Hit by Penguin, Can I move the content from the old site to a new domain and start again with the same content which is high quality
-
I need some advice please.
My website got the unnatural links detected message and was hit by penguin.. hard. Can I move the content from the current domain to a new domain and start again or does the content need to be redone also. I will obviously turn of the old domain once its moved.
The other option is to try and identify the bad links and change my anchor profile which is a hit and miss task in my opinion.
Would it not be easier just to identify the good links pointing to the old domain and get those changed to point to the new domain with better anchors.
thanks
Warren
-
it has hundreds, but my concern is google will always have a flag saying this site has done some bad stuff in the past.
-
It sounds like you have your work cut out either way you have to either
- Get the bad links identified and removed
- or get the good links pointed to the new domain
it boils down to which one would be the easier of the two. One other thing to note is if you have build you brand around the old site , you have to start from scratch on the new one.
-
It really depends on how much unnatural links we're talking about. Hundreds? Thousands?
If your current site doesn't have too many backlinks (aside from the spam), moving to a new domain could work. Just check to see first whether your content is being scraped on other sites, as they may outrank your new site if so. Not sure how canonicals would work in a Penguin situation.
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
-
Does redirecting from a "bad" domain "infect" the new domain?
Hi all, So a complicated question that requires a little background. I bought unseenjapan.com to serve as a legitimate news site about a year ago. Social media and content growth has been good. Unfortunately, one thing I didn't realize when I bought this domain was that it used to be a porn site. I've managed to muck out some of the damage already - primarily, I got major vendors like Macafee and OpenDNS to remove the "porn" categorization, which has unblocked the site at most schools & locations w/ public wifi. The sticky bit, however, is Google. Google has the domain filtered under SafeSearch, which means we're losing - and will continue to lose - a ton of organic traffic. I'm trying to figure out how to deal with this, and appeal the decision. Unfortunately, Google's Reconsideration Request form currently doesn't work unless your site has an existing manual action against it (mine does not). I've also heard such requests, even if I did figure out how to make them, often just get ignored for months on end. Now, I have a back up plan. I've registered unseen-japan.com, and I could just move my domain over to the new domain if I can't get this issue resolved. It would allow me to be on a domain with a clean history while not having to change my brand. But if I do that, and I set up 301 redirects from the former domain, will it simply cause the new domain to be perceived as an "adult" domain by Google? I.e., will the former URL's bad reputation carry over to the new one? I haven't made a decision one way or the other yet, so any insights are appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gaiaslastlaugh0 -
301 old site to new site?
I have client with an old site - www.bestfamilylawattorney.com - which had a lot of spammy links (and bad rankings). Instead of fixing those issues, we started a new URL - www.berenjifamilylaw.com - with new content and redesign. Should I do a 301 redirect from old to new domain? If the old site was being penalized, would a 301 transfer that penalty? I just want to make sure I don't end up hurting the new site after doing all the work to start fresh. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mrodriguez14400 -
How to build PA and DA for a new site?
Hi Guys, Any good tips on how to build PA and DA for a new website about 3 months old now, and our DA is at 5 while PA 1. Any good ideas from past experiences on how to build these up? Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | edward-may0 -
Consolidating two different domains to point at same site, duplicate content penalty?
