Building a new website post penalty and redirects
-
A website I'm working on is clearly algorithmically penalised.
I've spent a lot of time mass disavowing spammy links, but it doesn't seem to make a difference.
We have been planning to build a new website anyway since we are rebranding.
1. Is it possible to tell which pages are most likely to have a penalty applied?
2. If the website as a whole has a penalty, will redirecting certain pages to the new website carry the penalty?
3. Our website is structured as sales pages and blog content. It is the sales pages that have the spammy links, yet most of the blog content does not rank either. Would it be a good strategy to only redirect all the blog posts (which have natural links pointing to them) to the new website and not the sales pages?
4. The homepage has a mix of spam and very good editorial links. If I have disavowed links and domains, can I safely redirect this page?
-
Daniel - No worries…
If there hasn't been a manual action (just a big drop in rankings), disavow is a great tool to use.
I think on the darker side of SEO, there has certainly been competitors in highly competitive spaces who have tried to create spammy links pointing to competitors as a means to win at this often zero-sum game. So my hunch is that is why Google realizes that sometimes links show up beyond your control.
Best practice, though, is to contact the other website and ask for links to be removed. But sometimes this can fall on deaf ears… Thus, Google's disavow tool…
If it was my site, I'd try to get some of the bad links removed.
And then really focus on a high-quality end user experience… including site load time, engaging content, etc...
Hope this helps guide the decision…
- Jeff
-
Hi Jeff, thanks for your response.
There has been no manual action, just an algorithmic penalty evidenced by the fact that posts do not rank for ab almost exact match for the name and sales pages that used to be page 1 arent in the top 50.
I have literally disavowed any link that is not an organic link or a link from a partner website.
Is disavowing (for a anlgo penalty) enough, or do we need to contact websites and have the link removed?
-
Daniel -
Have you had a manual action taken against the site? The place to look for this is in Google Webmaster Tools, and this describes it in more detail: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35843?hl=en
If you have, you'll want to clean up everything and ask Google to reconsider the site. This process can take weeks.
Google can either take action against your entire site, or just parts of it, according to their blog here:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2013/08/manual-actions-viewer.html
You might just want to start over, though, and do things with a clean slate.
Because repeat offenders, according to Google's Distinguished Engineer Matt Cutts, will face ever more challenging hurdles if additional manual actions occur.
If you haven't had a manual action against your site, you might want to do as much cleanup as possible, and monitor the performance. Try focusing on the end customer experience. What do they need to know? What enriches their lives? (Instead of what's great for the company's revenue.)
To answer the question about redirecting the blog posts - yes, that probably makes sense to do using 301 redirects, especially if that content is solid and has great inbound natural links.
Hope this helps!
-- Jeff
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
-
Rewrite a good post
Hello I have a blog post from 2015 that is ranking very well on Google but I have a terrible bounce rate of more than 98% for this landing page. This post is bringing 4 more visits than the rest of my website pages so I need to make people stay in the site. I don't want to lose my rankings so my question is: Is it better to modify this post or to write a new post and delete the old one? Thank you
Technical SEO | | seoandromedical0 -
How to handle New Page/post with site map
Hi, I've created and submitted to google (through webmaster tool) a site map with the WP plugin XML google maps. Now I've created new pages and posts. My question is: do i have to recreate and re submit another site map to google or can i just submit to google the new pages and posts with the option 'FETCH AS GOOGLE' ? Tx so much in advance.
Technical SEO | | tourtravel0 -
Removing indexed website
I had a .in TLD version of my .com website floated for about 15 days, which was a duplicate copy of .com website. I did not wish to use the .in further for SEO duplication reasons and had let the .in domain expire on 26th April. But still now when I search from my website the .in version also shows up in results and even in google webmaster it shows the the website with maximum (190) number of links to my .com website. I am sure this is hurting the ranking of my .com website. How can the .in website be removed from googles indexing and search results. Given that is has expired also. thanks
Technical SEO | | geekwik0 -
Website Redirects
Background information: We have a website (devicelock.com) which is currently our corporate website. The company use to operate under (ntutility.com) which is now being redirected to devicelock.com via a DNS Forward - 302 Redirect. The IT admin (a founder of the company) is reluctant to change it to a 301. The current flow is ntutility.com redirects to protect-me.com then redirects again to devicelock.com. When i search up Devicelock on google, it shows up as ntutlity.com. There is no devicelock.com homepage on google search. Question: Are there any negative implications about this? Is this hurting our SEO in any way? When i do link building, will this have any negative affects? Will my links for devicelock be attributed to devicelock.com?
Technical SEO | | Devicelock0 -
How to avoid duplicate content penalty when our content is posted on other sites too ?
For recruitment company sites, their job ads are posted muliple times on thier own sites and even on other sites too. These are the same ads (job description is same) posted on diff. sites. How do we avoid duplicate content penalty in this case?
Technical SEO | | Personnel_Concept0 -
Can I do a redirect to a new domain name only a couple of weeks after having redirected to another domain?
I have a client with two website with very similar content. Both had a lot of inbound links and performed fairly well in SERPS. We recently combined both sites and have redirected one of the domains to the other. The traffic dipped slightly initially, but is recovering nicely. Now the client registered a new domain name he would like to use for the site. Should I wait a few weeks for everything to settle down after the first redirect/consolidation of sites before doing a new redirect to a new domain name, or should I not worry about having any issues with doing it right away?
Technical SEO | | Drewco0 -
Can I redirect a URL that has a # in it? How?
Hi there - My web developer is saying that I can't do a URL redirect with a "#" in it. Currently, the URL is actually an anchored link within a page (which the URL indicates with a #). I want to change the content to a new URL, but our website links internally to the old URL, so we would need to do a URL redirect (assume 301). Can you tell me if this is possible and how? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | sfecommerce0 -
SEO Benefit from Redirecting New Exact Match Domains?
Hi, All! This is a question asked in the old Q & A section, but the answer was a little ambiguous and it was about 3 years ago, so I decided to repost and let the knowledgeable SEO public answer... From David LaFerney: It’s clear that it’s much easier to get high rankings for a term if your domain is an exact match for the query. If you own several such domains that are very related such as – investmentrealestate.com, positivecashflow.com, and rentalproperty.com – would you be able to benefit from those by 301ing them to a single site, or would you have to maintain separate sites to help capture those targeted phrases? In a nutshell – SEO wise, is it worth owning multiple domains to exactly match valuable search phrases? Or do you lose the exact match benefit when you redirect?>> To clarify: redirecting an old domain with lots of history and links to a new exact match domain seems to contain SEO benefit. (You get links+exact match domain, approximately.) But the other way around? Redirecting a new exact match domain to an older domain with links? Does that do anything for the ranking of the old domain for the exact match keyword? Or absolutely nothing? (My impression has been that it's nothing, but the question came up for a client and I just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing something.) Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | debi_zyx0