301 Re-direct Implementation & Its Possible Aftermaths

[ITRIX]

Hi all,

I'm currently working on a domain that seems to be 'unofficially' blacklisted by Google. The reason behind my belief are,

• Ranking process of KW became stagnant.

• Current crawling and indexing rate has been decreased.

• Site performance deteriorate after every Search engine update or major data refreshes.

• And few major indications pointing out that search engines might started doubting its authority.

The site is live n running for about 10+ yr and consists of 6000+ pages out of which 5000+ pages are indexed.

The site also have some serious issues like,

• The site has been 2 times penalized by Google.

• The link ratio & inbound link quality of the site is quite unnatural (mostly directory links, links form spammy sites, bad-neighborhood links etc. )

• The site is in flat file and not CMS, thus making it extremely difficult to maintain and update it.

Due to the above reasons I was thinking of implementing 301  re-direction. I would like to redirect this poor performing existing domain to a new fresh one keeping the URL structure and files same and maintaining 1:1 redirection rules.

I've read an awesome article by Danny Dover on 301 Re direction of a site here in SEOMOZ. It seems that if any one follow the steps mentioned there can actually get benefited by the overall re direction process. Now I'd like know your suggestion about following points:

1. Considering the factors that I've stated, do you think that it would be good to go with this re direction idea?

2. If  301 is implemented then what can be its immediate effects on current rankings and site performance?

3. Assuming that the ranks drowned or gets completely vanished from SERP, after what approx time period can be regain back?

4. Any other suggestion that might help me out to better understand the situation.

[ITRIX]

Thanks Mark,

We have actually decided to get rid of the old domain and move forward with the new one. Your suggestions are really useful and it helps a lot during this transition.

[Mark.RedGiant]

One thing to bear in mind is that you are never going to retain all of the link juice that you've got with the old site when redirecting to the new site.

If I were you, I would really try to clean up the backlink profile of the site as much as possible before doing any sort of redirection. I would argue that you might even be able to salvage the existing site's rankings by doing some rescue work in terms of your link profile.

One very important consideration is that your domain is 10+ years old already, which is in itself a pretty good authority indicator.

My suggestions to you:

• Clean up really spammy links by using a tool such as Open Site Explorer to find and weed out the bad links. Follow whatever process is required to remove some of these links. (Contact the administrator of the site, remove your URL from the directory etc.)

• Help dilute the effect of the spammy links by building new, higher quality backlinks to your site. Diversification is very important. If you have 100 spammy links, but 200 really good links, I don't feel like the Big G will worry too much.

• Check your on-page factors. What sort of content do you have on your site? Are you stuffing keywords everywhere? Are you using unique content, or spun nonsense? Do you have title tags and headings that are both relevant and unique? Are you duplicating any content throughout your site?

The problem, however, with salvaging the site is that, like you say, you're running on a static platform.

If your rankings are really that bad now, perhaps it would be a good idea to start fresh. Just bear in mind that this won't be a quick fix, particularly if you're using a new domain.

If you insist on creating a new site (CMS based) and using the same content, then you'll have to do the redirect to avoid duplicate content issues. I would just take a long, hard look at your content to ensure that it's really worth copying across rather than starting fresh.

Put it this way, I would use the 301 redirect to inform the search engines that the site has been transferred and is under a new domain now. I wouldn't use the 301 redirect to try and salvage much link juice.