Starting over after a Penguin Penalty
-
Hi,
Has anyone tried starting a new domain after being hit with a Penguin penalty? I'm considering the approach outlined here: https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2384644/can-you-safely-redirect-users-from-a-penguin-hit-site-to-a-new-domain.
In a nutshell, de-index the OLD site completely via Google's Removal Tool, and then relaunch old content under new domain.
This seems to have merit, unless Google keeps a hidden cache of content (or uses other sources like Wayback Machine). My concern is doing the above listed approach, but Google still passes the old links to the new domain.
We have great content, but too much spam (despite me removing a lot of the links + disavow).
Any feedback based on experience would be appreciated.
Thanks.
-
Pleasure. Keep me posted.
-
This helps a lot. Thank you. I'll update the results to help shed light on this.
Thanks again for your time.
-
Hey
This is tough and the article you link to covers many of the reasons why. Sure, there are penguin recoveries, but for every one of them I would venture there are ten sites still suffering. Many of these sites no longer have any (or many at least) dodgy links and it seems that algorithmic penalty is just lingering around. Will they see resolution when the algorithm updates and refreshes? At this point who knows? I don't think just because site A recovered you can make an assumption that site B will do the same.
In our experience we have seen sites really clean everything up and bounce back. We have seen sites clean everything up and not see resolution around the key pages / search terms all these years later. We have at least three folks we have worked with who don't want to change domain and who are waiting for the this somewhat overdue real time Penguin update.
It does not always seem very fair however we must accept that what is what is and look at solutions around that.
A new domain
We have seen some good results here. Sites that just could not recover using a new domain and bouncing back. We have seen this work with the same content when the other site is left up as a holding page (we have now moved). I don't think it hurts to just generally consider doing a refresh and renovation if you are going to move to a new site so you get all the on site signals 100% dialled in.
Your old site remains indexed. I would let all pages bar the homepage 404 to kill as many non homepage inbound links as possible but just have a good 404 page in place to let the user know what to do. I would likely disavow all the bad links to the old site as well so they are technically not considered.
Your new site will then exist on it's own merit so focus on getting any good links updated and just do good work on that site to make it as good as it can be. If you see keywords that are were previously 50+ jump into the 20s or so then you know you are on the right track.
My advice would be:
- clean up and disavow all links bad links to old site
- 404 all pages bar the homepage for the old site with a helpful 404 page
- add a nice little (unfollowed if you want) link to the new site
- freshen up the content and site so it is not an exact copy
- get any good links that you can updated to point at the new site
- track the old domain for a few terms to see if it does recover over time (so you can consider what to do with it then)
Experiment and report back
Ultimately you have to experiment. Keep that old site indexed. Freshen up the new one. Disavow and clean up the old links + keep an eye on the old one as it may well recover and give you more options (after careful analysis).
Much like the article you quote there is no hard and fast answer here. You have to make the best calls possible and review the results and keep tweaking.
Hope that helps!
Marcus
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
-
Remove Google penalty or make a new website, Which is better??
My local website was hit by google and I have done all steps to remove the penalty, But it's still not ranked. So it is better to make a new website with new content and start working on it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Dan_Brown10 -
Google penalty or what???
Hi, we have a blog site xxxxxxxxxxx.es, that yesterday dissapear from google ranks all of a sudden it only appears if you write xxxxxxxxx.es I have checked gogle webmaster tools and there are no manual actions, no messages. Also, we don't have much links pointing to this site. Webmaster tools show only 319 links. We don't understand what have happenned. Never see something similar. What do you think? Any help would be appreciated. How do you proceed in this cases? It doesn't seem to be a link problem. How do you know what kind of penalty do you have? Thank you. Update: Hi, the domain is www.crearcorreoelectronico.es I have check the majestic seo, ose, and wmt and get the links. We have some links that are not good, but are automatic ones, that some portals generate. Maybe is something related with the content. I don't know Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | teconsite1 -
Should I disavow without a manual penalty?
Hi all! I currently had someone remove about 70 bad backlinks pointing to our site. Is it worth disavowing the rest? We don't have any manual penalty or anything like that, but is it the sort of thing to use as a precautionary measure only? There are about 100 links in the disavow file that I had built. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | freeunlocks0 -
Our quilting site was hit by Panda/Penguin...should we start a second "traffic" site?
