Same Branding, Same Followers, New Domain After Penalty... Your Opinion Please
-
I know I've asked a similar question in the past but I'm still trying to figure out what to do with my website.
I've got a website at thewebhostinghero.com that's been penalized by both Panda and Penguin. I cleaned up the link profile and submitted a reconsideration request but it was denied. I finally found a handful of additional bad links and I submitted a new disavow + reconsideration request a few days ago and I am still waiting.
That said, after submitting the initial disavow request, the traffic has completely gone and while I expected a drop in traffic, I also expected my penalty to be lifted but it was not the case.
Even though the penalty might be lifted this time, I think that making the website profitable again could be harder than creating a new website.
So here's my questioning:
The website's domain is thewebhostinghero.com but I also happen to own webhostinghero.com which I bought later for $5000 (yes you read that right).
The domain "webhostinghero.com" is completely clean as it's only redirecting to thewebhostinghero.com. I would like to use webhostinghero.com as a completely new website and not redirect any traffic from thewebhostinghero.com as to not pass any bad link juice.
Pros:
- Keeping the same branding image (which cost me $$$)
- Keeping the 17,000+ Facebook followers
- Keeping the same Google+ and Twitter accounts
- Keeping and monetizing a domain that cost me $5000
- webhostinghero.com is a better domain than thewebhostinghero.com
Cons:
- Will create confusion between the 2 websites
- Any danger of being flagged as duplicate or something?
Do you see any other potential issues with this? What's your opinion/advice?
- P.S. Sorry for my english...
-
You have some great responses here. To summarize some of the advice and add a little new advice, this is what I would do:
- Display a text warning at the top of the site that the site has moved. I'd not worry about the text somehow contaminating the new domain.
- Keep the old site running, and try to get the penalties removed on the side.
- Noindex (or delete, if it's not important to the user) all the content that you want to keep but has few links, then move it to the new site.
- If the penalty is lifted, redirect the old site over to the new site's counterpart. Still, don't 301 redirect pages with low-quality content or spammy links. (You can just kill the pages that are "all bad" now.)
The only question left is what to do with the content you want to keep and has with clean external links. You could probably redirect and cut the internal links without too much risk, which is what I'd do. The completely safe thing to do would be to avoid linking altogether, leaving it out there to gather what traffic it can.
Good luck!
-
I would just rewrite the outbound url to look like sub folder so abc(dot)com/visit and then block the sub folder /visit in the robots.txt file.
I may even run a really good competition and try to suck the users up into a email list so when the time is right, expose the other site.
Its a tough one because you can't indicate the move to another url to Google so it's like starting again but at least you have a few lists and some traffic to the old site.
-
I guess I would suggest you don't.
Hidden text and links: "Hiding text or links in your content to manipulate Google’s search rankings can be seen as deceptive and is a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines."
-
As far as structure is concerned, having the same layout and navigation will not get you into duplicate content troubles. Have the same content will.
-
How about redirecting visitors from the original site to the new one using Javascript?
-
There's also some content that's highly valuable on the original website. Suppose I wanted to transfer this content to the new website, how about setting it to "noindex" on the original website and once it's out of G's index, I'd publish it to the new website.
Does that makes sense or would it get me another slap from Google?
-
What about website structure? Would it be better to start off with a completely new layout and navigation to avoid duplicate content issues?
-
In theory, using a no-follow link would do the trick. However, looking at the list of backlinks from my GWT account, I also see lots of no-follow links, don't ask me why.
So in that regards, I would rather avoid any kind of hyperlink association between the two sites. I mean, if that fails, my $5000 domain name is screwed so I'm not taking any chances.
-
No-Follow will stop PR passing through but the bot will still go through.
You need to block the bot from going through using your robots.txt file.
-
Redirecting the old website would worry me, it wouldn't surprise me if you redirected the problem along with it.
I would do what you suggested, modal popup with something like 'Hey, we have built a bigger, better website just for you' then block the url pointing out in the robots.txt file.
