Strange situation - Started over with a new site. WMT showing the links that previously pointed to old site.
-
I have a client whose site was severely affected by Penguin. A former SEO company had built thousands of horrible anchor texted links on bookmark pages, forums, cheap articles, etc.
We decided to start over with a new site rather than try to recover this one. Here is what we did:
-We noindexed the old site and blocked search engines via robots.txt
-Used the Google URL removal tool to tell it to remove the entire old site from the index
-Once the site was completely gone from the index we launched the new site. The new site had the same content as the old other than the home page. We changed most of the info on the home page because it was duplicated in many directory listings. (It's a good site...the content is not overoptimized, but the links pointing to it were bad.)
-removed all of the pages from the old site and put up an index page saying essentially, "We've moved" with a nofollowed link to the new site.
We've slowly been getting new, good links to the new site. According to ahrefs and majestic SEO we have a handful of new links. OSE has not picked up any as of yet. But, if we go into WMT there are thousands of links pointing to the new site. WMT has picked up the new links and it looks like it has all of the old ones that used to point at the old site despite the fact that there is no redirect.
There are no redirects from any pages of the old to the new at all.
The new site has a similar name. If the old one was examplekeyword.com, the new one is examplekeywordcity.com.
There are redirects from the other TLD's of the same to his (i.e. examplekeywordcity.org, examplekeywordcity.info), etc. but no other redirects exist.
The chances that a site previously existed on any of these TLD's is almost none as it is a unique brand name.
Can anyone tell me why Google is seeing the links that previously pointed to the old site as now pointing to the new?
ADDED: Before I hit the send button I found something interesting. In this article from dejan SEO where someone stole Rand Fishkin's content and ranked for it, they have the following line:
"When there are two identical documents on the web, Google will pick the one with higher PageRank and use it in results. It will also forward any links from any perceived ’duplicate’ towards the selected ‘main’ document."
This may be what is happening here.
And just to complicate things further, it looks like when I set up the new site in GA, the site owner took the GA tracking code and put it on the old page. (The noindexed one that is set up with a nofollowed link to the new one.) I can't see how this could affect things but we're removing it.
Confused yet?
I'd love to hear your thoughts.
-
My tip here is to return 404 to your old domain and customize your 404 page telling people that you moved to a new domain.
This approach will gives Google the appearance that your site has been discontinued but for users you just moved.
One extra thing is to try add a meta refresh in this 404 page, transferring users to the new domain.
Hope it helps.
-
Hi Marie,
I think your answer is here http://dejanseo.com.au/hijacked/. Correct me if I am wrong.
-
Thanks. I thought we had noindexed, nofollowed the old domain but it looks like that was not done. There is no robots.txt.
The old page only exists as a single page that says, "We've moved" with a nofollow link to the new one. All of the content and inner pages are gone.
I'll have him noindex and add robots.txt. I still can't see how that would cause Google to attribute links to the new page.
-
Is your old domain still blocking search engines via robots.txt? Or did you remove this rule?
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
-
Open Site Explorer - Spam analysis: need help with inbound links... from my site!
hallo, reading my spam analysis report from open explorer, I found somenthing I don't understand (please see attached image): The long list of links inside the red rectangle are inbound links with a spam score of 5 coming from my same site. How is that possible? Should I remove those links? Also , I see that many of those links are links present in the top navigation bar (about page, home page, service description etc.) or in the sidebar section of the website (categories, recent posts, recent comments). Should I treat them differently? Thank you for your time.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | micvitale0 -
Show wordpress "archive links" on blog?
