Another Penalty Question - Should I Start from Scratch?
-
I've seen many questions on google penalties recently. Not really sure where to go from here. I realised a year or so we would be living on borrowed time with our link building methods. We have been really successful in the past and are keen to build a site that has a bit more longevity.
We have not received a warning from google but have lost pretty much all of our ranking for everything.
My question is with our backlink profile as it is. Building links from various blog networks for the past 3 years. Is it just worth rebranding and starting from scratch rather than trying to get over a million links removed?
We have a lot of content that I guess could be classed as spam. Should I really remove all of the content? or leave it running as we are still getting some traffic from other marketing activities.
Or should I just get a new domain and transfer all the decent content?
-
Hi David,
When did the drop in rankings take place? After the blog network deindexation? After the latest Panda release? After Penguin?
From the way you've phrased your question, it sounds like you know the answer already. You have a lot of spammy content, lots of problematic links, and want to do things, as you phrased it, for a bit more longevity.
It sounds to me it'll be more cost efficient to start from scratch, do it properly this time, building with long term goals and strategy regarding site design, content creation, and link building, than to clean up everything and work from there.
Hope this helps,
Mark
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
-
Meta Data Question
Hi There, I am working on the umbraco CMS and we have a Menu page which sits under one page on the CMS. When accessing this page on the front end and navigating between the food menu / drinks menu, the url changes depending on which content you are on, however i have only one place to input a meta title and description meaning that it is seeing them as duplicate content as both the drinks menu url and food menu url are showing the same meta data. Hopefully this makes sense, does anyone have anything similair where a url change happens when content within the page changes.
Technical SEO | | AlexStanleyGK0 -
If a URL canonically points to another link, is that URL indexed?
Hi, I have two URL both talking about keyword phrase 'counting aggregated cells' The first URL has canonical link pointing to the second URL, but if one searches for 'counting aggregated cells' both URLs are shown in the results. The first URL is the pdf, and i need only second URL (the landing page) to be shown in the search results. The canonical links should tell Google which URL to index, i don't understand why both URLs are present in search results? Is 'noindex' for the first URL only solution? I am using Yoast SEO for my website. Thank you for the answers.
Technical SEO | | Chemometec0 -
Curious Keyword Tags Question...
In 2012, we got hit with something... I have always assumed Panda... We have hundreds of thousands of products on our site. Prior to the traffic drop, our old site design listed a small number of keywords tags on the product pages. About 10 or so... After the site re-design, we allowed all of the keyword tags to appear on these product pages and also linked them to our search results pages. I know that one thing this did is cause a lot of these Search Results pages to be indexed. But our traffic has been constantly declining since then... I wonder what would happen if I just went back to the old with a smaller number of keywords listed and not linked? Any thoughts? Thanks! Craig
Technical SEO | | TheCraig0 -
Google Enterprise Search Questions
Hi Everybody, A client has asked me to take a look at Google Enterprise Search for them. It has been a few years since I last fooled around with implementing a Google search box on a website, and that was the free version which included off-site results in the results. This appears to be the main page describing the paid product: http://www.google.com/enterprise/search/ I have three questions: The search testing function on the above page doesn't seem to be working. I'm typing in a URL and search term, as prompted, and the page is simply refreshing. It never provides me an example set of results. Is it working for you? This client has a moderately large e-commerce site (about 200 products). Have you implemented Google enterprise search on such a site and are you happy with its performance? The goal here is to let users search for a topic and be returned both product and informational pages. How well does this tool do this? Am I going to need to know any special types of coding (beyond html/css) to implement this? If so, what are they? If you have experience with this product, I would surely appreciate your feedback. Thank you!
Technical SEO | | MiriamEllis0 -
301 Redirect domain with penalty
Wondering if I could get a few views on this please... I have added an affiliate store to a domain I own, however I forgot to noindex the product pages which were duplicate content of the merchants. Despite a good deal of backlink building the site will not do much in the engines at all, doesn't even come up on the first few pages for it's own name! This suggests to me that I have a duplicate content penalty. Try as I may I cannot get it removed so am thinking of cloning the domain to a new domain, however, I do not want to lose the links I collected so I am planning on 301ing them. While I will not get all the link power moved over, I should at least get credit for some of them which will kick start the new domain. Can anyone forsee any potential issues with doing this? Is there a danger of 301ing a site with a penalty that the penalty would be carried over? I know there is no penalty on the links, no WMT warnings etc, it is the content causing the issue. Thanks, Carl
Technical SEO | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
Is it panda, pengiun, ad penalty?
I'm trying to figure out why my google traffic is going down... I see that back in Feb and then March 2011 it started to drop, which I assume was pengiun. I saw a gradual comeback in traffic until March 2012, which I assume the second drop was another pengiun update. The decline continued gradually until I saw a big drop in October 2012 which is completely dropping off in the past month today. I recreated my website on wordpress, improving content and removing google ads. Relaunched a few weeks ago and still see a big drop. Any idea what happened? I only got a message from google about a large traffic drop in march 2012 and a 404 error increase recently when I launched the new site which I fixed with 301 and removing media attachment pages that were indexed that gave a 404. Once concern is I have no idea if I have a problem with pengiun. Could I have a problem with too many links coming from my blog or soicial network? What's acceptable number of back links to not be spam? If you add pages in the blogroll is this thought of as spam with pengiun? website: http://www.dashinfashion.com Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | dashinfashion0 -
301 Redirect Questions
I have a site I built on a wisiwig editing platform that will not allow a 301 redirect. The site has already been remade and I need to point it to another domain. To do the redirect, can I change it to another domain host that will allow a 301 or will that make me loose the authority of the site? I may not be able to move the content of the site. Please help.
Technical SEO | | photoseo10 -
How to handle a merge with another site
I own a gaming site at legendzelda.net Recently a site zelda-temple.net wanted to merge communities and sites. We pretty much scrapped their content (a lot was articles I already had topics on), merged the user databases, and redirected the domain to mine. What is the best seo way to redirect that domain. I tried to set up a 301 on the entire domain to gain all the backlinks that site had (A LOT) but it seems as if a lot are not being picked up by the open site explorer and other tools. Advice?
Technical SEO | | webfeatseo0