Penguin recovery, no manual action. Are our EMD sites killing our brand site?
-
Hi guys,
Our brand site (http://urban3d.net) has been seeing steady decline due to algorithm updates for the past two years.
Our previous SEO company engaged in some black-hat link building which has hurt us very badly. We have recently re-launched the site, with better design, better content, and completed a disavow of hundreds of bad links.
The site is technically indexed, but is still nowhere in the SERPs after months of work to recover it by our internal marketing team.
The last SEO company also told us to build EMD sites for our core services, which we did:
My question is - could these EMD sites now hurting us even further and stopping our main brand site from ranking? Our plan is to rescue our brand site, with a view to retiring these outlier sites. However, with no progress on the brand site, we can't afford to remove these site (which are ranking). It seems a bit chicken and egg.
Any advice would be very much appreciated.
Aidan, Urban 3D
-
Hi Erica, & Alan below...
Thank you both very much for taking the time to respond to my query. It's as much as we suspected, and it's great to get your expert views on this.
We will take your advice on board and go forth, and clean-up! Oh to have a time machine.
Thanks again guys, have a great week/weekend.
Aidan
-
I'm going to reinforce what Erica has stated.
Even a quick 30 second check reveals your main site and your http://3dvisualisation.co.uk/ site are competing for the same focus. That is both cross-site cannibalization (meaning Google would have to figure out which of the two deserves higher ranking through their imperfect multi-algorithm environment) and in direct violation of Google policies where you are attempting to have two sites rank for the same phrases.
Now - having said that, there's no way to know if THAT issue is the sole cause, a main cause, or even a contributing cause to your current problems. SEO is vastly complicated and involves many different signals and factors.
However you can be sure that the current multi-site approach is extremely toxic. The best practice solution would be to take those individual focus sites and 301 redirect all of them to their appropriate main site pages. But ONLY if you don't also have toxic links pointing to THOSE sites.
And if there ARE bad links to those, just kill those sites dead.
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go and vomit because of the fact that some genius SEO company foisted a horrific ranking "method" on your unsuspecting business.
-
We've definitely seen a lot of evidence that EMDs do not work the way they once did, and they could very well be hurting your rankings for your main domain. Dr. Pete wrote a great post about this a while ago that's still very applicable. Seems like since your products are related, it would be much better to integrate the sites together and put them in a subfolder of your main domain instead of separate sites. You'd, of course, want to 301 redirect and all that jazz to maintain most of your link equity and ranking signals.
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
-
SEO audit for ccTLD sites
Hi.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOSanna
My customer has sites with Country code TLDs (e.g. https://sample.fr, https://sample.fi and https://sample.en) and I'm supposed to perform SEO audit for them. Is there any way to perform audit at the same time for all versions? Can I perform audit e.g. just for https://sample or do I have to run every .fr, .fi and .en separately in multiple tools I use? Thanks much in advance!0 -
Large Site - Complete Site URL Change and How to Preserver Organic Rankings/Traffic
Hello Community, What is your experience with site redesign when it comes to preserving the traffic? If a large enterprise website has to go through a site-wide enhancement (resulting in change of all URLs and partial content), what do you expect from Organic rankings and traffic? I assume we will experience a period that Google needs to "re-orientate" itself with the new site, if so, do you have similar experience and tips on how to minimize the traffic loss? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | b.digi0 -
Ranking EMD to 301 for branding is it better to leave it as or 301 it?
We have a client about to enroll with us for SEO. The client has about 50 EMD sites, out of which 9 are ranking. An EMD has [Exact] match anchoring naturally, the sites in question are all EMDs the link profiles show it. The client wants to 301 the EMDs to a brand page.. We would want to 301, 9 EMD sites to the new site. Here is the thing, if the site domain has an exact match to the anchor text profile, when we 301 the page to www.brand.com/EMD will the link profile matter? One of the EMDs is on page one spot 2 if we do this change, will Google look at the new brand page (www.brand.com/EMD) as an unnatural link profile?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bryan_Loconto0 -
Site speed tests
In webmaster tools my site is showing that it is taking longer and longer to load, and it has now doubled. Is there a way to check which pages are the problem? The site is quite large so I can't check them one at a time.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
Need your thoughts on my site
Hi, This is my site: http://hemorrhoidssuccess.com/ I have got some decent natural links with a mix of different anchor texts. My main keyword is "Hemorrhoids Treatment", And i got very less exact match anchor texts. Now i was able to rank for "Top Hemorrhoid Treatment" on #2 Page, but i was not in the index for the my main keyword "Hemorrhoids Treatment". Can you review my site and let me know, what i am missing? Do i need to get more links? If so with what anchor texts? Will be waiting for your replies.. Thanks in Advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Vegitss
Dhee0 -
Do I have to tell WBT site moved to a subdirectory on another internal site?
I am moving content from one site to another and redirecting the DNS from www.oldsite.com to www.newsite.com/old-site. I have put the 301 in place but I wanted to make sure I have to also tell Webmaster Tools to change the old site to the new domain? We still want the old domain name to answer and redirect to www.newsite.com/old-site. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GeorgeLaRochelle0 -
Hit by Penguin, Can I move the content from the old site to a new domain and start again with the same content which is high quality
I need some advice please. My website got the unnatural links detected message and was hit by penguin.. hard. Can I move the content from the current domain to a new domain and start again or does the content need to be redone also. I will obviously turn of the old domain once its moved. The other option is to try and identify the bad links and change my anchor profile which is a hit and miss task in my opinion. Would it not be easier just to identify the good links pointing to the old domain and get those changed to point to the new domain with better anchors. thanks Warren
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | warren0071 -
Is the Penguin algorithmic penalty on a page basis or a site basis?
Just wondering if there has been any clarification of whether the Penguin algorithmic penalty is on a Page basis or a Site basis? In other words, is it all or nothing?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | darkgreenguy0