Starting Over with a new site - Do's and Don'ts?
-
After six months, we've decided to start over with a new website. Here's what I'm thinking. Please offer any constructive Do's or Don'ts if you see that I'm about to make a mistake.
Our original site,(call it mysite.com ) we have come to the conclusion, is never going to make a come back on Google. It seems to us a better investment to start over, then to to simply keep hoping. Quite honestly, we're freakin' tired of trying to fix this. We don't want to screw with it any more. We are creative people, and would much rather be building a new race car rather than trying to overhaul the engine in the old one.
We have the matching .net domain, mysite.net, which has been aged about 6 years with some fairly general content on a single page. There are zero links to mysite.net, and it was really only used by us for FTP traffic -- nothing in the SERPS for mysite.net.
Mysite.NET will be a complete redesign. All content and images will be totally redone. Content will be new, excellent writing, unique, and targeted. Although the subject matter will be similar to mysite.COM, the content, descriptions, keywords, images -- all will be brand spankin' new.
We will have a clean slate to begin the long painful link building process.We will put in the time, and bite the bullet until mysite.NET rules Google once again.
We'll change the URL in all of our Adwords campaigns mysite.net.
My questions are:
1. Mysite.com still gets some ok traffic from Bing. Can I leave mysite.com substantially intact, or does it need to go?
2. If I have "bad links" pointing to mysite.com/123.html what would happen if I 301 that page to mysite.NET/abc.html ? Does the "bad link juice" get passed on to the clean site? It would be a better experience for users who know our URL if they could be redirected to the new site.
3. Should we put Mysite.net on a different server in a different clean IP block? Or doesn't matter? We're willing to spend for the new server if it would help
4. What have I forgotten?
Cheers, all
-
1. Penguin is the problem. Have never received any notices from Google, but the drop corresponds exactly to the date.
2. Ok I hear you. I'll 301 it to a competitors site (it's a joke!)
3. Good point.
-
1. Mysite.com still gets some ok traffic from Bing. Can I leave mysite.com substantially intact, or does it need to go?
Have you determined if your Google problem is Penguin, Panda or something else? You can get a quick diagnosis here.
2. If I have "bad links" pointing to mysite.com/123.html what would happen if I 301 that page to mysite.NET/abc.html ?
BAM!
3. Should we put Mysite.net on a different server in a different clean IP block? Or doesn't matter? We're willing to spend for the new server if it would help.
It probably doesn't matter, but if you want to distance yourself from problems the new hosting might be a good idea. I would do it.
4. What have I forgotten?
The problem could be what you have NOT forgotten.....
....We will have a clean slate to begin the long painful link building process.
I see a very dangerous word..... "building". If that is your mentality you can get into penguin problems. I would replace that with "earning" and have every link something that was editorially given by people who thought that your site was awesome!
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
-
How will changing my website's page content affect SEO?
Our company is looking to update the content on our existing web pages and I am curious what the best way to roll out these changes are in order to maintain good SEO rankings for certain pages. The infrastructure of the site will not be modified except for maybe adding a couple new pages, but existing domains will stay the same. If the domains are staying the same does it really matter if I just updated 1 page every week or so, versus updating them all at once? Just looking for some insight into how freshening up the content on the back end pages could potentially hurt SEO rankings initially. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bankable1 -
Guest Posting Campaign For New Site
Hi looking at doing a large guest post campaign for a new site (no authority) of mine. In total the plan is to distribute 50 high quality articles to other blogs in the same vertical. The goal is to kick start my link building campaign doing this. However I know that Google has been slamming down on guest posts: http://searchengineland.com/guest-post-google-penalty-187707 AND https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/guest-blogging/ What are some ways of doing guest posting and reducing the risk. Will keeping anchor-text brand based, be the best option? Kind Regards, Mark
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mikey0081 -
How do I tell if competitor's links are good?
One strategy I have seen recommended over and over is to look at your competitor's back links and see if any could be relevant for your site and worth pursuing. My question is how do I evaluate a link and not end up pursuing some penalized site? I would guess checking for Google index is a good idea since some of the webmasters may not be aware they are penalized. Is it DA and whether they are indexed alone? Many sites I have seen have DA in the teens but are legitimate in our industry. Should they not be considered due to low DA? Also I see links from directories on many competitor sites. Seems a controversial subject, but assuming the directory is industry specific, is it OK? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chris6610 -
Should I 'nofollow' links between my own sites?
We have five sites which are largely unrelated but for cross-promotional purpose our company wishes to cross link between all our sites, possibly in the footer. I have warned about potential consequences of cross-linking in this way and certainly don't want our sites to be viewed as some sort of 'link ring' if they all link to one another. Just wondering if linking between sites you own really is that much of an issue and whether we should 'nofollow' the links in order to prevent being slapped with any sort of penalty for cross-linking.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | simon_realbuzz0 -
Acquisition of a new site in the same field.
Hello, I work with SEO for a company that just bought another in the same field. What is better to do? Just a 301 domain? Make 301 per page for a related page (more than 10,000 URLs, i'am afraid that this may be interpreted as blackhat ) or make crossdomain canonical tag urls related to (I believe this is not good, because the pages are not fully equal). thank's
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | j0a0vargas0 -
Should I use both Google and Bing's Webmaster Tools at the same time?
Hi All, Up till now I've been registered only to Google WMT. Do you recommend using at the same time Bing's WMT? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet0 -
How to check a website's architecture?
Hello everyone, I am an SEO analyst - a good one - but I am weak in technical aspects. I do not know any programming and only a little HTML. I know this is a major weakness for an SEO so my first request to you all is to guide me how to learn HTML and some basic PHP programming. Secondly... about the topic of this particular question - I know that a website should have a flat architecture... but I do not know how to find out if a website's architecture is flat or not, good or bad. Please help me out on this... I would be obliged. Eagerly awaiting your responses, BEst Regards, Talha
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MTalhaImtiaz0 -
Most Painless way of getting Duff Pages out of SE's Index
Hi, I've had a few issues that have been caused by our developers on our website. Basically we have a pretty complex method of automatically generating URL's and web pages on our website, and they have stuffed up the URL's at some point and managed to get 10's of thousands of duff URL's and pages indexed by the search engines. I've now got to get these pages out of the SE's indexes as painlessly as possible as I think they are causing a Panda penalty. All these URL's have an addition directory level in them called "home" which should not be there, so I have: www.mysite.com/home/page123 instead of the correct URL www.mysite.com/page123 All these are totally duff URL's with no links going to them, so I'm gaining nothing by 301 redirects, so I was wondering if there was a more painless less risky way of getting them all out the indexes (IE after the stuff up by our developers in the first place I'm wary of letting them loose on 301 redirects incase they cause another issue!) Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | James770