But that's just me.
-
I'm interested to see what you will do in regards to redirecting the visitors to the new address. We're going trough a similar process at the moment where we are replacing the current site which was hit with panda and penguin updates to a new branded domain although with a new design and new content. Would placing a message asking visitors to visit your new address with a no-follow link do the trick?
-
Sorry. I was under the impression that you wanted to more or less shut down the penalized site. That is why I suggested the mass-redirection. It also would allow you to move all of your content from the penalized domain to the new domain and you wouldn't have to worry about rewriting completely new and unique content.
Solid idea about using an image. The only downside would be that users would not be able to copy and paste the URL into the address bar... but it would really be just removing "the"... so I would like to assume they could handle it
I would probably shy away from popups, because depending on a user's settings, they may be blocking popups or may disregard the popups if they think they are an advertisement.
Mike
-
I am not sure about redirecting all the subpages to the homepage of thewebhostinghero.com
The website still has about 300 visitors a day. It's for "money keywords" that it doesn't get any traffic. Redirecting all the traffic to the homepage would cause the website to fall quickly.
If I wanted to keep as much of the visitors from the old site as possible, what about displaying a message at the very top of every page stating that the new website is at webhostinghero.com (I'd use an image instead of text to avoid any issue). Or what about showing a popup to each visitor?
-
It sounds to me like you already have a pretty good plan in place.
I would maybe suggest redirecting all of the sub-pages of thewebhostinghero.com to the homepage of thewebhostinghero.com. And on the homepage write something like, "Our website has moved. Please visit webhostinghero.com for blah blah blah." I would leave this as plan text so that you are not passing bad link juice to your new domain.
I don't know how co-occurrence (webhostingher.com being listed in text on thewebhostinghero.com) would play any role in your rankings; however, doing this would hopefully help eliminate some of the confusion your old customers would have and redirecting all of your sub-pages to the homepage would help ensure that you wouldn't have any duplicate content issues on the new site.
Does that help/make sense?
Mike
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
-
Interstitial Penalty?
We have an ecommerce website, and we show a popup for first time visitors to our desktop site to join our email list. Google has cached pages with the popup. Can I assume that this is a problem?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMHC0 -
Transferring Domain and redirecting old site to new site and Having Issues - Please help
I have just completed a site redesign under a different domain and new wordpress woo commerce platform. The typical protocol is to just submit all the redirects via the .htaccess file on the current site and thereby tell google the new home of all your current pages on the new site so you maintain your link juice. This problem is my current site is hosted with network solutions and they do not allow access to the .htaccess file and there is no way to redirect the pages they say other than a script they can employ to push all pages of the old site to the new home page of the new site. This is of course bad for seo so not a solution. They did mention they could also write a script for the home page to redirect just it to the new home page then place a script of every individual page redirecting each of those. Does this sound like something plausible? Noone at network solutions has really been able to give me a straight answer. That being said i have discussed with a few developers and they mentioned a workaround process to avoid the above: “The only thing I can think of is.. point both domains (www.islesurfboards.com & www.islesurfandsup.com) to the new store, and 301 there? If you kept WooCommerce, Wordpress has plugins to 301 pages. So maybe use A record or CName for the old URL to the new URL/IP, then use htaccess to redirect the old domain to the new domain, then when that comes through to the new store, setup 301's there for pages? Example ... http://www.islesurfboards.com points to http://www.islesurfandsup.com ... then when the site sees http://www.islesurfboards.com, htaccess 301's to http://www.islesurfandsup.com.. then wordpress uses 301 plugin for the pages? Not 100% sure if this is the best way... but might work." Can anyone confirm this process will work or suggest anything else to redirect my current site on network solutions to my new site withe new domain and maintain the redirects and seo power. My domain www.islesurfboards.com has been around for 10 years so dont just want to flush the link juice down the toilet and want to redirect everything correctly.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | isle_surf0 -
Negative SEO penalty, new domain?