I have two websites that are extremely similar and want to consolidate them into one website by pointing both domain names at one website. is this going to cause any duplicate content penalties by having two different domain names pointing at the same site? Both domains get traffic so i don't want to just discontinue one of the domains.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ron100 -
Following Penguin 2.0 hit in May, my site experienced another big drop on August 13th
Hi everyone, my website experienced a 30% drop in organic traffic following the Penguin 2.0 update in May. This was the first significant drop that the site has experienced since 2007, and I was initially concerned that the new website design I released in March was partly to blame. On further investigation, many spammy sites were found to be linking to my website, and I immediately contacted the sites, asked for the removal of the sites, before submitting a disavow file to Google. At the same time, I've had some great content written for my website over the last few months, which has attracted over 100 backlinks from some great websites, as well as lots of social media interaction. So, while I realise my site still needs a lot of work, I do believe I'm trying my best to do things in the correct manner. However, on August 11th, I received a message in Google WMTs : Googlebot found an extremely high number of URLs on your site I studied the table of internal links in WMTs and found that Google has been crawling many URLs throughout my site that I didn't necessarily intend it to find i.e. lots of URLs with filtering and sorting parameters added. As a result, many of my pages are showing in WMTs as having over 300,000 internal links!! I immediately tried to rectify this issue, updating the parameters section in WMTs to tell Google to ignore many of the URLs it comes across that have these filtering parameters attached. In addition, since my access logs were showing that Googlebot was frequently crawling all the URLs with parameters, I also added some Disallow entries to robots.txt to tell Google and the other spiders to ignore many of these URLs. So, I now feel that if Google crawls my site, it will not get bogged down in hundreds of thousands of identical pages and just see those URLs that are important to my business. However, two days later, on August 13th, my site experienced a further huge drop, so its now dropped by about 60-70% of what I would expect at this time of the year! (there is no sign of any manual webspam actions) My question is - do you think the solutions I've put in place over the last week could be to blame for the sudden drop, or do you think I'm taking the correct approach, and that the recent drop is probably due to Google getting bogged down in the crawling process. I'm not aware of any subsequent Penguin updates in recent days, so I'm guessing that this issue is somehow due to the internal structure of my new design. I don't know whether to roll back my recent changes or just sit tight and hope that it sorts itself out over the next few weeks when Google has more time to do a full crawl and observe the changes I've made. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. My website is ConcertHotels.com. Many thanks Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mjk260 -
Essential items to consider when starting a new site in terms of SEO?
I've just launched a new site and have undertaken the following: Keyword friendly page titles Meta description Not a great deal of content on the site yet - but have a blog which we're trying to update as much as we can Analytics and Webmaster tools set up Dmoz submission Facebook, Twitter and Google+ page Google places set-up - waiting for postal pin I've signed up to here to help me to start building a link profile. However, would like to hear any more hints, tips or help on items I should be doing for a new site looking to move up rankings. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | savageseo0 -
Move webshop domain to the brand domain?
Hello, A client of mine has a brand with a website for over 10 years now.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Seeders
About 4 years ago the have opened a webshop on an other domain (like www.brandnamewebshop.com). At this moment the brand domain has a seomoz authority of 45.
The webshop domain authority is 25. The question:
Would it not be better to transfer the webshop to the brand domain because of the domain authority? If so, how can this be done the best way? With a 301?
I also think: what a loss of energy of building the authority on the other domain.
Is it an idea to use both domains for a webshop and rewrite the content? Or is there an other way to still make use of the built up domain authority? Would it really help the other domain when I make a 301 redirect (and make use of the pointing links to the webshop domain?). I hope somebody have some experience with this...
Looking forward to the possibilities! Gerjan0 -
Can you be penalized by a development server with duplicate content?
I developed a site for another company late last year and after a few months of seo done by them they were getting good rankings for hundreds of keywords. When penguin hit they seemed to benefit and had many top 3 rankings. Then their rankings dropped one day early May. Site is still indexed and they still rank for their domain. After some digging they found the development server had a copy of the site (not 100% duplicate). We neglected to hide the site from the crawlers, although there were no links built and we hadn't done any optimization like meta descriptions etc. The company was justifiably upset. We contacted Google and let them know the site should not have been indexed, and asked they reconsider any penalties that may have been placed on the original site. We have not heard back from them as yet. I am wondering if this really was the cause of the penalty though. Here are a few more facts: Rankings built during late March / April on an aged domain with a site that went live in December. Between April 14-16 they lost about 250 links, mostly from one domain. They acquired those links about a month before. They went from 0 to 1130 links between Dec and April, then back to around 870 currently According to ahrefs.com they went from 5 ranked keywords in March to 200 in April to 800 in May, now down to 500 and dropping (I believe their data lags by at least a couple of weeks). So the bottom line is this site appeared to have suddenly ranked well for about a month then got hit with a penalty and are not in top 10 pages for most keywords anymore. I would love to hear any opinions on whether a duplicate site that had no links could be the cause of this penalty? I have read there is no such thing as a duplicate content penalty per se. I am of the (amateur) opinion that it may have had more to do with the quick sudden rise in the rankings triggering something. Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rmsmall0