Hit By Penguin...Wait for recovery or do i change domains?
-
I have been working hard to recover from Penguin..and keep cleaning my backlink structure...and the site start getting value and now with Penguin update 5 or 2.1 the website again lost value.. Our website have huge no of backlinks and most of the website owners are not responding.
Shall I wait for recovery or can i change the domain with same content and dead the olde one?
-
Hi Manroop,
You posted this a while ago and I wondered what you decided to do in the end and what the outcome was. I'm interested as I, too, have been hit by Penguin. I've disvowed/removed links, but have not had any further joy - although I need to wait until the next Penguin update before deciding on next steps. Probably changing the domain is the next step.
-
I don't know that anyone can answer that question without deep knowledge of the site. I agree with Chris that starting from scratch is a big move. Have you attempted to disavow the bad links? It's your next reasonable step. Unfortunately, we're unclear on the Penguin data update cycle, so seeing a positive result from this could take weeks (or longer).
If (1) nothing seems to be working, or (2) you have no good links left after the clean-up, or (3) you simply can't risk waiting any longer - from a business standpoint - then, starting over may be your only option. Keep in mind that you don't want to 301-redirect the old site (you could transfer the penalty), so you really will be starting from scratch. You'll also be taking on a new domain name, which could have many implications (positive and negative). The best you can do at that point is try to re-point some of your old, good links to the new site and at least reclaim some of that link equity.
It's a huge decision, and you need to look at all the ramifications. I would also dig deep and be absolutely sure that Penguin is the only thing that's hitting you. If you do this, and it turns out there's something about the site/content itself harming you, you're going to have made a huge change only to end up in the same situation.
-
Hiya,
if they (webmasters) don't respond use the disavow keep track for the sake of proving you tried to get hold of them. It's a hell of a lot more work to start from scratch then to remove some bad links. I wouldn't recommend sitting on your hands as the problem wont go away by its self.
Unfortunately penguin is doing its job and making sure you don't have a rubbish back link profile so I recommend removing the bad links and getting some good content on your site to help get some great links.
Good luck.
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
-
Should I buy an expired domain that has already been redirected to some other website? Can I use it or redirect it to my own site if I purchase it?
I was going to purchase an expired domain but then I came to know that it has been redirected to some other website. I have two questions: Can I build a website around this domain if I purchase it? and will the Domain Authority remains the same ? Can I redirect it to my own site? and will all the Link Juice flow to my site?
Industry News | | Kamranktk0 -
Time to Separate Company Websites or Keep it on One Domain?
Hey Everyone! I am completely stumped with what I should do for the scenario I find myself in… I’m hoping with your experience, you could guide me into the right direction. Let’s say our current website is Brown.com (Brown Group Inc.). We have a splash page, which links to two subfolders Brown Minerals (Brown.com/Minerals) and Brown Pet Products (Brown.com/Pet). Both of these are separate companies but owned by Brown Group Inc. Each company specializes in different industries, sell different products, have different customers and have different marketing. The only common thing the two companies have is the brand name “Brown” and owned by the same person. Brown Group Inc.
Industry News | | rminerals
(Brown.com) Brown Minerals
(Brown.com/Minerals) Brown Pet Products
(Brown.com/Pet) I work specifically for Brown Minerals. It is my job to develop a new website, build traffic to our website, improve our SEO rankings and to build the Brown Minerals online brand. I am afraid that the work I will be putting into building our online brand may not be as effective since we share the same domain name with Brown Pet Products, which their website is outdated, they have their own traffic, links, etc. specifically for their products & industry. My question is, should we keep both websites in subfolders on the existing domain name or should we separate the websites and put them on their own domain names (BrownMinerals.com and BrownPetProducts.com)? Thank you0 -
Cleaning up after Penguin | Next steps?
Background:
Industry News | | godreamvacations
We've come to the realization that Google's Penguin update back in 2013 has penalized us and are just now attending to the issue. We had subscribed to a link-building service for years and just recently cancelled their services. Unfortunately those links are still out there. We've submitted a disavow list to Google on January 14, 2014; but there is no way to tell when/if they processed it. Our homepage used to rank in the top three listings for our main keyword, but now we're somewhere around #31 on page 4. It's not even our homepage that ranks any longer either; its a page specifically created recently that is tailored to our main keyword. What I've Done So Far Using MOZ, I determined our homepage was using our keyword 53 times in various ways; so I dwindled that down to 27. I built a new page tailored to our main keyword that apparently is ranking in Google as #31 now; not gaining any placement at all though. I've implemented canonical tags in the <header>of most pages (usually just linked to itself to minimize duplicate pages being detected from URL variables and such). I've worked on Title and meta description length issues. Duplicate Content?
