Acquiring a blog
-
Hello All,
I've recently acquired somebody else's blog and have redirected every post to the relevant page of my website (madegood.org). The content is the same as on the original site, and I have used 301 redirects. The original blog didn't have a particularly high page rank
I'm slightly worried that there are now thousands of links coming from one domain, which itself doesn't have much authority. Is there a way that I can tell google that I've acquired the blog, as opposed to just having lots of links from one domain.
Thanks
Will
-
Hey thanks!
-
Couple of good resources I can recommend:
1. How to find low value Links: http://www.stateofsearch.com/step-by-step-guide-finding-low-quality-links/
2. Link Detox: http://www.linkdetox.com/
If using an automated system like Link Detox, be sure to review each link manually.
-
Charles, saying that "Google will penalize you" for doing something is a fairly strong statement. Can you point to your source on this subject? It's helpful to give additional information in cases like this.
-
Although, what am I looking for with regards to dodgy backlinks? What are the tell tale signs?
I'd be happy to go through my backlinks in WMT and check each one, but not entirely sure what I'm looking for. I know all the theory behind good backlinks, but it all seems a bit wooly when it come to bad links, is there an easy way to spot sure fire offenders. Then when I find one, what can I do about it?
Cheers
Will
-
Will do!
-
I'd start by checking your backlinks, both to your domain and the one you redirected. After that, expand your investigation from there.
-
Thanks Cyrus, that's a very comprehensive answer!
I basically uploaded the copy on to new pages on my site, and manually put a 301 every page of the old site to the page on my site that has the same copy.... If that makes sense!?
I'm only concerned because I've suddenly (over the last couple of days) seen a hit in my google search referrals by about 70%. This migration happened months ago but I'm trying look under every stone.
I'll do as you suggested and see how I get on. Thanks again.
Will
-
It sounds like basically you did a domain migration? I'm a bit confused because you said you redirected to relevant pages on your website, but you also said the content is the same. So I'm wondering if you redirected to existing pages on your own site, or simply redirect the old URLs over to new URLs with the content from the old site. (Yeah, it doesn't make sense, but I'm on my first cup of coffee)
Generally, a large amount of redirects won't hurt you if it's for a legitimate reason - especially if you're migrating content from one domain to another. Where you get in trouble is when you 301 redirect URLs with low-quality backlinks. Those links then become YOUR links.
It might also look suspicious if you redirected multiple domains in a short period of time to your new domain, but this doesn't sound like the case.
Regardless, the best way to handle this is to claim ownership of both sites in Google Webmaster Tools before the redirect, then file a change of address for the old domain. You can actually still do this after the fact - you simply need to stop the 301 for the homepage long enough to claim ownership.
You likely want to file sitemaps for both the old URLs and new URLs so search engines can "process" the 301s. You can find more helpful tips here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/web-site-migration-guide-tips-for-seos
I wouldn't expect this to effect your traffic in a negative way or cause a penalty, but keep an eye on your traffic and rankings just in case. If anything does go wrong, you can revert the changes you made.
Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.
Cyrus
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
-
Hi! I first wrote an article on my medium blog but am now launching my site. a) how can I get a canonical tag on medium without importing and b) any issue with claiming blog is original when medium was posted first?
Hi! As above, I wrote this article on my medium blog but am now launching my site, UnderstandingJiuJitsu.com. I have the post saved as a draft because I don't want to get pinged by google. a) how can I get a canonical tag on medium without importing and b) any issue with claiming the UJJ.com post is original when medium was posted first? Thanks and health, Elliott
Technical SEO | | OpenMat0 -
Control indexed content on Wordpress hosted blog...
