Dump Penguin Hit Domain

[mavster]

Just wanting to get some feedback from others dealing with Penguin hits on client's websites. We've got one particularly client that has been hit badly because of a high proportion of link toxicity. After running the Cemper Detox Tool we found that only about 25 links are healthy. We're actually thinking of dumping the domain and moving the website to a new domain and starting again with link building (manually grabbing as many of the existing healthy links as possible on the way).

Has anyone out there used this strategy? What do you think of the potential of the Sandbox of the new site vs. the Penguin hit on the old site. Do you think the 'drag' of Penguin is higher than the 'drag' of the Sandbox on rankings?

Thanks guys, look forward to your insight!

[artdivision]

Hi Linda

Do NOT redirect - If you set up a redirect you will pass the penalty to the new domain and you will have the exact same results. I suggest you clean the profile and once you see your traffic picking up then do 301.

Try to think why you got penalised. Go to webmaster tools and download your latest links - there is a tab and you can select it. Since you were hit with the latest update I would start to check links within the 2 update dates. Disavow those links or try to remove them. I am sure you will pick up.

I can have a look for you if you want should you give me the web site url on a PM.

Best of luck!

[mavster]

Thanks for your responses so far guys.  Just to clarify, there has not be a manual penalty, just a hit from the Penguin 2.1 algo update on October 3rd.

My concern is that given that there is not manual penalty, we can't ask for re-consideration and therefore have no idea when the next algo update will happen and if it will fix the problem.

With regard to traffic, they are getting around 500 visitors a month from direct traffic and almost nothing from referrals, however I was thinking that I would just set up an automatic redirect of the domain, or alternatively just set up a simply page telling customers 'we've moved'.  The domain would be similar, so brand name recognition would be ok going forward.

[artdivision]

I agree with Federico if we are dealing with a "manual penalty" case which seems to be the case since he is mentioning reconsideration requests. You have to remember that there is not a one size fits all solution for penalised domains, each client is a unique case that needs a unique action from your part.

For example:

1. Is the cost of your extra hours of work and the time he is going to lose in order to revoke the penalty less thanbuying a domain, uploading the site and rank it again.
   2) Is the domain a branded domain? If so you need to try and clean it, if not maybe worth changing it?
2. Does the client have referral web sites driving good quality traffic to the site? This is extremely important. For example one of my clients who got penalised (manual penalty) was getting 6000 visits a month from a referal web site Google pointed out as against their "quality guidelines". Needless to say I did not disavow the site and carried on cleaning the rest of the domain. Few months later the penalty timed out and client got back all his rankings and traffic, also impressions got increased on google webmaster tools.

Up to date everything seems fine.

[FedeEinhorn]

Is the site still getting customers accessing the site directly? As if you established a brand name, that people is used to, I should consider cleaning up the domain instead.

I've done it myself, 95% of the links were toxic according to Link Dtox, we tried disavowing just the worse ones, reconsideration declined, then we disavowed over 1500 domains and left around 50 that were healthy links, reconsideration approved and penalty revoked. The very next day we started seeing 100% increase in search traffic, and although we are not ranking as high as we expected, Google's Matt Cutts told a few days ago that even after a penalty is removed, it may take some time until Google trust the site again.

All the work was done KNOWING that we couldn't just "dump" the domain as we had over 100,000 customers accessing our site directly. And if you change to a new domain and redirect the penalized one, chances are the new domain gets the hit too.

So as a first step, I would ask myself if it is worth the clean, depending on how many direct traffic you have, brand, etc.

Hope that helps!