Big Mess - Multiple Websites
-
I have a customer, a Psychologist, who put up +/-20 websites many years ago. He has 1 main site (with his name as the domain) with hundreds of pages of quality content. The other sites are all exact match domains - anxiety counseling, couples counseling, etc. Some are single page sites, others have a good amount of quality content. Many of the EMD sites were getting ranked on the first page, as was the main site. The money site was ranking on the first page for the best keywords
All of the EMD pages linked back to the main site, many with site wide footer links. The main site did not link back. All of the sites are on the same IP address. These sites have been in place for years. I don't believe that he has a duplicate content problem.
About 8 weeks ago, the rankings for the main site crashed, moving 10 or more SERP pages deep. The EMD sites are still ranking. He has not gotten any nasty-grams from Google in Webmaster Tools.
The Psychologist relies exclusively on organic for his business, and it has taken a significant hit.
1. Has anyone else seen this happen?
2. Is it safe to assume that Google finally nailed him for using a linking scheme?
3. How can we unwind this? The other sites are still generating business, and if those go away, he is really screwed.
4. Will taking down all of the links from the other sites be enough? Would moving the money site to another hosting company on a different IP make a difference? Ideas?
I think the white hat answer would be to take down the EMD sites, and 301 redirect to the main site. The problem is that the loss of business from this process could be catastrophic.
-
I am not sure that "sandboxing" is an appropriate word at this time.
If google takes a manual action against your site they notify you in webmaster tools.
If the problem with your site is detected by algorithm, they simply demote your site.
I honestly think that you need experienced professional help with this.
-
EGOL:
If Google decides to drop your rankings instead of sandboxing your site, do they send you a warning?
-
In my opinion, any answers given here are guesses and are inappropriate to use as an attempt to solve this problem.
This is a high stakes problem. So a detailed evaluation of these sites, their historic linkbuilding practices, the quality of their content, their traffic source history and more should be considered.
If these were my sites I would get a penalty pro to look at them and be willing to pay the cost of a thorough review and recommendation.
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
-
Questions about the DA,PA of website
I am counting on some more ads on the site https://gogoanime.city/, is it a problem if I add some ads about sex, porn ..., to make a little more money. So does it affect the PA DA score. Thank you!
Technical SEO | | gogoanimetp0 -
Disavow a big part of my external link profile
Hi There, With the latest penguin 3.0 algorithm update (on October 17th,) I noticed a drop in my rankings. Even though I didn’t receive any manual penalty because no messages have been found in WebMaster Tool, I suspect it is an algorithm penalty. For this reason, I definitively decided to clean-up my external link profile. **I am excluding it is a Panda 4.1 penalty because an extensive site structure review has been conducted quite recently. I collected external links from Webmaster Tool and Open Site Explorer. What I found is that 83% of my external links need to be disavowed because the links come either from poor directories or marketing articles that are evidently and specifically written for link building purposes. My questions are: 1) Shall an external link clean-up be set in place anyway although I didn’t receive any penalty message in order to prevent future problems with penguin algorithm? 2) Is it too dangerous to disavow 83% of external links? May such a manoeuvre destroy my actual rankings? Thanks in advance for you advices 🙂
Technical SEO | | Midleton0 -
Multiple domains pointing to same site
Over the years, we have acquired a great number of variations of our domains, or industry-specific domains to protect our brand. Currently, the majority of those domains are parked at the registrars. Would we do any harm to our rankings if we pointed the dormant domains to our website (www.ellsworth.com)? If not, are there any recommendations as the best way to do this, or just point them to the same IP?
Technical SEO | | Ellsworth0 -
Use of Multiple Tags
Hi, I have been monitoring some of the authority sites and I noticed something with one of them. This high authority site suddenly started using multiple tags for each post. And I mean, loads of tags, not just three of four. I see that each post comes with at least 10-20 tags. And these tags don't always make sense either. Let's say there is a video for "Bourne Legacy", they list tags like bourne, bourney legacy, bourne series, bourne videos, videos, crime movies, movies, crime etc. They don't even seem to care about duplicate content issues. Let's say the movie is named The Dragon, they would inclue dragon and the-dragon in tags list and despite those two category pages(/dragon and /the-dragon) being exactly the same now, they still wouldn't mind listing both the tags underneath the article. And no they don't use canonical tag. (there isn't even a canonical meta on any page of that site) So I am curious. Do they just know they have a very high DA, they don't need to worry about duplicate content issues? or; I am missing something here? Maybe the extra tags are doing more good than harm?
Technical SEO | | Gamer070 -
As a wholesale website can our independent retailer's website use (copy) our content?
As a wholesaler of villa rentals, we have descriptions, images, prices etc can our agents (independent retailers) use the content from our website for their site or will this penalize us or them in Google rankings?
Technical SEO | | ewanTHH0 -
Multiple Domains for One Site
We are building a site for a new miniature golf course. They have a long name, which they don't want me to mention, but it's equivalent to a name like Golden State Golf and Putt. They also have a restaurant with its own name and brand that will be a part of the mini golf course and its website, much how Hotel websites have their restaurants on their sites. Before becoming our client they purchased golfandputt.com and want to go with this domain for simplicity sake. In addition to this domain name they purchased 7 others that contain the bussiness' full name in some way, such as: goldenstategolfandputt.com goldenstategolfandputt.net, goldenstategolf-guitar.com etc., As well as: 3 variations of the golfandputt.com domain 3 variations of the restaurants name They wish to have all of these redirect to the main website or the restaurant page to "help with SEO," as they told me. From what I have researched on SEOmoz it seems better to simply optimize the website for Golden State Golf and Putt and the restaurant page for the restaurant's name. Additionally, I'm worried that redirecting the domains to the site will actually hurt them in rankings. If someone can shed some light on what the best practices for this sort of situation are I'd be much appreciative. Apologies in advance for the lengthy explanation but its a bit of a unique situation.
Technical SEO | | TVI0 -
New website, to www or not
I was just wondering if there are any advantages to using the www instead of just the domain name for seo. Can these be elaborated on?
Technical SEO | | simvegas1 -
How do you measure content on a website?
I never thought of this question before. Maybe because i didn't focus myself on content but only on optimizing existing content from clients. So how do you measure the content on a specific page?
Technical SEO | | mosaicpro0