Should I redirect my Google Update Effected Domain to brand new Domain?
-
Hey Moz experts, I had a domain which was really doing better but after the Humming Bird update my traffic was decreased up to 90%. There are plenty of posts on my existing blog, Now what should I do? I mean should I redirect it to a brand new domain or Copy all the posts to a brand new domain and delete my existing domain? Note that the Old domain has PR1, DA 19 and PA 30.
-
Thank You for such a nice and descriptive answer, you're 100% right and I did not received any manual penalty from Google. I even tried to add up new content but it does not made any difference so I thought to transfer all the content to new domain. By the way you've got semrush premium account? and how much useful is that?
-
Imran,
I looked at semrush.com and it looks like you had a spike of traffic in August 2013 and then it quickly died back down. I also looked at your backlink profile and I see that the overwhelming majority of your links are from blog comments. It's okay to have some blog comments but you don't want that to dominate your backlinks. You also want to be sure that you're using your actual name for the anchor text of the link (and you are, so that's good). I also noticed that you have some links from other sites linking to you, like androidcentral.us. Since you also own that website, you're effectively creating your own little link network, which could become an issue, if it's not already.
The quality of the content is also lacking. There are a lot of grammatical issues and that may be because English isn't your first language. Your English isn't terrible, but Google wants high quality and unfortunately the level of English on your site won't be considered high quality.
What you should do is work on getting more high quality backlinks and diversifying your backlink profile. I checked a few of your pages on copyscape and they didn't turn up any duplicates found. Assuming this content is actually 100% unique and not just spun/rewritten from another source, you should also have someone fix up the grammatical issues. If the content is spun/rewritten from another source, start adding new content that is completely unique and original. You also need to remove the "Example Widget" text in your sidebar ASAP. That makes your site look incomplete.
If you haven't already done so, please check Google Webmaster Tools to make sure you didn't receive a manual penalty from Google.
-
And one thing more, almost 2 weeks ago, I also changed the permalink structure which encountered in so many 404s but then I manually edited all the links and made some redirection changes to my .htaccess file.
-
Hey Philip thanks for your response, My domain is ohguideme.com, over the recent months i have made so many changes to its look and almost have edited many posts and even deleted some of the poor posts that I thought were of poor quality but then there is still no improvement in rankings. I even paid a guy who was boasting that he will recover my site but nothing happened. Do you have any suggestions or tips? What should i do with it???
-
I have not heard of any websites receiving a penalty from Google due to the Hummingbird update. In my opinion, there is something else going on that affected your rankings. I would not recommend you delete your domain and redirect posts to another domain. That isn't solving the problem. That's just a way to try and avoid the issue. Like I said, a penalty can follow you to your new domain.
Are you referring to the androidrootcental.com website in your tagline? Or is this a problem with another website?
-
Well I still don't know why was my site hit by Humming Bird update and it was in Mid-August, My site content was original but I guess it was due to poor internal backlinks.. So what should I do now? Delete my existing domain and transfer all the posts??
-
Matt Cutts has said that a penalty CAN follow you to your new domain if you just simply recreate the site on a new domain exactly as it was on the penalized domain.
Do you know why you were penalized? Was it for duplicate content, poor site quality, spammy backlinks, or something else? When did your rankings drop? Mid-August?
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
-
Does redirecting from a "bad" domain "infect" the new domain?
Hi all, So a complicated question that requires a little background. I bought unseenjapan.com to serve as a legitimate news site about a year ago. Social media and content growth has been good. Unfortunately, one thing I didn't realize when I bought this domain was that it used to be a porn site. I've managed to muck out some of the damage already - primarily, I got major vendors like Macafee and OpenDNS to remove the "porn" categorization, which has unblocked the site at most schools & locations w/ public wifi. The sticky bit, however, is Google. Google has the domain filtered under SafeSearch, which means we're losing - and will continue to lose - a ton of organic traffic. I'm trying to figure out how to deal with this, and appeal the decision. Unfortunately, Google's Reconsideration Request form currently doesn't work unless your site has an existing manual action against it (mine does not). I've also heard such requests, even if I did figure out how to make them, often just get ignored for months on end. Now, I have a back up plan. I've registered unseen-japan.com, and I could just move my domain over to the new domain if I can't get this issue resolved. It would allow me to be on a domain with a clean history while not having to change my brand. But if I do that, and I set up 301 redirects from the former domain, will it simply cause the new domain to be perceived as an "adult" domain by Google? I.e., will the former URL's bad reputation carry over to the new one? I haven't made a decision one way or the other yet, so any insights are appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gaiaslastlaugh0 -
Is domain authority lost if you create a 301 redirect but mark it as noindex, nofollow?
