Should a 301 from a penalised domain to a new domain be removed?
-
A business traded on a domain let's say example.COM which was heavily penalised due to non-removable spammy back links. Their previous SEO advised them to set up on example.CO.UK but redirected example.COM to example.CO.UK.
Example.CO.UK ranks very poorly, presumably due to being 'tarred with the same brush' i.e. attributed with the ills of example.COM.
Will it do any good to remove the redirect or is example.CO.UK now doomed as well?
-
Hi Robert,
Thanks and sorry for my slow reply.
Loads of good points you've raised here.
You're quite right to challenge my presumption that the new domain is ranking poorly due to the 301 since there could be many other reasons.
It's difficult to describe all the circumstances in a short question, so I guess I was going on my gut feel to some extent. Not ranking in the top 100 for a non-competitive term. I don't think the question of correlation arises here since there are no data sets to relate but I understand the point you make about cause and effect.
For me a 302 doesn't really feel like that's what it's intended for so is not ideal.
I think when Matt Cutts said 'start again', he meant really start again' i.e. no 301 so removing the 301 and having no other kind of redirect seems intuitively like the best option to me.
Cheers.
-
Hi Marcus,
Thanks and sorry for my slow reply.
I guess removing the 301 has the short term disadvantage of losing any traffic that might have come via the good links to the old domain but that's probably the lesser of two evils so a worthwhile trade-off longer term.
Cheers.
-
Ewan,
I would remove the 301 on a very simple premise: the previous domain had (based on you stating it was penalized) a lot of poor links. If that is true, why would you want to even go down that road to try to bring juice that likely does not exist any longer? Also, was the "penalty" a manual or algorithmic? Was it based on a date of inception for something like Panda, Penguin, or an update of same?
But, even though I would remove the 301, you cannot draw a correlation that a new domain: example.co.uk is ranking poorly due to the 301's from the .com. That is correlation equalling causation and, typically, it does not. First, what additional quality links are now coming to new domain that are independent of the 301 coming in? Second, is on-page, KW analysis, etc. for new domain all as it should be or did previous SEO miss on any of that? If it is possible for localization there with the domain, when new domain was created did someone make changes to local, citation sites, etc.? Is there a change from previous social such that the social now resolves to the new domain.
There are many questions here, but I think I would be remiss to claim that taking the 301 off would cause some rise in rankings. It is more likely that other factors will have a larger impact. Note, given you still need to redirect to the new site, you could use a 302 (temporary) redirect to prevent juice passing. You could use a meta refresh but that is a bit slow to most and not really recommended. There are other redirects and I would be interested to see what others suggest as a way to redirect while preserving the "autonomy" of the new domain. My first thought is still the 302. On a certain level, you could continue to attempt removal and mitigation of poor links to old site while you keep new up. Ryan Kent does a lot more with link removal I believe. If the site is of particular value in customers/revenue, etc. you might PM him. If you do a site search on him here, you will find several links to answers on link removal/penalty removal.
I hope this helps you out,
Robert
-
Hey Ewan,
By all accounts, if you 301 a penalised domain to a new domain, you are just passing the penalty along (5h1t rolls down hill) and if the whole reason they moved domain was to move away from an inescapable penalty then 301'ing the bad domain to the new domain makes no sense whatsoever.
If you remove the 301 you will eventually remove the problem. If it was a manual penalty then you may need to submit a reconsideration request (it may not hurt to do this anyway) but the new domain is not broken assuming nothing untoward has been done there.
This is basically a severing of ties, remove the 301 is removing the bad links so whilst you may need to do some SEO to move things forward you will not be fighting a losing battle.
Hope that helps!
Marcus
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 can you promote a sub-domain ahead of a domain on the SERPs?
I have a new client that wants to promote their subdomain uk.imagemcs.com and have their main domain imagemcs.com fall off the SERPs. Objective? Get uk.imagemcs.com to rank first for UK 'brand' searches. Do a search for 'imagem creative services' and you should see the issue (it looks like rules have been applied to the robots.txt on the main domain to exclude any bots from crawling - but since they've been indexed previously I need to take action as it doesn't look great!). I think I can do this by applying a permanent redirect from the main domain to the subdomain at domain level and then no-indexing the site - and then resubmit the sitemap. My slight concern is that this no-indexing of the main domain may impact on the visibility of the subdomains (I'm dealing with uk.imagemcs.com, but there is us.imagemcs.com and de.imagemcs.com) and was looking for some assurance that this would not be the case. My understanding is that subdomains are completely distinct from domains and as such this action should have no impact on the subdomains. I asked the question on the Webmasters Forum but haven't really got anywhere
Technical SEO | | nathangdavidson2
https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/webmasters/1Avupy3Uw_o/hu6oLQntCAAJ Can anyone suggest a course of action? many thanks, Nathan0 -
41.000 pages indexed two years after it was redirected to a new domain
Hi!Two years ago, we changed the domain elmundodportivo.es to mundodeportivo.com. Apparently, everything was OK, but more than two years later, there are still 41.000 pages indexed in Google (https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aelmundodeportivo.es) even though all the domains have been redirected with a 301 redirect. I detected some problems with redirections that were 303 instead of 301, but we fixed that one month ago.A secondary problem is that the pagerank for elmundodportivo.es is 7 yet and mundodeportivo.com is 3.What I'm doing wrong?Thank you all,Oriol
Technical SEO | | MundoDeportivo0 -
Domain Forwarding Implications
Hi, I am working with a client who is planning to rebrand the company and set up a new domain. What is the best way to maximize and pass the authority from the existing sites (there are 2)? Each site already has many inbound links and have been around for a while. Should I set up 301 redirects for all of the pages? Should I set up domain forwarding? If I do this, what are the implications from an SEO perspective? Please advise. Thank you, Erin
Technical SEO | | HiddenPeak1 -
What is the advantage of using sub domains instead of pages on the root domain?
Have a look at this example http://bannerad.designcrowd.com/ For each category of design, they have a landing page on the sub domain. Wouldn't it be better to have them as part of the same domain? What is the strategy behind using sub domains?
Technical SEO | | designquotes0 -
301 Redirect without specifying base domain?
Hi guys, about 10 minutes ago, I finally found the underlying problem in magento between 301 redirects and canonical tags - part of the reason why it was hard to identify was because the problem is not constant through all pages. Anyway now that I found the problem, I have about 50 301 redirects to implement via .htaccess. Now I know the regular syntax is Redirect 301 /oldpage.html http://www.yoursite.com/newpage.html But I'm wondering if there's a way that the base domain doesn't have to be specified in the second half of this line. Something like: Redirect 301 /oldpage.html /newpage.html I'm sure this can be done, somehow. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | yacpro130 -
301 redirects twice
We currently have some 301 redirects set up on our site however sometimes a page will redirect twice before reaching the final location. Is this OK from an SEO perspective to have a page redirect twice or should we concentrate on reducing it to one?
Technical SEO | | JohnHillman0 -
50+ duplicate content pages - Do we remove them all or 301?
We are working on a site that has 50+ pages that all have duplicate content (1 for each state, pretty much). Should we 301 all 50 of the URLs to one URL or should we just completely get rid of all the pages? Are there any steps to take when completely removing pages completely? (submit sitemap to google webmaster tools, etc) thanks!
Technical SEO | | Motava0 -
Buying a new domain
Hello guys! We are in process of buying a new domain. How can we be sure that this domain is not blacklisted and are there any steps to take in order to be sure that whatever we are buying is actually in "good shape"? Thanks much!
Technical SEO | | echo10