Multiple, Partial Redirecting URLs from old SEO company
-
Received quite a surprise when I gained access to the Google webmaster account and saw 4 domains that are link to my clients domain and the number of links for each domain range between 10,000 and 90,000.
Come to find out this was a result of their former agency. The business is very local central. I will use the example of a burger place. They main site is burgers.com and burger places are listed by city and state. Their former agency bought several domains like californiaburgers.com and duplicated the listings for that state on this domain. You can view certain pages of the second domain, but the home page is redirected as are most of the city pages with 301s to the main burgers.com domain.
However, there are pages on the additional domains that do not redirect, as they are not duplicated on the main domain so nowhere to redirect. Google has only found four of them but looks like there could be at least 50. Pages that are not redirected are indexed by the engines - but not ranking (at least not well).
There is a duplicate content issue, although "limited" in the sense that it really is just the name of the business, address and phone number - there is not much to these listings.
What is the best approach to overcome? Right now GWT is showing over 300,000 links, however at least 150,000 to 200,000 of that is from these domains.
-
Brutal honesty time.
You're in a very difficult position on this one. From one perspective, the best practice would be to tell you all of those domains should be shut down, not even 301 redirects. It's the only "ideal" clean-up of what could very well be deemed mass-scale spam.
However, doing so could literally wipe out a significant volume of existing SEO strength that comes from the links because there's just no way to know how those sites are or are not impacting the main site at this point.
Alternate option:
If there are pages on the rogue domains not on the main site, are those pages that "should" be on the main site when taking the "single site" approach? If so, those should be moved and redirects set up. And if that content doesn't really belong on the main site, those pages should be redirected to their parent home page or wiped out entirely.
In this scenario, you're communicating "there's only one site - it's the site we want ranking, and thus we've taken action to kill all the renegade content".
This is the option I would recommend if it were my client.
Except how can you determine all the other rogue domains out there? That would be important to the process.
I would personally also need to evaluate current organic search traffic to help decide what to do. Is the total organic based visit count significant? Or is it almost non-existent? Because if it's almost non-existent, as painful as it might be to do so, I would opt for the first action - killing off all the rogue domains.
As drastic as it is, and as much as some SEOs would say "get what value you can from redirects", it really is the safest way, long-term to ensuring the site doesn't get slammed by Google. And if short-term or even mid-term rankings drop in that process, my position is still "I care most about long-term goals with sustainability and stabilization critical long-term elements.
Whatever you consider doing, I would also explain all of this to the site owner, and have them participate in the decision making process in a way you can be sure they first understand the issues and then that they have no ability afterward to blame you for anything that takes place due to past methods that were obviously ugly at best and reckless at worst.
I'd also love to hear what others here have to say about this and what they would recommend.
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
-
Looking for Adult SEO company
Hi guys and girls, I am looking for a company that is willing to work with us to improve our SEO. Our website is www.reallovesexdolls.com and we keep on going all the way UP to fall rock bottom hard again (like waves in the ocean). It's really weird, we never invested much in link building and such. We are so busy with other things that it would be nice to outsource this task. You can contact us by phone, or by email. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MartinePeters0 -
Which URL is better for SEO?
We have a URL structure question: Because we have websites in multiple countries and in multiple languages, we need to add additional elements to our URL structure. Of the two following options, what would be better for SEO? Option 1: www.abccompany.com/abc-ca-en/home.htm Option 2: www.abccompany.com/home.abc.ca.en.htm
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | northwoods-2603420 -
For URLs that require login, should our redirect be 301 or 302?
