301 redirect after penalty to domain which currently 301 to the penalised domain
-
Hello all,
As I have mentioned in another Q&A, one of our new clients got hit by manual penalty. I checked their link profile and there was a lot of black hat involved. Long story sort, I submitted a reconsiderationr equest which was not enough as it seems 99,9% of his links are bad links. We took the decision to move a newly launched web site from www.websitename.com to www.website-name.com with the latter being an old domain name with good authority and clean link profile.
The problem is that at the moment the www.website-name.com is set to 301 redirect to www.websitename.com and what we want to do now is take the web site off www.websitename.com and launch (not 301 as we dont want to pass the penalty to the clean domain) it to www.website-name.com. What is the best practise for this particular case and are there any things i should pay attention to?
I would appreciate your advise!
-
Hi There
Karl's answer was fantastic - and I just want to emphasize as well - if this is decently strong brand I would put some more effort into recovering from the manual penalty. As tedious as this can be, if it was just a "churn and burn" site I'd say just axe it and re-build.
But go to Keyword Planner - how much brand search volume does the company receive? Try [brand] [brand.com] [www.brand.com] etc - if this number is at least in the hundreds or thousands of brand searches a month, I'd work to remove that penalty and let the brand signals help you recover. Also, does the main site receive a lot of direct traffic? It just sounds like if you can get the penalty lifted it will be an easier recovery than just some exact match domain that's not really a brand.
-Dan
-
Hello karl and thanks for the feedback, much appreciated mate!
The reason we wanted to redirect is purely for customer experience, this is a site with 10,000 visits per day. The web site was hit with manual penalty and I am right now on the second reconsideration request.
Allow to give a bit more details.
The website when launched bought 2 domains.
www.website.com and www.web-site.com with "website" being the brand's name.
Previous SEO guy uploaded 2 different versions, dont ask me why, I have no idea why. Few months ago they decided to take down www.web-site.com and redirect it to www.website.com so link juice and bookmarks would land people to one version of the web site.
Now that the www.website.com got penalised, for brand purposes they want to use www.web-site.com So my 2 questions are:
-
Is this safe considering that www.web-site.com redirects all this time to the penalised www.website.com ?
-
What if I set **302 redirects **instead of 301 from www.website.com to the www.web-site.com until the penalty is lifted? Or even an iframe?
Kind Regards and thanks a million
iframe, 302 redirect
-
-
The first thing to consider is what type of penalty the website got hit by, if it was Penguin and 99.9% links built were spam then you can leave all your links and just take the content. If it was Panda then you can't even take your content and place it on the new/old website because you'd still get found. If it was both then don't even bother redirecting anything!
I'd question the importance of the website to any business if it wasn't worth spending time on finding ALL the spam links and fixing the penalty. The reconsideration request can take a while, you may have to submit 3 or 4 requests before it gets lifted. I know this can take a considerable amount of time, effort and money but it's got to be worth it to get the business back on the right footing. Put yourself in Google's shoes, they deal with these requests every day and have got a back log so if they see ONE link that looks spammy, then they aren't going to lift the penalty. Someone is going to have to sit down and look at your link profile manually!
If the www.websitename.com has bad links and poor content, then why 301 it? I know you are doing it for the customers but you could just put a banner on the homepage saying you've moved to www.website-name.com.
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
-
Forced Redirects/HTTP<>HTTPS 301 Question
Hi All, Sorry for what's about to be a long-ish question, but tl;dr: Has anyone else had experience with a 301 redirect at the server level between HTTP and HTTPS versions of a site in order to maintain accurate social media share counts? This is new to me and I'm wondering how common it is. I'm having issues with this forced redirect between HTTP/HTTPS as outlined below and am struggling to find any information that will help me to troubleshoot this or better understand the situation. If anyone has any recommendations for things to try or sources to read up on, I'd appreciate it. I'm especially concerned about any issues that this may be causing at the SEO level and the known-unknowns. A magazine I work for recently relaunched after switching platforms from Atavist to Newspack (which is run via WordPress). Since then, we've been having some issues with 301s, but they relate to new stories that are native to our new platform/CMS and have had zero URL changes. We've always used HTTPS. Basically, the preview for any post we make linking to the new site, including these new (non-migrated pages) on Facebook previews as a 301 in the title and with no image. This also overrides the social media metadata we set through Yoast Premium. I ran some of the links through the Facebook debugger and it appears that Facebook is reading these links to our site (using https) as redirects to http that then redirect to https. I was told by our tech support person on Newspack's team that this is intentional, so that Facebook will maintain accurate share counts versus separate share counts for http/https, however this forced redirect seems to be failing if we can't post our links with any metadata. (The only way to reliably fix is by adding a query parameter to each URL which, obviously, still gives us inaccurate share counts.) This is the first time I've encountered this intentional redirect thing and I've asked a few times for more information about how it's set up just for my own edification, but all I can get is that it’s something managed at the server level and is designed to prevent separate share counts for HTTP and HTTPS. Has anyone encountered this method before, and can anyone either explain it to me or point me in the direction of a resource where I can learn more about how it's configured as well as the pros and cons? I'm especially concerned about our SEO with this and how this may impact the way search engines read our site. So far, nothing's come up on scans, but I'd like to stay one step ahead of this. Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | ogiovetti0 -
Redirecting 301 or 302?
