Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Penalised by Google - Should I Redirect to a new domain?
-
Last month my rankings dropped a couple of pages on Google and am no longer receiving as many visits from Google as I used to. It's coming up to summer which is the time my business naturally picks up yet I can't fix this problem.
I have a crazy idea of redirecting my established site onto a new domain in hopes that the penalty would be removed.
I have tried removing any manipulative links yet my ranking are not coming back.
Anyone had success in redirecting to a new domain?
-
I would definitely NOT redirect a domain that received an unnatural link penalty to a new domain that you're starting fresh on. I wouldn't host that new domain on the same C-block either.
If you were running from the cops would you call them and let them know that you cut your hair, changed your clothes and got a new car?
-
Hi Todd,
Thanks for confirming the redirect will not solve the issue.
I received an unnatural link warning on March 22nd, and the penalty came into effect 2 weeks later even after removing the links.
My blog which is on a different sub domain has had a dramatic increase in SE traffic and I'm now thinking to start fresh on a new site and redirect the blog only.
-
It won't help. In fact, the search results are so finicky right now that you could probably redirect your domain to a competitor and get them penalized. Basically, if your rankings dropped on April 23rd - 24th you're probably not coming back any time soon.
It's not all bad though. Look at it as an opportunity to try out new marketing strategies. You could try going through your site and reducing bounce rates, increasing time on page, improving site speed etc, but honestly I'd work on other marketing techniques. Get a video or data visualization campaign going. Try to get some media mentions. Conduct some interviews and give some yourself.
Did you get an unnatural links warning in webmaster tools?
Goodluck
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
-
Spam Score & Redirecting Inbound Links
Hi, I recently downloaded a spreadsheet of inbound links to my client sites and am trying to 301 redirect the ones that are formatted incorrectly or just bad links in general (they all link to the site domain, but they used to have differently formatted urls on their old site, or the link URL in general has strange stuff on it). My question is, should I even bother redirecting these links if their spam score is a little high (i.e. 20-40%)? it already links to the existing domain, just with a differently formatted URL. I just want to make sure it goes to a valid URL on the site, but I don't want to redirect to a valid URL if it's going to harm the client's SEO. Also not sure what to do about the links with the --% spam score. I really appreciate any input as I don't have a lot of experience with how to deal with spammy links.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AliMac260 -
Sitewide nav linking from subdomain to main domain
I'm working on a site that was heavily impacted by the September core update. You can see in the attached image the overall downturn in organic in 2019 with a larger hit in September bringing Google Organic traffic down around 50%. There are many concerning incoming links from 50-100 obviously spammy porn-related websites to just plain old unnatural links. There was no effort to purchase any links so it's unclear how these are created. There are also 1,000s of incoming external links (most without no-follow and similar/same anchor text) from yellowpages.com. I'm trying to get this fixed with them and have added it to the disavow in the meantime. I'm focusing on internal links as well with a more specific question: If I have a sitewide header on a blog located at blog.domain.com that has links to various sections on domain.com without no-follow tags, is this a possible source of the traffic drops and algorithm impact? The header with these links is on every page of the blog on the previously mentioned subdomain. **More generally, any advice as to how to turn this around? ** The website is in the travel vertical. 90BJKyc
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ShawnW0 -
HOW!??! Homepage Ranking Dropped Completely out of Top 100 on Google....
So I'm competing for a very competitive keyword, and I've been on the bottom of page 2 for a while now, ranking for my homepage, which is very content rich and has GREAT links pointing to it. Out of nowhere, last week I dropped completely out of the top 100 or so, yet one of my article posts now ranks on page 6 or so for the same keyword. I have great authoritative links, my on-page is spot on, all of my articles are super super high quality, I don't understand how my homepage, which has ranked for the main keyword for months on page 2, can just completely drop out of the top 100 or so.... Can anyone help provide some insight?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | juicyresults0 -
Advice needed! How to clear a website of a Wordpress Spam Link Injection Google penalty?