I built a website for my wife who is a quilter called LearnHowToMakeQuilts.com. However, it has been hit by Panda or Penguin (I’m not quite sure) and am scared to tell her to go ahead and keep building the site up. She really wants to post on her blog on Learnhowtomakequilts.com, but I’m afraid it will be in vain for Google’s search engine. Yahoo and Bing still rank well. I don’t want her to produce good content that will never rank well if the whole site is penalized in some way. I’ve overly optimized in linking strongly to the keywords “how to make a quilt” for our main keyword, mainly to the home page and I think that is one of the main reasons we are incurring some kind of penalty. First main question: From looking at the attached Google Analytics image, does anyone know if it was Panda or Penguin that we were “hit” by? And, what can be done about it? (We originally wanted to build a nice content website, but were lured in by a get rich quick personality to rather make a “squeeze page” for the Home page and force all your people through that page to get to the really good content. Thus, our avenge time on site per person is terrible and Pages per Visit is low at: 1.2. We really want to try to improve it some day. She has a local business website, Customcarequilts.com that did not get hit. Second question: Should we start a second site rather than invest the time in trying to repair the damage from my bad link building and article marketing? We do need to keep the site up and running because it has her online quilting course for beginner quilters to learn how to quilt their first quilt. We host the videos through Amazon S3 and were selling at least one course every other day. But now that the Google drop has hit, we are lucky to sell one quilting course per month. So, if we start a second site we can use that to build as a big content site that we can use to introduce people to learnhowtomakequilts.com that has Martha’s quilting course. So, should we go ahead and start a new fresh site rather than to repair the damage done by my bad over optimizing? (We’ve already picked out a great website name that would work really well with her personal facebook page.) Or, here’s a second option, which is to use her local business website: customcarequilts.com. She created it in 2003 and has had it ever since. It is only PR 1. Would this be an option? Anyway I’m looking for guidance on whether we should pursue repairing the damage and whether we should start a second fresh site or use an existing site to create new content (for getting new quilters to eventually purchase her course). Brad & Martha Novacek rnUXcWd
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BradNovi0 -
Penguin/Panda/Domain Purchase
If I move forward with the acquisition: 1. Should I, if there is a way, just acquire the domain and then attempt to unlink existing links? 2. Can I just buy the domain, completely kill the site, and then build again from scratch? Even if I do that, the links to the domain will still be out there. 3. Should I even move forward with the purchase if I know these tactics have been used? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dbuckles0 -
Where do I start? A little overwhelmed - Really appreciate any help.
Hello everyone, I was hoping to be able to get some advice if at all possible. I'm know there's some really skilled people on these forums. I'm not sure of the etiquette of posting links so if it's crossing the line to post the link of the site I'm working on please let me know. I was just hired as the Director of Digital Marketing for a decent sized company. I have a lot of experience with PPC, media buys and digital integration but unfortunately I'm a noob with SEO. I'm trying to learn as quickly as possible, and I'm reading everything I can (including everything I can find from Rand) The issue is that I have to start somewhere but there's so much that needs to be done that I'm getting a bit lost. We used to have 3 separate sites that ranked really well for our main keywords on Google, but with the growth of our company we consolidated the different market sites into one main one and 301'd the older ones. In doing so we lost nearly all of our search rankings. Our current site is: Http://www.GoldMaxUSA.com/ Does anyone have any advice on where to dive in here? I'm currently paying a ton each month for traffic through search PPC and contextual display, along with a bunch of geographically targeted brand awareness display campaigns, and I really need to show some progress on our organic search. Thanks in advance for any help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JFritton0 -
Google Penalty, Which one is hitting me?
Hello there SEOMOZ'ers, Just signed up for a Pro Account. Impressed with the trial. Just wondering is there any way to find out if you have fallen foul of a Google update, is there any way to know which you have fallen foul of or is the date it happens the only guide or pointer to what might have happened? My site was getting a reasonable amount of traffic for the last few years and was ranking well for my main search terms up till Feburary the 4th when the traffic fell by almost 50% ... and it has never really recovered. I thought it might be the Above the Fold Advertising penalty (or whatever it is called) because I had a lot of images linking elsewhere on my site, above the fold on my homepage, but I removed them about 4 weeks ago and the traffic still hasnt recovered. I've been using SEOMOZ to detect duplicate content and various other problems with my site since and fixing a good few of them each week. I have the main issues down from about 300 to about 20 which i think i have just fixed. I have also used Copyscape and found that some other websites had stolen some of my content, which i have since rewritten. I was ranking number 2 or 3 for my main keyword but dropped out of the top 100 in February, which is pretty frustrating at this stage. I don;t know if I have accidentally gone too far over optimising my site or what has happened. If anyone can give me some pointers I'd really appreciate it, if anyone can help me fix it I'll buy them a beer next time you are in Ireland! 🙂 Thanks, Shane
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shaneod0 -
Can backlinks negatively influence your ranking, or worse, cause a penalty?
Hello everbody! I am the owner of a price compare website and have been running it succesfully for over two years now. However, since february the news and articles section of our website lost a great deal of it's traffic. We did not completely lose traffic but only for items that were posted after february 2011. We have skilled content writers who do good research on the topics covered in our news section, i can honestly say we write our content for our visitors and not just for the search engines. We have investigated every part of our source code but we did not find anything there that was violating any guidelines. So my next guess was that maybe some incoming links could harm our news section. The most backlinks we receive are directed to our news and article section. These links are generally put on sites which use our RSS feed. There is just one website that we think could be the reason. It had included our RSS feed on each page which resulted in over 2,500,000 backlinks from a single domain which hosts a very poor quality website. We never considered it to be harmfull so we never did anything about it. My question is if this case could be the reason for the drop in traffic? kind regards, Jeroen from the Netherlands
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jeroenpf0