Local SEO and Penguin
-
All,
One of my client's sites was hit by Penguin. The business has lost almost all of its organic rankings but is still holding on for a handful of local searches for some of its satellite offices.
We've built a new site and are slowly building domain authority.
My question is this: at what point do I swap out the new site's location URL for the old URL in Google places?
I don't want to risk the existing local placement which is all they have left for the time being.
Thanks,
John
-
Thanks Miriam, that was my concern as I mentioned above.
-
Hi John,
I'm in 80% agreement with what our members have replied. Changing the website address should not affect local rankings as a stand-alone fact...but, if the new website is different than the old one, in terms of content, optimization, authority, links, citations, etc., then yes, you could be in for some ranking changes. The strength of the website is the biggest local ranking search factor, so I believe you may see some ranking changes, unless the new website matches the old one in all respects.
-
_Nope, it is not going to affect it as far as my knowledge is concerned. Unless you are making a 301 redirection to the new domain, there is no such possibility of carrying on the legacy of the penalized domain. Keep up the good work and you will be just fine. _
-
Thanks Oleg, my thought was that since domain authority plays a role in local, it could hurt, but I appreciate the feedback.
John
-
If its the places page that is ranking locally, it shouldn't affect it. Had a client in the same situation, made a new site and changed the places page URL to the new site and haven't had any problems.
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 to stop UTM affecting SEO
Dear Moz community, We are a directory website and have lots and lots of UTM. This is crucial as we want to measure visits through Google analytics. Moz as a tool is fantastic because through a site crawl it can spot all our duplicate pages. Needless to say, due to the amount of UTM's on different pages, we have lots of duplicate pages flagged up. I ideal solution is still having the analytics capabilities of the UTM, but not affecting our SEO where search engines will realise it is not a duplicate page - we're aware it is the same page we just want to track the source! Your help is greatly appreciated! Thanks,
Technical SEO | | Eric_S
Eric0 -
Redesiging website and how to prevent a SEO disaster?
Hey guys, I'm in the process of re designing my company website. This website runs in Kentico CMS and now I'm moving to drupal CMS. The main reason for the move is that I need a more flexible design with responsiveness and integrate better social aspects. Currently I'm having to deal with a developer whom can't be bothered to update the site. I also find kentico extremely difficult to deal with. The site has good Google rankings and I was thinking about setting up some 301 redirects when the move is completed. Now the question is this site is been live for over 2 years and I have tons of blog posts sitting in here. How can I get these moved? When this is done will they lose their 'age' ? What if I re create the blog posts as it is and then setup 301 re-directs on this? I have G+ authorship and will they be affected by this? Last question is having a responsive site will affect my SEO rankings once moved? I heard the 301 is not considered as a 'safe' thing with Google so what are my options? If anyone can share a link(s) to site upgrades/moving to new design tutorials/best practices articles based on SEO ill be grateful. Thank you very much.
Technical SEO | | Suganthan0 -
Monthly SEO contract or dedicated employee?
Have one more question. There are people offering monthly SEO contracts like this http://www.link-building-strategies.com/monthly-link-building.html My question is that is it worth it for $199 a month? Though its reviews are good on freelancing sites but I can also hire a full time employee for that cost. Is there anything a dedicated employee cannot do that these guys are offering? Only drawback I see is I dont know the links where these guys are submitting but I am ready to spend much more time (my employees time) to get the things done. Please suggest. Your valued opinions welcome 🙂 Following is the detailed offering 1. 300 links submissions = 180 Guaranteed One Way Theme Links - The links are built by manually publishing 3 Original Articles on 75 different article sites, each published article will have 2 back links to your site. 70% of our Article Sites have PR 2 to 6; all with different C classes IPs.
Technical SEO | | geekwik
2. 60 links submissions = 30 Guaranteed One Way Theme Links – The links are built by manually publishing 1 Review for your site fromon** 30 Social Bookmarking sites, 90% of the sites have PR 2 to 8, all with different C classes IPs.
3. 160 links submissions = 100 Guaranteed One Way Theme Links – The links are built by manually publishing ** 2 Original Press on 50 Press Release sites, each published article will have 2 back links to your site. All our Press Release Sites have PR 2 to 7; all with different C classes IPs.
4. 80 links submissions = 40 Guaranteed One Way blog links – These links are built by publishing** 1 article **(300 words each) with 2 back links to your site on 20 different free blog sites. These free blog sites are our sites (new sites with PR 0) which we are promoting to get the highest PR for them and your blog back links too. - All the submissions are 100% handmade, NO automated software is involved. You can check this by looking at our over 1000 GOOD SEO REVIEWS made during the past 5 years on 4 freelancing sites. The links will not appear all at once to your site. The indexing process of all the links will take between 1-3 months. The links will appear gradually to your site and everything will look naturally for all the search engines0 -
Are pagination a bad thing for seo
hi i am just checking my errors on my site and it is telling me about duplicate pagination results, so i am just wondering if pagination is bad for seo for example http://www.in2town.co.uk/benidorm/benidorm-news/Page-2 i also have page 3 and page 4. should i stop my site from having this to help with seo
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
301 redirects and seo..
I bought a domain and it has nice traffic. It only has about 5 main pages in php When i got the site i switched to html because php was overkill. I did the 301 and google deleted the php files and replaced with html version when i check site:domain.com It has been about 7 days. I DID NOT use 301 for each of the 5 pages to go php to html instead is used this code RewriteEngine On
Technical SEO | | samerk
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mydomain.com
RewriteRule (.) http://www.mydomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
RedirectMatch 301 (.).php$ http://www.mydomain.com$1.html So basically if you load php it will load the html version. dog.php > dog.html Is this OKAY? or should it be done differently.... worried! Thanks !0 -
Should WordPress themes be hard coded for better SEO?
In the interests of making my site faster I have recently come across the suggestion of removing unwanted PHP from my WooThemes WordPress theme. The suggestion is to hard code the choices I have made in the WordPress template to reduce on database calls. Has anyone actually done this to their WordPress theme before and seen any measurable results?
Technical SEO | | Wallander1 -
Suggestions on how to hire help with my SEO?
Hi, I just signed up with SEOMOZ and found some major duplicate content issues with Wordpress. I have installed Yoast SEO plug in but honestly am a little lost on how Wordpress handles it all and need guidance. I would love to hire someone to do some desktop share / Skype sessions to teach me the proper way to set this up but did not see if there was any place on SEOMOZ where employers and providers can connect. I am interested in more than just this one issue, looking for a freelancer ongoing to work on our site for SEO. Any suggestions? Thanks in advance Force7
Technical SEO | | Force70 -
How to get SEO juice from a widget iframe?
Looking at building a widget for my site, Babyhuddle. We're looking at using iframes for the widget and I'm concerned that this means I won't be able to get any SEO juice out of each widgets that are implemented on users' blogs. Any recommendations on how we can get SEO juice out of widgets in iframes?
Technical SEO | | walidalsaqqaf0