Hi Guys, I am currently working on website that has been penalised by Google for a spam link injection. The website was hacked and 17,000 hidden links were injected. All the links have been removed and the site has subsequently been redesigned and re-built. That was the easy part 🙂 The problems comes when I look on Webmaster. Google is showing 1000's of internal spam links to the homepage and other pages within the site. These pages do not actually exist as they were cleared along with all the other spam links. I do believe though this is causing problems with the websites rankings. Certain pages are not ranking on Google and the homepage keyword rankings are fluctuating massively. I have reviewed the website's external links and these are all fine. Does anyone have any experience of this and can provide any recommendations / advice for clearing the site from Google penalty? Thanks, Duncan
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CayenneRed890 -
Dealing with links to your domain that the previous owner set up
Hey everyone, I rebranded my company at the end of last year from a name that was fairly unique but sounded like I cleaned headstones instead of building websites. I opted for a name that I liked, it reflected my heritage - however it also seems to be quite common. Anyway, I registered the domain name as it was available as the previous owner's company had been wound up. It's only been in the last week or two where I've managed to have a website on that domain and I've been tracking it's progress through Moz, Google & Bing Webmaster tools. Both the webmaster tools are reporting back that my site triggers 404 errors for some specific links. However, I don't have or have never used those links before. I think the previous owner might have created the links before he went bust. My question is in two parts. The first part is how do I find out what websites are linking to me with these broken URL's, and the second is will these 404'ing links affect my SEO? Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mickburkesnr0 -
Black hat : raising CTR to have better rank in Google
We all know that Google uses click-through-rate (CTR) as one of it is ranking factor. I came up with an idea in my mind. I would like to see if someone saw this idea before or tried it. If you search in Google for the term "SEO" for example. You will see the moz.com website in rank 3. And if you checked the source code you will see that result 3 is linking to this url: https://www.google.com.sa/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CDMQFjAC&url=https%3A%2F%2Fmoz.com%2Fbeginners-guide-to-seo&ei=F-pPVaDZBoSp7Abo_IDYAg&usg=AFQjCNEwiTCgNNNWInUJNibqiJCnlqcYtw That url will redirect you to seomoz.com Ok, what if we use linkbucks.com or any other cheap targeted traffic network and have a campaign that sends traffic to the url that I show you. Will that count as traffic from Google so it will increase the CTR from Google?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Mohtaref11 -
Why does expired domains still work for SEO?
Hi everyone I’ve been doing an experiment during more than 1 year to try to see if its possible to buy expired domains. I know its considered black hat, but like I said, I wanted to experiment, that is what SEO is about. What I did was to buy domains that just expired, immediately added content on a WP setup, filled it with relevant content to the expired domain and then started building links to other relevant sites from these domains.( Here is a pretty good post on how to do, and I did it in a similar way. http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2297718/How-to-Build-Links-Using-Expired-Domains ) This is nothing new and SEO:s has been doing it for along time. There is a lot of rumors around the SEO world that the domains becomes worthless after they expire. But after trying it out during more than 1 year and with about 50 different expired domains I can conclude that it DOES work, 100% of the time. Some of the domains are of course better than others, but I cannot see any signs of the expired domains or the sites i link to has been punished by Google. The sites im liking to ranks great ONLY with those links 🙂 So to the question: WHY does Google allow this? They should be able to see that a domain has been expired right? And if its expired, why dont they just “delete” all the links to that domain after the expiry date? Google is well aware of this problem so what is stopping them? Is there any one here that know how this works technically?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Sir0 -
Are expired domains for Godaddy backlinks already reset by googel ?
When does Google actual reset backlinks to a domain. If i am buying expired domains from godaddy action for linking purpose am i wasting my time.Also if that the case whats the point of buying expired domains with many links pointing to them. If the backlinks to the expired domain still show up under my Google webmaster tool window does that mean Google counts that link?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Ryguy870