Penguin recovery, no manual action. Are our EMD sites killing our brand site?

[aidancass]

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:

http://3dvisualisation.co.uk/

http://propertybrochure.com/

http://kitchencgi.com/

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

[aidancass]

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

[AlanBleiweiss]

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.

[EricaMcGillivray]

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.