Should I start new domain and redirect site?
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I recently my rankings for http://www.top-10-dating-reviews.com (some adult content) drop off a cliff. Google tells me there's no manual penalty therefore it might be algorithmic. I don't know why my rankings went but I think it could be that I added A LOT of category pages pulling the same content from posts and this could have caused both duplicate content issues and too many on page links causing an algo penalty.
Ive deleted the categories and therefore fixed duplicate content issue (perhaps you guys could check out the site and see that you agree with me) but rankings have not improved even thougo most of the pages have been recrawled.
I read somewhere its extremely hard to recover from such a penalty so should I move my site to a and domain and redirect all urls? I can't think of another solution.
Any help appreciated!
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Hi there,
First of all, penalties are eventually passed along with redirects, so you won't do yourself any favors by setting up a new domain and redirecting the old site.
Second, I highly highly doubt that categories are your problem here. It's far more likely that one of the following occurred:
- You lost some good, authoritative links
- Google devalued some of the links you had
- Penguin update
- Panda update
- Low-quality EMD update
Take a look at the date that traffic dropped and see if it coincides with one of the updates we know about. It looks like the link profile could justify Penguin, but my guess would be Panda/EMD, both of which are referred to as "page quality' updates. If I'm right, you need to keep people from bouncing back to Google.
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Duplicate content kills the ranking, I had been facing the issue due to the usage of Os Commerce, however, since I fixed the duplicate content my site ranking is getting better every day. The process is painfully slow but there is an improvement, Use Google webmaster tool to track duplicate title tags and content.
The categories you have deleted might be appearing as Page Not Found errors, this also effect search ranking as far as I know, you might see improvement in ranking in a few days.
Good Luck
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