Negative SEO penalty, new domain?
-
One of my clients has just been hit with a Penguin 3.0 penalty. They have been subject to a negative link building attack for the last 5 months and despite my best effort it appears I haven't disavowed enough, someone was building a lot of links to them and all really low quality spam and a lot of forum profiles. They still rank for their brand, the site is in the index but the only rankings I can see are in Google Local.
My advice to them for the quickest way back into Google is to get a new domain and relaunch on this new domain. The challenge is, the domain they want to buy used to be used as a domain in the 'erotic video distrubution' industry. It currently has 17 backlinks from 9 domain and the anchor text is mostly brand related but I can see that 70 links have already been deleted.
I would consider this to be too high risk but would be interested to see if everyone agrees with me, it would be an awesome domain name if the history wasn't there!!
-
It's tough to speak in generalities, but in almost all of the cases where I suspect negative SEO was in play, there was an inherent weakness or problems in the link profile to begin with. If you add those problems to a domain with a questionable history, your risk is going to be fairly high. If you were a new site in a completely different industry with no history (or a good history), then the history of that domain might not matter. In your case, though, I'm hearing some alarm bells.
Also keep in mind that unless you're going to start over cold-turkey, and not 301-redirect any of the old site, you'll carry any link-related problems with you. So, re-launching on a new domain is definitely a big decision and will probably take months of work to rebuild momentum. Granted, waiting for the next Penguin refresh could take months, too, so I understand your dilemma.
If you're going to take this step, though, I'd put the time and money into a domain with a clean history. You can't afford to do this twice.
-
Here is what I would do if I will have the similar situation. Instead of saying good bye to the old domain just because someone is negatively attacking the website, I would try and get all of their links using tools like Ahrefs and Majestic SEO and disavow in Google disavow file and at the same time try to get highest quality link back to the website so that Google can have a clear idea of what is going on with the website.
Even in that case if the website hit the penalty or the penalty did not wave I probably will go for a new domain. In case of a new domain my advice will be to again create a link disavow file and include all links in the file and let Google know that you are buying this expired domain which have the following history but you are disavowing all the links so the history does not bite.
Obviously there is always a risk but I probably will take that risk if the domain name is that good.
Hope this helps!
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
-
Our new site will be using static site generator which is supposed to be better for SEO?
Hi folks, Our dev team is planning on building our new marketing webpages on SSG or Static Site Generator(we are stepping away from SSR). Based on my research this is something that can help our SEO in particular for site speed (our site has a poor score).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TyEl
Are there any challenges or concerns I should be aware regarding this direction? If so what are they and how can this be addressed? Thanks0 -
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 -
301 redirecting staff Domain to Company Domain
My colleague owns a domain (A) for about 10 years that he does not use. The domain's content is the same as my company's website (B) content.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi5
Question: Can I 301 redirect domain A to domain B's homepage or is it better he just closes down his website since this would not be SEO best practices? thank you0 -
Negative SEO and big decrease in main keyword ranking
Hi about 4 months ago, I had ranking #1 to #4 for "SEO" in Persian in my country; but someone made about 1000 spam links to my site and some other industry sites. I disavowed the links when I see (after 2-3 days of OSE detection). But now I'm in the page 2 of rankings for the most important keyword I ever had. The point is, My visits increased in this months, but I lost my rankings for this keyword not others. The spammy links targeted my main keyword. Whats you idea to get my ranking back? I'm writing content about SEO, Marketing and blogging for about 4 years and I don't have any bad resume in buying links or stuffing keywords or ... All natural.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | masoudfatemi0 -
Domain Forwarding - SEO Impacts?
I have a site that has been active for years - thinkbiglearnsmart.com. Awhile ago I had purchased about 50 domain names that were relevant to my company. I still have those urls and would like to use them to point to different pages on my site - just because they have good key words in the URLs. For example - one is dreamweavertrainingclassesonlinelive.com. Currently they are all redirecting to my homepage. A. is that hurting me? B. I would like to redirect to the more relevant page. ie the page dedicated to Dreamweaver training (http://thinkbiglearnsmart.com/dreamweaver-creative-cloud-training-course/ ) Will this hurt my Dreamweaver keyword for example because there is already a 301 redirect on that page from a very old Dreamweaver link which was something like thinkbiglearnsmart.com/dreamweaver C. On my hosting account where I can select where the URL forwards to - it has an option for "Location forwarding" and "Frame forwarding" - currently they are set to Frame forwarding - which one is best? Any help is much appreciated!!! Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | webbmason0 -
"Starting Over" With A New Domain & 301 Redirect
Hello, SEO Gurus. A client of mine appears to have been hit on a non-manual/algorithm penalty. The penalty appears to be Penguin-like, and the client never received any message (not that that means it wasn't manual). Prior to my working with her, she engaged in all kinds of SEO fornication: spammy links on link farms, shoddy article marketing, blog comment spam -- you name it. There are simply too many tens of thousands of these links to have removed. I've done some disavowal, but again, so much of the link work is spam. She is about to launch a new site, and I am tempted to simply encourage her to buy a new domain and start over. She competes in a niche B2B sector, so it is not terribly competitive, and with solid content and link earning, I think she'd be ok. Here's my question: If we were to 301 the old website to the new one, would the flow of page rank outperform any penalty associated with the site? (The old domain only has a PR of 2). Anyone like my idea of starting over, rather than trying to "recover?" I thank you all in advance for your time and attention. I don't take it for granted.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RCNOnlineMarketing0 -
Domain registered with US provider; hosted with UK - SEO effects?
My boss wants me to register a domain with a US company. However, most of our customers are in the UK. Though I would host any future website using a UK hosting provider, I don't know if registering the domain with a US provider would make any difference SEO-wise?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JacobFunnell0 -
Is there any negative SEO effect of having comma's in URL's?
Hello, I have a client who has a large ecommerce website. Some category names have been created with comma's in - which has meant that their software has automatically generated URL's with comma's in for every page that comes beneath the category in the site hierarchy. eg. 1 : http://shop.deliaonline.com/store/music,-dvd-and-games/dvds-and-blu_rays/ eg. 2 : http://shop.deliaonline.com/store/music,-dvd-and-games/dvds-and-blu_rays/action-and-adventure/ etc... I know that URL's with comma's in look a bit ugly! But is there 'any' SEO reason why URL's with comma's in are any less effective? Kind Regs, RB
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RichBestSEO0