I here conflicting reports on whether to show wordpress archive links on the blog or not. Some say it is important for viewers to see, others say it is not and creates way too many links. I think both have good points but for SEO purposes, I lean towards removing them. What do Moz users think?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seomozinator0 -
Links from new sites with no link juice
Hi Guys, Do backlinks from a bunch of new sites pass any value to our site? I've heard a lot from some "SEO experts" say that it is an effective link building strategy to build a bunch of new sites and link them to our main site. I highly doubt that... To me, a new site is a new site, which means it won't have any backlinks in the beginning (most likely), so a backlink from this site won't pass too much link juice. Right? In my humble opinion this is not a good strategy any more...if you build new sites for the sake of getting links. This is just wrong. But, if you do have some unique content and you want to share with others on that particular topic, then you can definitely create a blog and write content and start getting links. And over time, the domain authority will increase, then a backlink from this site will become more valuable? I am not a SEO expert myself, so I am eager to hear your thoughts. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | witmartmarketing0 -
Redirect old .net domain to new .com domain
I have a quick question that I think I know the answer to but I wanted to get some feedback to make sure or see if there's additional feedback. The long and short of it is that I'm working with a site that currently has a .net domain that they've been running for 6 years. They've recently bought a .com of the same name as well. So the question is: I think it's obviously preferable to keep the .net and just direct the .com to it. However, if they would prefer to have the .com domain, is 301'ing the .net to the .com going to lose a lot of the equity they've built up in the site over the past years? And are there any steps that would make such a move easier? Also, if you have any tips or insight just into a general transition of this nature it would be much appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BrandLabs0 -
When crawls occur - when will my links show up in Open Site Explorer
Hello everyone, I've been building links for a while now and none of them show up in Explorer. My domain authority hasn't changed for about a month or so. When does Google do crawls and when does SEOMoz do crawls? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Harbor_Compliance0 -
Site less than 20 pages shows 1,400+ pages when crawled
Hello! I’m new to SEO, and have been soaking up as much as I can. I really love it, and feel like it could be a great fit for me – I love the challenge of figuring out the SEO puzzle, plus I have a copywriting/PR background, so I feel like that would be perfect for helping businesses get a great jump on their online competition. In fact, I was so excited about my newfound love of SEO that I offered to help a friend who owns a small business on his site. Once I started, though, I found myself hopelessly confused. The problem comes when I crawl the site. It was designed in Wordpress, and is really not very big (part of my goal in working with him was to help him get some great content added!) Even though there are only 11 pages – and 6 posts – for the entire site, when I use Screaming Frog to crawl it, it sees HUNDREDS of pages. It stops at 500, because that is the limit for their free version. In the campaign I started here at SEOmoz, and it says over 1,400 pages have been crawled…with something like 900 errors. Not good, right? So I've been trying to figure out the problem...when I look closer in Screaming Frog, I can see that some things are being repeated over and over. If I sort by the Title, the URLs look like they’re stuck in a loop somehow - one line will have /blog/category/postname…the next line will have /blog/category/category/postname…and the next line will have /blog/category/category/category/postname…and so on, with another /category/ added each time. So, with that, I have two questions Does anyone know what the problem is, and how to fix it? Do professional SEO people troubleshoot this kind of stuff all of the time? Is this the best place to get answers to questions like that? And if not, where is? Thanks so much in advance for your help! I’ve enjoyed reading all of the posts that are available here so far, it seems like a really excellent and helpful community...I'm looking forward to the day when I can actually answer the questions!! 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | K.Walters0 -
Any reason not to redirect entire directory from old site structure to new?
I'm helping on a site that has tons of content and recently moved from a 10 year old .ASP structure to WordPress. There are ~800 404s, with 99% of them in the same directory that is no longer used at all. The old URL structures offer no indication of what the old page contents was. So, there is basically no way to manually redirect page by page to the new site at this point.....is there any reason not to redirect that entire old directory to the new homepage? Matt Cutts seems to think its OK to point an entire old directory to a new homepage, but its not as good as the 1:1 redirects: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=93633 Any thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wattssw0 -
My site links have gone from a mega site links to several small links under my SERP results in Google. Any ideas why?
A site I have currently had the mega site links on the SERP results. Recently they have updated the mega links to the smaller 4 inline links under my SERP result. Any idea what happened or how do I correct this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | POSSIBLE0