Old site penalised, we moved: Shall we cut loose from the old site. It's curently 301 to new site.
-
Hi,
We had a site with many bad links pointing to it (.co.uk). It was knocked from the SERPS.
We tried to manually ask webmasters to remove links.Then submitted a Disavow and a recon request.
We have since moved the site to a new URL (.com) about a year ago. As the company needed it's customer to find them still. We 301 redirected the .co.uk to the .com
There are still lots of bad links pointing to the .co.uk.
The questions are:
#1 Do we stop the 301 redirect from .co.uk to .com now? The .co.uk is not showing in the rankings. We could have a basic holding page on the .co.uk with 'we have moved' (No link). Or just switch it off.
#2 If we keep the .co.uk 301 to the .com, shall we upload disavow to .com webmasters tools or .co.uk webmasters tools. I ask this because someone else had uploaded the .co.uk's disavow list of spam links to the .com webmasters tools. Is this bad?
Thanks in advance for any advise or insight!
-
- Just to add to this, I'd look at the backlink profile and see the ratio of good to bad. If it's nothing but terrible links, I'd kill the 301 redirect. Though honestly at this point any damage that's done has probably already been done. Do you see any notice of penalty in WMT? If so definitely kill the 301. If not, and there are some good links, probably just move forward. If there are any pages with particularly good/bad ratios, you can do page-level redirects rather than domain-level redirects.
If you have no reason to believe you're under penalty, it's probably best to simply move forward. Try to have the worst of the worst removed, build or re-build links to the .com, and work on getting legitimate links going forward. It's all very hard to say without looking at the site or the links, but hopefully this is helpful.
- Keep the disavow on the .com as long as spammy links are still more-or-less pointing (albeit through a 301) to your site.
-
Without seeing the data in detail, I'd have to give a pretty general answer: If your old site has a poor DA, been penalized, or is itself spammy, then having it redirect to a new site is only one step better than just staying on the old site. When you redirect, you're passing link-juice from website A to website B; both bad and good. It's the same reason why you disavow bad links in the first place, though in this case, the redirect is at least under your control.
Anything that points to your new site factors in its overall stats. It sounds like your old site is hindering your attempt to break away from the bad links. My recommendation would be to cut the redirect, and only reinstall the redirect when you've cleaned up website A.
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
-
Has Anyone Encountered This Old Meta Tag and Know It's Past Function?
name="url" content="http://www.mysite.com/"> I've never personally seen it used until I saw a site using it this past weekend...I cannot find any old documentation on the purpose if this tag either.Any insights or direction would truly appreciated!Many thanks, T 😎
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | talexanderyano0 -
Community Discussion - What's the ROI of "pruning" content from your ecommerce site?
Happy Friday, everyone! 🙂 This week's Community Discussion comes from Monday's blog post by Everett Sizemore. Everett suggests that pruning underperforming product pages and other content from your ecommerce site can provide the greatest ROI a larger site can get in 2016. Do you agree or disagree? While the "pruning" tactic here is suggested for ecommerce and for larger sites, do you think you could implement a similar protocol on your own site with positive results? What would you change? What would you test?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MattRoney2 -
My Site name changed. Why does sometimes new name, sometimes old name show in Google.
My website name has changed in the title, but only shows up sometimes in the SERPs. What can I do to ensure the new name is the name that always shows up? It's been a month since the change and we have submitted a new sitemap. Here's one example: http://www.building.govt.nz/blc-building-act. In Google (for New Zealand building code) it shows up as Building Act - Department of Building and Housing. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DanielleNZ0 -
Guest Posting Campaign For New Site
Hi looking at doing a large guest post campaign for a new site (no authority) of mine. In total the plan is to distribute 50 high quality articles to other blogs in the same vertical. The goal is to kick start my link building campaign doing this. However I know that Google has been slamming down on guest posts: http://searchengineland.com/guest-post-google-penalty-187707 AND https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/guest-blogging/ What are some ways of doing guest posting and reducing the risk. Will keeping anchor-text brand based, be the best option? Kind Regards, Mark
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mikey0081 -
Do Q&A 's work for SEO
If I create a good community in my particular field on my SEO site and have a quality Q&A section like this etc (ripping of MOZ's idea here sorry, I hope it's ok) will the long term returns be worth the effort of creating and man ageing this. Is the user created content of as much use as I think it will be?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mark_baird0 -
Why my site it's not being indexed?
Hello.... I got to tell that I feel like a newbie (I am, but know I feel like it)... We were working with a client until january this year, they kept going on their own until september that they contacted us again... Someone on the team that handled things while we were gone, updated it´s robots.txt file to Disallow everything... for maybe 3 weeks before we were back in.... Additionally they were working on a different subdomain, the new version of the site and of course the didn't block the robots on that one. So now the whole site it's been duplicated, even it´s content, the exact same pages exist on the suddomain that was public the same time the other one was blocked. We came in changes the robots.txt file on both server, resend all the sitemaps, sent our URL on google+... everything the book says... but the site it´s not getting indexed. It's been 5 weeks now and no response what so ever. We were highly positioned on several important keywords and now it's gone. I now you guys can help, any advice will be highly appreciated. thanks Dan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | daniel.alvarez0 -
If it's not in Webmaster Tools, is it Duplicate Title
I am showing a lot of errors in my SEOmoz reports for duplicate content and duplicate titles, many of which appear to be related to capitalization vs non-capitalization in the URL. Case in point, if a URL contains a lower character, such as: http://www.gallerydirect.com/art/product/allyson-krowitz/distinct-microstructure-i as opposed to the same URL having an upper character in the structure: http://www.gallerydirect.com/art/product/allyson-krowitz/distinct-microstructure-I I am finding that some of the internal links on the site use the former structure and other links use the latter structure. These show as duplicate title/content in the SEOmoz reports, but they don't appear as duplicate titles in Webmaster Tools. My question is, should I try to work with our developers to create a script to change all of the content with cap letters in the destination links internally on the site, or is this a non-issue since it doesn't appear in Webmaster Tools?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sbaylor0 -
Is Google taking longer to rank new sites?
We run a lot of "niche blogs" and websites focused on fairly non-competitive keywords. At the start of the year, we used to be able to put up websites and be able to achieve almost instant rankings on these sites. However, recently, it seems to be taking a lot longer for these sites to rank. It also seems to be taking longer for Google to index links. Is this a recent change in Google to protect against spam and help filter out the lower quality sites? Has anyone else noticed this or is it just me?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ukss19840
