interesting question!
I had to do some research on this, there is not much out there. One place I was sure to find and answer was the depths of the underworld in blackhat forums. I found a whole discussion on it from 6 months back. (Not going to link to a black hat site, sorry)
However what they said and had tried and tested was that the site must be de-indexed and the same for all pages so that it did not trip the duplicate content.
However lets back things up a little. Why are you doing this? Does the original have a penalty?
Why not keep the original live and put a canonical link in your page pointing to the new site stating that is the original content owner? this way you will get traffic right away and not have to start ranking from scratch.
Need to know more about your reasons please.
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
-
Is this campaign of spammy links to non-existent pages damaging my site?
My site is built in Wordpress. Somebody has built spammy pharma links to hundreds of non-existent pages. I don't know whether this was inspired by malice or an attempt to inject spammy content. Many of the non-existent pages have the suffix .pptx. These now all return 403s. Example: https://www.101holidays.co.uk/tazalis-10mg.pptx A smaller number of spammy links point to regular non-existent URLs (not ending in .pptx). These are given 302s by Wordpress to my homepage. I've disavowed all domains linking to these URLs. I have not had a manual action or seen a dramatic fall in Google rankings or traffic. The campaign of spammy links appears to be historical and not ongoing. Questions: 1. Do you think these links could be damaging search performance? If so, what can be done? Disavowing each linking domain would be a huge task. 2. Is 403 the best response? Would 404 be better? 3. Any other thoughts or suggestions? Thank you for taking the time to read and consider this question. Mark
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MarkHodson0 -
Thin Content Pages: Adding more content really help?
Hello all, So I have a website that was hit hard by Panda back in 2012 November, and ever since the traffic continues to die week by week. The site doesnt have any major moz errors (aside from too many on page links). The site has about 2,700 articles and the text to html ratio is about 14.38%, so clearly we need more text in our articles and we need to relax a little on the number of pictures/links we add. We have increased the text to html ratio for all of our new articles that we put out, but I was wondering how beneficial it is to go back and add more text content to the 2,700 old articles that we have just sitting. Would this really be worth the time and investment? Could this help the drastic decline in traffic and maybe even help it grow?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com0 -
Site Search external hosted pages - Penguin
Hi All, On the site www.myworkwear.co.uk we have a an externally hosted site search that also creates separately hosted pages of popular searches which rank in Google and create traffic. An example of this is listed below: Google Search: blue work trousers (appears on front page of Google) Site Champion Page: http://workwear.myworkwear.co.uk/workwear/Navy%20Blue%20Work%20Trousers Nearest Category page: http://www.myworkwear.co.uk/category/Mens-Work-Trousers-936.htm Could this be a penalisation or duplication factor? Could these be interpreted as a dodgy link factor? Thanks in advance for your help. Kind Regards, Andy Southall
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MarzVentures0 -
How long we can keep 302 redirection for a webpage url?
Hi Friends, I have a webpage featuring a product. I have created a new domain featuring the same product and the page is under construction. I am planning to do 302 redirection from the new domain to the existing domain for the time being. How long can I keep the 302 redirection from the new domain to existing domain? Is there any fixed time period/ duration that we can keep the 302 redirection for a webpage? I am planning to make few more pages (privacy policy, about us, etc) from the new domain 302 redirected to the existing domain. Is it possible? If so, how long can I keep the same? May I know which redirect is safe to use in this case, 302 or 301 redirect?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | zco_seo0 -
Can anyone tell me why this site ranks so well?
Site in question: cellphoneshop.net From what I can tell from their link profile, the links they garner don't appear to be particularly high value but they dominate organic listings for my vertical (cell phone accessories), esp. in the last 2-3 months when Google was supposedly increasing the quality of their search results. Can anyone tell me why in particular this site ranks so well for competitive short and long tail terms?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | eugeneku0 -
Am I Being Penalized For Having My Whole Site In A Subfolder Named With A Keyword?
I inherited a client. For some reason, their previous webmaster set up the site so everything is in a subfolder /law/. It's an attorney website. All the urls have the primary domain name /law/ and then assigned url. I can't image this is helping but could the site be penalized for this by Google or Bing? It's set up like this: www.attorneysite.com**/law/**therestoftheurl /law/ is included in EVERY PAGE... even the homepage.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | DeltonChilds0 -
Using Redirects To Avoid Penalties
A quick question, born out of frustration! If a webpage has been penalised for unnatural links, what would be the effects of moving that page to a new URL and setting up a 301 redirect from the old penalised page to the new page? Will Google treat the new page as ‘non-penalised’ and restore your rankings? It really shouldn’t work, but I’m convinced (although not certain) that our clients competitor has done this, with great effect! I suppose you could also achieve this using canonicalisation too! Many thanks in advance, Lee.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Webpresence0 -
Are there tools out there to determine when a link linked to your site? I want to know when a link farm was done a site.
In Webmaster Tools I discovered that a client of mine with signed up for or hired another company to get links. The links are poor quality and from other countries, so it looks like a link farm was done. I want to know when they links were linked to the site, and not sure how to find that information out. Does anyone know how to find this out?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | StrategicEdgePartners0