How About Moving My Site to Another Domain?
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My website has been hit by a Google Penguin penalty. At this point, it seems very few websites have recovered from this penalty even after it was lifted.
That said, I'm still wondering if I should start a new website or my current one to another domain.
When I started my website, I registered the domain name http://www.thewebhostinghero.com
A few years later, I bought webhostinghero.com as it became available.
Actually, webhostinghero.com redirects traffic to thewebhostinghero.com at the registrar level. There are barely any links pointing to webhostinghero.com.
TheWebHostingHero.com is quite a big website with over 1400 pages and some very useful tools (http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/free-tools) that took me so long to develop, I just can't believe I'd have to throw it all out the window.
So that said, do you think it would be possible to move all or some of the content from thewebhostinghero.com to webhostinghero.com? Would that make sense? Would webhostinghero.com come out as a copy of thewebhostinghero.com since the domain is similar, etc.?
Of course, moving the content from thewebhostinghero.com to webhostinghero.com would have to be done without any 301/302 redirects to avoid passing bad link juice. At the same time, I don't want to end up with duplicate content on both domains.
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I submitted a reconsideration request but it was denied. I'm still trying to find out where those bad links are cause I did a hell of a job at cleaning bad links and disavowing those I couldn't get removed. I must have missed a handful of links and I'm trying to find them but in the meantime, the website is still penalized.
Basically, I have strong doubt that any small website ever recovers from a Penguin penalty so I'm wondering if I'm wasting my money by maintaining this site.
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Wow, this is a hard one.
There are several things to consider here:
- Have you tried fixing the penalty issue? Removing the links, using disavow tool and submitting a reconsideration request?
- If you did, have you waited long enough to say you haven't recovered from it?
- If you start from scratch using the other domain, remove the other one to avoid duplicate content, start with a new site completely. I would even try to redo the content.
- Does it worth it? How long will it take for the new site to reach what you have now with the penalized site?
- etc, etc.
It will be ultimately your decision and yours only. But consider all the pros/cons and first of all, try fixing the error. Redeem yourself, if that works, it will be so much better, and easier.
Hope that helps!
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