1st Ecommerce site got penalized, can we start a 2nd one?
-
Hello,
A client's first site got penalized by Goolge Penguin. It has recovered through cleaning up backlinks, but not to where it was before. It is 2nd and 3rd for several money keywords, but is far less successful than before penalization.
We are starting a second site. Here's the important steps to mention
The new site shows up first for it's domain name, and it has 30 pages indexed. It shows up NOWHERE for our leading search term. Out other site has a blog post that is 3rd for that search term.
We are using new categories and new organization.
We are using a different cart solution
We are adding all unique content
The home pages and some of the product pages are very thorough. We are adding comprehensive products like nothing else in the industry (10X)
We plan on adding a very comprehensive blog, but haven't started yet.
We've added the top 100 products so far. Our other store has 500.
There's a lot of spam in the industry, so sites are slow to rank.
Our category descriptions are 500 words
Again, all unique content. No major errors in Moz Campaign tools
Just a few categories so far, we're going to add many more.
Same Google Analytics account as our other site
It looks like we should eventually be on page 3 for our major search term. Again, we're nowhere for anything right now.
...
Have you seen that Google will not rank a second site because it's from the same company and Google Analytics account, or does Google let you rank 2 sites in the same industry? We are hoping it's just slow to rank.
If you can rank 2 sites, what are your best recommendations to help show up?
Thanks.
-
If you launch a duplicate site, Google will sniff it out and neither site will rank because they will treat them as one site with duplicate content. I had an issue like this for 2 legitimate sites with the same content and different brands. When we went with cross domain canonicals, we started ranking in a big way.
Without improving Backlinks, Content Quality and UX, your site will not achieve it's old rankings. The site was getting ranked because of link spam, and when those links spammy links go bye-bye your rankings go with them.
With the new "kinder & gentler" penguin, stick to 1 site and focus on making the current site awesome and acquiring high quality backlinks.
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
-
What would you say is hurting this site, Penguin or Panda?
Would you say this is both Penguin and Panda and no penalty has ever been lifted? What would be your general recommendations for this site? seWnoQm
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Can the disavow tool INCREASE rankings?
Hi Mozzers, I have a new client who has some bad links in their profile that are spammy and should be disavowed. They rank on the first page for some longer tail keywords. However, we're aiming at shorter, well-known keywords where they aren't ranking. Will the disavow tool, alone, have the ability to increase rankings (assuming on-site / off-site signals are better than competition)? Thanks, Cole
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ColeLusby0 -
Blogger relationship - One Off VS periodic monthly blogging (which is best)
Good day all, I am interested in building relationships with my bloggers (i.e...people that are interested in my website and blog about it regularly). I would also propose to them the idea of blogging about our page regularly, perhaps recurring monthly. If the strategy is in place, could receiving links from the same bloggers each month cause any negative SEO effects? Thanks for your input.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | 90miLLA0 -
Do some sites get preference over others by Google just because? Grandfathered theory
So I have a theory that Google "grandfathers" in a handful of old websites from every niche and that no matter what the site does, it will always get the authority to rank high for the relevant keywords in the niche. I have a website in the crafts/cards/printables niche. One of my competitors is http://printable-cards.gotfreecards.com/ This site ranks for everything... http://www.semrush.com/info/gotfreecards.com+(by+organic) Yet, when I go to visit their site, I notice duplicate content all over the place (extremely thin content, if anything at all for some pages that rank for highly searched keywords), I see paginated pages that should be getting noindexed, bad URL structure and I see an overall unfriendly user experience. Also, the backlink profile isn't very impressive, as most of the good links are coming from their other site, www.got-free-ecards.com. Can someone tell me why this site is ranking for what it is other than the fact that it's around 5 years old and potentially has some type of preference from Google?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com0 -
Can you have too many NOINDEX meta tags?
Hi, Our magento store has a lot of duplicate content issues - after trying various configurations with canonicals, robots, we decided it best and easier to manage to implement Meta NOINDEX tags to the pages that we wish the search engines to ignore. There are about 10000 URL's in our site that can be crawled - 6000 are Meta No Index - and 3000 odd are index follow. There is a high proportion of Meta No Index tags - can that harm our SEO efforts? thanks, Ben
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | bjs20100 -
Is my competitor up to no good? Strange site-explorer results.
I'm researching a competitor using site explorer and the seomoz toolbar and getting some strange results. When you search by the domain name in site explorer you get no results, but the toolbar shows 170K incoming links. http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=www.augustagreenlawns.com I noticed the top referring page was a strange internal url so I ran that through site explorer and discovered 19 links.. When you put the strange link in a browser, it redirects to the home url;.. At this url the toolbar shows 220 links and semoz shows 19 http://www.augustagreenlawns.com/?xid_78e7f=0f2a64344c8de6bdf2d8cdf8de93ea5c http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=www.augustagreenlawns.com%2F%3Fxid_78e7f%3D0f2a64344c8de6bdf2d8cdf8de93ea5c What is up with that url? What are they doing? This is a site ranking #1 for my local search term even though he has about 50 pages of almost duplicate content. See link below. I'm really scratching my head here. http://www.augustagreenlawns.com/home.php?all=categories
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | dwallner0 -
Can our white hat links get a bad rap when they're alongside junk links busted by Panda?
My firm has been creating content for a client for years - video, blog posts and other references. This client's web vendor has been using bad links and link farms to bolster rank for key phrases - successfully. Until last week when Google slapped them. They have been officially warned on WMT for possibly using artificial or unnatural links to build PageRank. They went from page one of the most popular term in Chicago for their industry where they had been for over a year - to page 8 - overnight. Other less generic terms that we were working on felt the sting as well. I was aware of and had warned the client of the possibility of repercussions from these black hat tactics (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-google-makes-liars-out-of-the-good-guys-in-seo#jtc170969), but didn't go as far as to recommend they abandon them. Now I'm wondering if one of our legitimate sites (YoChicago.com), which has more than its share of the links into the client site is being considered a bad link. All of our links are legitimate, i.e., anchor text equals description of destination, video links describe the entity that is linked to. Our we vulnerable? Any insight would be appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mikescotty0 -
How many times should one submit the same article to various websites? 1 time? 10 times? What is okay to do with the most recent Panda update?'
For link-building purposes, seemingly it was okay to post the same article to multiple sites for links in the past. However, after the most recent Panda update our thought is that this may not be a good practice. So the question is, how many times is okay to submit an article for link building purposes. Should you always only submit to one site? Is it okay to do more than once? What is the right way to submit for link-building in Google's eyes? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Robertnweil10