How About Moving My Site to Another Domain?
-
My website has been hit by a Google Penguin penalty. At this point, it seems very few websites have recovered from this penalty even after it was lifted.
That said, I'm still wondering if I should start a new website or my current one to another domain.
When I started my website, I registered the domain name http://www.thewebhostinghero.com
A few years later, I bought webhostinghero.com as it became available.
Actually, webhostinghero.com redirects traffic to thewebhostinghero.com at the registrar level. There are barely any links pointing to webhostinghero.com.
TheWebHostingHero.com is quite a big website with over 1400 pages and some very useful tools (http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/free-tools) that took me so long to develop, I just can't believe I'd have to throw it all out the window.
So that said, do you think it would be possible to move all or some of the content from thewebhostinghero.com to webhostinghero.com? Would that make sense? Would webhostinghero.com come out as a copy of thewebhostinghero.com since the domain is similar, etc.?
Of course, moving the content from thewebhostinghero.com to webhostinghero.com would have to be done without any 301/302 redirects to avoid passing bad link juice. At the same time, I don't want to end up with duplicate content on both domains.
-
I submitted a reconsideration request but it was denied. I'm still trying to find out where those bad links are cause I did a hell of a job at cleaning bad links and disavowing those I couldn't get removed. I must have missed a handful of links and I'm trying to find them but in the meantime, the website is still penalized.
Basically, I have strong doubt that any small website ever recovers from a Penguin penalty so I'm wondering if I'm wasting my money by maintaining this site.
-
Wow, this is a hard one.
There are several things to consider here:
- Have you tried fixing the penalty issue? Removing the links, using disavow tool and submitting a reconsideration request?
- If you did, have you waited long enough to say you haven't recovered from it?
- If you start from scratch using the other domain, remove the other one to avoid duplicate content, start with a new site completely. I would even try to redo the content.
- Does it worth it? How long will it take for the new site to reach what you have now with the penalized site?
- etc, etc.
It will be ultimately your decision and yours only. But consider all the pros/cons and first of all, try fixing the error. Redeem yourself, if that works, it will be so much better, and easier.
Hope that 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
-
Multisite domain
good morning I have a wordpress site I have activated the multisite, currently the site has a domain authority of 8, when I publish a post, it is indexed quite quickly, if I publish a post in a language other than the /es subdomain it takes 24 hours why? If the author domain is the same, why does the employee take longer to be indexed on Google? Thank you
Technical SEO | | alainscilly770 -
Site Not Being Indexed
Hey Everyone - I have a site that is being treated strangely by google (at least strange to me) The site has 24 pages in the sitemap - submitted to WMT'S over 30 days ago I've manually triggered google to crawl the homepage and all connecting links as well and submitted a couple individually. Google has been parked the indexing at 14 of the 24 pages. None of the unindexed URL's have Noindex or follow tags on them - they are clearly and easily linked to from other places on the site. The site is a brand new domain, has no manual penalty history and in my research has no reason to be considered spammy. 100% unique handwritten content I cannot figure out why google isn't indexing these pages. Has anyone encountered this before? Know any solutions? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | CRO_first0 -
Does my "spam" site affect my other sites on the same IP?
I have a link directory called Liberty Resource Directory. It's the main site on my dedicated IP, all my other sites are Addon domains on top of it. While exploring the new MOZ spam ranking I saw that LRD (Liberty Resource Directory) has a spam score of 9/17 and that Google penalizes 71% of sites with a similar score. Fair enough, thin content, bunch of follow links (there's over 2,000 links by now), no problem. That site isn't for Google, it's for me. Question, does that site (and linking to my own sites on it) negatively affect my other sites on the same IP? If so, by how much? Does a simple noindex fix that potential issues? Bonus: How does one go about going through hundreds of pages with thousands of links, built with raw, plain text HTML to change things to nofollow? =/
Technical SEO | | eglove0 -
Old domain still being crawled despite 301s to new domain
Hi there, We switched from the domain X.com to Y.com in late 2013 and for the most part, the transition was successful. We were able to 301 most of our content over without too much trouble. But when when I do a site:X.com in Google, I still see about 6240 URLs of X listed. But if you click on a link, you get 301d to Y. Maybe Google has not re-crawled those X pages to know of the 301 to Y, right? The home page of X.com is shown in the site:X.com results. But if I look at the cached version, the cached description will say :This is Google's cache of Y.com. It is a snapshot of the page as it appeared on July 31, 2014." So, Google has freshly crawled the page. It does know of the 301 to Y and is showing that page's content. But the X.com home page still shows up on site:X.com. How is the domain for X showing rather than Y when even Google's cache is showing the page content and URL for Y? There are some other similar examples. For instance, you would see a deep URL for X, but just looking at the <title>in the SERP, you can see it has crawled the Y equivalent. Clicking on the link gives you a 301 to the Y equivalent. The cached version of the deep URL to X also shows the content of Y.</p> <p>Any suggestions on how to fix this or if it's a problem. I'm concerned that some SEO equity is still being sequestered in the old domain.</p> <p>Thanks,</p> <p>Stephen</p></title>
Technical SEO | | fernandoRiveraZ1 -
Linking Domains in Open Site Explorer Report No Longer Exist. Help.
Hello to all, I have a number of Linking Domains on our Open Site Explorer Report that no longer exist. I've run URL checks on just a sample of the list, and found that approx. 35% of that sample are from now dead Linking Domains. Can someone help? If these Linking Domains are defunct, how can I remove these? Does Google reflect negatively on these dead Linking Domains in our SERPs? Has anyone experienced this before? What action did you take?
Technical SEO | | -Al-0 -
Buying a SERPs competitor domain / site
For a specific term, we have the potential opportunity to purchase the domain (complete with site) that sits just above us in the Google search results... The domain has reasonable page authority of 49, domain authority of 38 with 168 linking root domains - 311 total links... Would the most beneficial use of the domain be to retain the site content as is and incorporate a few relevant links back to our site or... 301 the entire domain?
Technical SEO | | digitalarts1 -
How to relate two sites Domain Authority
Hi All I have been looking at advertising on some fashion blogs for our online store. Both sites have decent traffic though A is stronger than the B with more than double the traffic, Therefore given equal relevance to our business sunglasses (www.pretavoir.co.uk) it would be fair to predict that A would result in double the number of conversions.. However another interesting aspect to making a decision on which sites to advertise is their Domain Authority and how much link juice they can pass. Therefore my question is this; Putting aside any potential click through traffic, if site A Domain Authority is 70 (link to be on homepage) and site B Domain Authority is 35 is the value of site A double that of site B or is there a less linear relationship (just as with page rank). Site A are charging 500$ per year for an advertising link and Site B 100$ per year would it better business to take 5 x Site Bs or is the linkjuice passed by one DA 70 site worth more? Your thoughts would be most appreciated..
Technical SEO | | seanmccauley0 -
How to setup tumblr blog.site.com to give juice to site.com
Is it possible to get a subdomain blog.site.com that is on tumblr to count toward site.com. I hoped I could point it in webmaster tools like we do www but alas no. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | oznappies0