I have a client with a blog setup on their domain (example: blog.clientwebsite.com) and even though it loads at that subdomain it's actually a Wordpress-hosted blog. If I attempt to add a plugin like Yoast SEO, I get the attached error message. Their technical team says this is a brick wall for them and they don't want to change how the blog is hosted. So my question is... on a subdomain blog like this... if I can't control what is in the sitemap with a plugin and can't manually add a sitemap because the content is being pulled from a Wordpress-hosted install, what can I do to control what is in the index? I can't add an SEO plugin... I can't add a custom sitemap... I can't add a robots.txt file... The blog is setup with domain mapping so the content isn't actually there. What can I do to avoid tags, categories, author pages, archive pages and other useless content ending up in the search engines? 7Zo93b2.png
Technical SEO | | ShawnW0 -
Blog Page Titles - Page 1, Page 2 etc.
Hi All, I have a couple of crawl errors coming up in MOZ that I am trying to fix. They are duplicate page title issues with my blog area. For example we have a URL of www.ourwebsite.com/blog/page/1 and as we have quite a few blog posts they get put onto another page, example www.ourwebsite.com/blog/page/2 both of these urls have the same heading, title, meta description etc. I was just wondering if this was an actual SEO problem or not and if there is a way to fix it. I am using Wordpress for reference but I can't see anywhere to access the settings of these pages. Thanks
Technical SEO | | O2C0 -
Duplicate Page Content and Titles from Weebly Blog
Anyone familiar with Weebly that can offer some suggestions? I ran a crawl diagnostics on my site and have some high priority issues that appear to stem from Weebly Blog posts. There are several of them and it appears that the post is being counted as "page content" on the main blog feed and then again when it is tagged to a category. I hope this makes sense, I am new to SEO and this is really confusing. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | CRMI0 -
Wanted to shift a blog from sub domain to sub directory but...
Ok, I have a client who has their blog up and running on blog.website.com and they are planning to shift the blog to sub-directory www.websire.com/blog. The only problem is that the blog and website are hosted on two different servers so is there any way we can shift the blog to sub directory without shifting the blog to the similar server?
Technical SEO | | MoosaHemani0 -
What Happens to the Existing YouMoz Blog Post URL If It Is Promoted to the Main SEOmoz Blog?
Howdy SEOmoz Fans, Im wondering what happens to an existing YouMoz blog post if it gets promoted to the main SEOmoz blog? Does SEOmoz do a 301 redirect to the new URL? It seems like the old post disappears, but perhaps I'm not digging deep enough. Anyone have experience with this happening on SEOmoz? I'd like to know so I can figure out how to do something similar to that on one of my own sites (promoting UGC to a main blog). Thanks!
Technical SEO | | OrionGroup
~Scott0 -
Promoting a blog or a blog article
Hi what is the best way to promote a blog or a blog article. What i want to do is to find a site when i can put part of the article on that site and then have a link going to my blog for the article. Can anyone recommend any sites that do this please or the best ways to promote a new article from a blog
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Parked Domain blog directory not redirecting
My newly parked domain name, (our main website had to switch primary domains) is not redirecting properly and is causing our blog to be duplicate content. My 301 redirects work for everything else, but our parked domain /blog directory is not redirecting. I can type in both urls and then the blog appears on both sites. Not good. If I delete my blog .htaccess file, then it redirects fine. However, then our blog links are broken. So it has to do something with our .htaccess files. I do have a .htaccess file for our website, saying redirect everything to correct location, so i think this is interfering, but I cannot pinpoint it. this is the .htaccess file for the blog. BEGIN WordPress <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
Technical SEO | | hfranz
RewriteBase /blog/
RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /blog/index.php [L]</ifmodule> END WordPress main sites .htaccess (i am trying to pinpoint the issue here) Options +Includes
AddType text/html .htm .html
AddHandler server-parsed .htm .html
Options +FollowSymLinks RewriteEngine on RewriteBase / RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www.)?parkeddomain.com [NC,OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^newdomain.com [NC] RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain/$1 [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /([^?]*)? RewriteRule (.*) /$1? [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^.*/index.php RewriteRule ^(.*)index.php$ http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^.*/index.htm RewriteRule ^(.*)index.htm$ http://www.newdomain/$1 [R=301,L] RedirectMatch 301 /index.php/(.*) /$1 Is there something obvious here, that does not look right?0