One of my clients has just been hit with a Penguin 3.0 penalty. They have been subject to a negative link building attack for the last 5 months and despite my best effort it appears I haven't disavowed enough, someone was building a lot of links to them and all really low quality spam and a lot of forum profiles. They still rank for their brand, the site is in the index but the only rankings I can see are in Google Local. My advice to them for the quickest way back into Google is to get a new domain and relaunch on this new domain. The challenge is, the domain they want to buy used to be used as a domain in the 'erotic video distrubution' industry. It currently has 17 backlinks from 9 domain and the anchor text is mostly brand related but I can see that 70 links have already been deleted. I would consider this to be too high risk but would be interested to see if everyone agrees with me, it would be an awesome domain name if the history wasn't there!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Karen_Dauncey0 -
Unique domains vs. single domain for UGC sites?
Working on a client project - a UGC community that has a DTC model as well as a white label model. Is it categorically better to have them all under the same domain? Trying to figure which is better: XXX,XXX pages on one site vs. A smaller XXX,XXX pages on one site and XX,XXX pages on 10-20 other sites all pointing to the primary site. The thinking on the second was that those domains would likely achieve high DA as well as the primary, and would passing their value to the primary. Thoughts? Any other considerations we should be thinking about?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | intentionally0 -
Google Penalty or Not?
One of my sites I work with got this message: http://www.mysite: Unnatural inbound linksJune 27, 2013 Google has detected a pattern of artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site. Buying links or participating in link schemes in order to manipulate PageRank are violations of Google's Webmaster Guidelines. As a result, Google has applied a manual spam action to mysite.com/. There may be other actions on your site or parts of your site. But, when I got to manual actions it says: Manual Actions No manual webspam actions found. -- So which is it??? I have been doing link removal, but now I am confused if I need to do a reconsideration request or not.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | netviper0 -
How to do a site migration followed by a domain migration and avoid 301 redirect chains?
Hi all, The current roadmap for our Eng team has us performing a site migration (redirecting one subfolder to another subfolder) and then a domain migration shortly after. The way I see it, I have 2 scenarios (the 1st involves the site migration THEN the domain migration and the 2nd is the site migration and domain migration being done simultaneously): olddomain.com/subfolder-old to olddomain.com/subfolder-new THEN olddomain.com/subfolder-new to newdomain.com/subfolder-new AND olddomain.com/subfolder-old to newdomain.com/subfolder-new olddomain.com/subfolder-old to newdomain.com/subfolder-new I also understand that there are two best practices for a domain migration and they are 1) keep everything the same that you can to help Google understand it is the same page, just on a different domain and 2) avoid chain redirects. As you can imagine, scenario 1 requires more Eng costs than scenario 2. So, my question is, is scenario 2 a perfectly viable option or should I make the push to go for scenario 1? Any advice is greatly appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brad-causes1 -
Redirect ruined domain to new domain without passing link juice
A new client has a domain which has been hammered by bad links, updates etc and it's basically on its arse because of previous SEO guys. They have various domains for their business (brand.com, brand.co.uk) and want to use a fresh domain and take it from there. Their current domain is brand.com (the ruined one). They're not bothered about the rankings for brand.com but they want to redirect brand.com to brand.co.uk so that previous clients can find them easily. Would a 302 redirect work for this? I don't want to set up a 301 redirect as I don't want any of the crappy links pointing across. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jasonwdexter0 -
How to move domain content w Penguin Penalty?
Hey guys, I've come to the conclusion the sheer amount of crap links a site of ours has is un repairable. We own a .net version with the same brand name so I'm planning to move our ecommerce store over with all its content. I can move the site in one swoop but I believe Google will see it as duplicate content if we don't allow the old site to de index first. I would simply take it down for a month but we still get some orders now and then. Anyone have any ideas? I was thinking of leaving an image up on each page that is no index no follow linked to the new site that explains the site is being moved, etc.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iAnalyst.com1