We have a login required section of our website that is being crawled and reporting as potential issues in Webmaster Tools. I'm not sure what the best solution to this is - is it to make URLs requiring a login noindex/nocrawl? Right now, we have them 302 redirecting to the login page, since it's a temporary redirect, it seems like it isn't the right solution. Is a 301 better?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alecfwilson0 -
Multiple Domain Names Pointing to One URL
Hi! A company I work with has purchased several (70-something) domain names that are relevant to their business. According to their IT pro, they're currently using DNS to point those domains to our IP address, with a catch-all header on IIS for that IP address. Essentially, we have 70-something domain names that direct to the homepage. I noticed that some have been indexed by Google and are pulling in the meta of the homepage they're being directed to. Is this potentially an issue? If so, would 301 redirects fix this or are we okay with the status quo and the indexing is no big deal? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 199580 -
SEO and marketing for a company that doesn't want to promote their primary website
Hi All! One of my new clients is in a semi-grey-hat industry, and is in perpetual danger of having their real websites (of which they have several), blocked by the Chinese firewall (which is where their target market is). So their idea is to use neutral sites to write information (Squidoo, article site, maybe a stand-alone WP site with a few pages) and promote those pages. The idea being that China is less likely to block those sites, and then the link to the actual website from those pages could always be changed if China blocks the website listed. I'm a little dubious as to how feasible this is - how do you promote a Squidoo page? Or an article on an article site for semi-competitive keywords? Besides on-page SEO (which may not be enough), is there anything you can really do post-Penguin? If anyone has any ideas as to the above - or as to how else to effectively market sites when you can't market the site and brand directly, I'd be very happy to hear. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | debi_zyx0 -
How to deal with old, indexed hashbang URLs?
I inherited a site that used to be in Flash and used hashbang URLs (i.e. www.example.com/#!page-name-here). We're now off of Flash and have a "normal" URL structure that looks something like this: www.example.com/page-name-here Here's the problem: Google still has thousands of the old hashbang (#!) URLs in its index. These URLs still work because the web server doesn't actually read anything that comes after the hash. So, when the web server sees this URL www.example.com/#!page-name-here, it basically renders this page www.example.com/# while keeping the full URL structure intact (www.example.com/#!page-name-here). Hopefully, that makes sense. So, in Google you'll see this URL indexed (www.example.com/#!page-name-here), but if you click it you essentially are taken to our homepage content (even though the URL isn't exactly the canonical homepage URL...which s/b www.example.com/). My big fear here is a duplicate content penalty for our homepage. Essentially, I'm afraid that Google is seeing thousands of versions of our homepage. Even though the hashbang URLs are different, the content (ie. title, meta descrip, page content) is exactly the same for all of them. Obviously, this is a typical SEO no-no. And, I've recently seen the homepage drop like a rock for a search of our brand name which has ranked #1 for months. Now, admittedly we've made a bunch of changes during this whole site migration, but this #! URL problem just bothers me. I think it could be a major cause of our homepage tanking for brand queries. So, why not just 301 redirect all of the #! URLs? Well, the server won't accept traditional 301s for the #! URLs because the # seems to screw everything up (server doesn't acknowledge what comes after the #). I "think" our only option here is to try and add some 301 redirects via Javascript. Yeah, I know that spiders have a love/hate (well, mostly hate) relationship w/ Javascript, but I think that's our only resort.....unless, someone here has a better way? If you've dealt with hashbang URLs before, I'd LOVE to hear your advice on how to deal w/ this issue. Best, -G
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Celts180 -
Subdomains and SEO - Should we redirect to subfolder?
A new client has mainsite.com and a large numer of city specific sub domains i.e. albany.mainsite.com. I think that these subdomains would actually work better as subfolders i.e mainsite.com/albany rather than albany.mainsite.com. The majority of links on the subdomains link to the main site anyway i.e. mainsite.com/contactus rather than albany.mainsite.com/contactus. Having mostly main domain links on a subdomain doesnt seem like clever link architecture to me and maybe even spammy. Im not overly familiar with redirecting subdomains to subfolders. If we go the route of 301'ing subdomains to subfolders any advice/warnings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndyMacLean0 -
How do I set up a 301 redirect if the default settings for our web servers create multiple URLs for the same page?
How do I set up a 301 redirect if the default settings for our web servers create multiple URLs for the same page but only views it as one page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ibex0