Hi, I think the part of this question has been already discussed, but not exactly the same, I think. My site requires authentication for member page. When a user try to go to member area, we redirect to 3rd party to do the authentication. 1. user clicks a link to www.mysite.com/member/contents.html
Technical SEO | | HypermediaSystems
2. www.myauthenticate.com/login?h=somehashuniquehash454859428778545 (enters id/pass)
3. login success => redirect back to www.mysite.com/member/contents.html We are doing it 302, temporary redirect. But moz crawler error seems to suggest we should do it 301.
So my question is:
A. Should we do it 301???
B. If we do 301, what happens to myauthenticate.com? since it has hashtag, I am afraid it could create a lot of duplicate contents on myauthenticate.com side... Thank you so much for your help in advance...0 -
Best Place to Redirect 301 to?
Hey Everyone! I have an old site with hundreds of blog posts that are very spammy (duplicate content, keyword stuffed, and just plain bad content). I am going to redirect them and delete them from WordPress but I'm wondering where is the best place to redirect them to? Home page, other posts, other pages...? Any thoughts would be appreciated! Thanks!
Technical SEO | | adamxj21 -
How should I set up a domain redirect
A client has 2 domains that he wants to use for the same site. At the moment one domain is just an abbreviation of the main domain (not sure why) as follows: www.mygreatpropertycompany.com
Technical SEO | | davidmaxwell
www.mgpc.com (just redirects to the above) He is complaining that when he searches for 'mpc' there are no results (at all) so I'm wondering what the best approach is.There is currently nothing on the main domain that refers to 'mgpc' in it's abbreviated sense - the only place it's being used is the company's email addresses (info@mgpc.com). The redirect is simply a html file in the root of www.mgpc.com as follows: Is there anything I can do to help him out? (this is one of those 'doing a friend a favour' tasks!) Thanks!0 -
Will a timed 301 redirect work for Googlebot?
Our client is changing brand names and domain names. We know we need to 301 redirect the old domain, but for marketing reasons we want people to see a short message saying that the brand has changed and that they will be redirected. Example: | | Our concern is how, or if, Googlebot will intepret the redirect. Will this accomplish our SEO objective of moving the value of the page to the new domain, or do we need to do just a plain old fashioned 301 redirect and not even let the page load? Thanks for your help.
Technical SEO | | GOODSIR0 -
301 Redirect Properly To Keep the Juice
I have a bunch of WP Blogs and was thinking of taking all linkjuice from these to my main money site. The most of the other WP Blogs is hosted at godaddy.com (domain and site) and I know they have a URL Redirects page in site manager but I`m not sure this is the right way to go. Also I wonder some of these sites have hundreds of blogposts there is no way I can "re-create" those on the money site but I am sure that is not a must-thing to do in order to keep the "juice" right or wrong? Last but not least, I was wondering if you think it would be best to redirect the sites to relevant pages on money sites. For instance if i had a domain called cheap-ties.com with 100 blogposts about this and on money site a webshop with a category called ties, should redirect to this or to main domain or doesnt it matter?
Technical SEO | | fAgBxa8b0 -
301 Redirect
Hi there, We are re-branding & re-structuring our website, there will be quite a number of 301 re-directs, possibly hundreds. The question is: Should i wait until the re-branding has been completed and do al the 301's in one go?, or should I try and do 301's as i go along? Kind Regards
Technical SEO | | Paul780 -
301 redirect issues
Hi all, I'm hoping someone will be able to help me with an extermley frustrating problem with 301 redirects in .htaccess. Basically I'm trying to redirect some old pages (from our old website) that stil rank to the new equivilent. For example - old url = www.domain.com/frames/news/company-news/news-reader.php?newsStoryID=395 New www.domain.com/news/article-title I've tried the simple redirect 301 /frames/news/company-news/news-reader.php?newsStoryID=395 http://www.domain.com/news/article-title But this doesnt work. I've also tried - RewriteEngine on
Technical SEO | | EclipseLegal
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^newsStoryID=395$
RewriteRule ^/news-reader.php$ http://www.domain.com/news/article-title/? [L,R=301] Could anyone help? I've followed lots of tutorials that all match the above but it just doesn't work! The only other thing within the htaccess file is from wordpress for pretty permalinks - BEGIN WordPress <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]</ifmodule> END WordPress Many thanks in advance!0