We sell hotels, so we have a ton of internal links 500+ hotels, linking to/from one another. One page might have 100 hotel links (all internal). Another category page might be duplicating half of those links. For example, we have 200 all-inclusive resorts, so they are listed as links with the hotel name and a short description. On an adults-only page, we have 100 resorts, but 75 of them are the same resorts as on the all-inclusive page; so it may appear like duplicate content. << Not sure how to combat this. ? Too Many internal Links on Homepage?
Our homepage: navigation bar has 68 links, rest of page has ~74 links. I've read that that's too many and other people say it's fine as long as your page has textual content that is long enough. Any thoughts? Domain Name Change?
An SEO company that we talked to said they would transform our site into a Wordpress-based site for SEO reasons and that we should change our domain name; thus starting fresh and ridding us of the bad/spammy links that are coming to us. They also said they have several high-quality ranking pages that they would write articles on and link to us. Considering we don't have many good links to our site to begin with, what are your thoughts on a domain name change? It's drastic and we're not that open to the idea (yet). Would the SEO's link-building technique be what MOZ is talking about in his video 7 days ago. If so, I think that's a scary route to take; especially when after we stop the SEO's services, they said our links would come off those pages. Won't google see that happen and flag us as using black-hat tactics? As for Wordpress; we have 500+ hotels.. so that's doable, but a chore in itself. If our CMS code and website can be cleaned up some I think our custom CMS is fine for SEO. Any WP fanatics out there think WP is good for 700+ page sites? *we already have our CMS programmed to pull data from vendors; so that code would need rewritten also to work with WP. Analytics Data
I reviewed Google Analytics closely looking at the google organic traffic closely from Jan 2012 till now and I don't see any sudden drops; just gradual decreases. Is this normally the case for Penguin-hit sites; or shouldn't there be a sudden drop in organic traffic? If you've read this far; THANK YOU. Any comments to the above questions are appreciated. </header>0 -
How do you measure impacts of Google Updates Like Penguin 4?
Having a conversation with a fellow SEO via twitter and we were discussing measuring algorithm updates. In the aftermath of Google Penguin 4 how do you determine the effects it has on your site/sites and your respective verticals?
Industry News | | Thos0030 -
Google Penguin 2.0 - Coming soon
There is an interesting article on SEW that Google is going to update Penguin to the next major version - http://bit.ly/15Vkr6O So what do you think, what should we expect? And also, is there available updated webmaster guidelines?
Industry News | | ditoroin1 -
Domain crowding, when exactly?
So I was reading the latest search improvements to Google search on http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/05/search-quality-highlights-53-changes.html Good to see they are doing something about "domain diversity" explained as More domain diversity. [launch codename "Horde", project codename "Domain Crowding"] Sometimes search returns too many results from the same domain. This change helps surface content from a more diverse set of domains. OK so it sounds good, right? I was hopeful too but I have been running a few queries myself to see how it helped us. Not even a single change yet. So, I'm wondering how this works. They make a change and it takes some time to see it actually happens? Or is it all done for now and it just fixed a small part of the problem and we have to wait for another change? I'd have been ok if the authority site with 3 links actually were useful links. Unfortunately (not for only competitors, but Google search users too) 2 of the links listed are pages from 2008 and is not really helping anyone.
Industry News | | Gamer070 -
My site was hit by the Penguin Update, Now What?
My site is very young, having only been up for about a month and a half. Despite being nascent we were seeing a ton of organic traffic. Enter Google Penguin update.... Traffic is down 40% or so over the past week. So, assuming the damage has been done, the question is, what do we do next to start moving back towards where we were? If we're doing everything everything right do we just chalk it up to the fact that our site is very new and stay the course on original content and link building? I know you can submit your site for reconsideration which is something that we are going to do this week, but I wonder what else we can do to start edging back to where we were pre-penguin update. Maybe this would be a good Whiteboard Friday topic.
Industry News | | knowyourbank0 -
Hyphenated domains – good or bad?
I have a client who will be changing their domain name from www.brand.co.uk to www.brandglobal.com. There are concerns however that this might affect the searches for brand terms and variants. Hence, there is a suggestion for going for www.brand-global.com. I’m aware that search engines are smart enough to discern the brand name in most cases, but I’m wary if it would impact highly on the brand search terms and would it be a better option to go for www.brand-global.com instead of www.brandglobal.com? Any advice (or reference to discussions around this) would be much appreciated. Thanks
Industry News | | ravisodha0