Hi everyone, Our company sells products in various divisions. While we've been selling Product A and Product B under our original brand, we've recently created a new division with a new domain to focus on a Product B. The new domain has virtually no domain authority (3) while the original domain has some (37). We want customers to arrive on the new domain when they search for key search terms related to Product B instead of the pages that previously existed on our main website. If we create 301 redirects for the pages and content on the main site and add noindex, nofollow tags, will we lose the domain authority that we have from our original domain because the pages now have the noindex, nofollow tags? I read a few blog posts from Moz that said there isn't any domain authority lost with 301 redirects but I'm not sure if that is true if the pages are noindex, nonofollow. Do you follow? 🙂 Apologies for the lengthy post. Love this community and the great Moz team. Thanks, Joe
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jgoehring-troy0 -
Redirects & Authority when Updating Product Pages
Hi Quick question on SEO & product pages. We're changing suppliers, so discontinuing their range, adding new - but the products will be very similar - almost identical in some cases. I don't want to lose authority built up from current product pages, the only way to reuse these pages is to reuse SKUs - which we can't do. If I am redirecting these pages to new products which are similar, I know page authority will be passed - so is this the best option? Our links on the website will actually point to the final URL, rather than going through a redirect - if this is the case will it still pass authority? Thank you Becky
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Purchasing an existing domain + redirecting to company's domain
Let's pretend that competitor.com ranks well for certain search terms and generates some traffic from organic search. If a company were to acquire the competitor (or their domain), what's the smartest way to redirect that SEO value to the acquiring company's website? Does a 301 redirect work between different root domains? Even if it does work, is that the smartest approach? Thanks for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Raleigh0 -
New Site (redesign) Launched Without 301 Redirects to New Pages - Too Late to Add Redirects?
We recently launched a redesign/redevelopment of a site but failed to put 301 redirects in place for the old URL's. It's been about 2 months. Is it too late to even bother worrying about it at this point? The site has seen a notable decrease in site traffic/visits, perhaps due to this issue. I assume that once the search engines get an error on a URL, it will remove it from displaying in search results after a period of time. I'm just not sure if they will try to re-crawl those old URLs at some point and if so, it may be worth it to have those 301 redirects in place. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BrandBuilder0 -
Fetch As Google Redirect from HTTPS to HTTP
Hi Moz Community, We just launched a redesigned site and moved our blog from http://sparkline.motifinvesting.com to https://www.motifinvesting.com/blog. When I went to check the site today I noticed something strange. When I Fetch a Blog URL as Google it is redirecting from https to http AND dropping the / <post-id>from the end of the URL.</post-id> So for the URL https://www.motifinvesting.com/blog/cleantech-obama-romney/1494 I am getting the attached results when I Fetch as Google. When I access the same URL in my browser, I see a 200 status code and no redirect. Why would Google Bot show that the URL is being redirected? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | motif_marketing
Breanna https://www.motifinvesting.com/blog/cleantech-obama-romney/1494 I7yQPza.png0 -
Merging Sites: Will redirecting the old homepage to an internal page on the new site cause issues?
I've ended up with two sites which have similar content (but not duplicate) and target similar keywords, rather than trying to maintain two sites I would like to merge the sites together. The old site is more of a traditional niche site and targets a particular set of keywords on its homepage, the new site is more of an authority site with a magazine type homepage and targets the same set of keywords from an internal page. My question is: Should I redirect the old site's homepage to the relevant internal page on the new website...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lara_dar
...or should I redirect the old site's homepage to the new site's homepage? (the old site's homepage backlinks are a mixture of partial match keyword anchor text, naked URLs and branded anchor text) I am in two minds (a & b!) (a) Redirecting to the internal page would be great for ranking as there are some decent backlinks and the content is similar (b) But usually when you do a 301 redirect the homepage usually directs to the new homepage and some of the old site's links are related to the domain rather than the keyword (e.g. http://www.site.com) and some people will be looking for the site's homepage. What do you think? Your help is much appreciated (and hope this makes sense...!)0 -
What About Google Panda Update 22?
Maybe I haven't found the threads or whatever but I haven't seen lots of posts about the latest Google Panda update from November 21-22 on SEOmoz. Panda 22 is not even listed here: http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change Until November 21st, Google killed 3 of 5 websites I own through their Panda updates (never got hit by Penguin updates as I got only original content), accounting for about 25% of my income. Fortunately, the 2 remaining websites gained more traffic throughout the summer of 2012 so my income almost got back to 100% even though I got the "Unnatural Links" warning in Google Webmaster Tools in July. Since then, I did a huge link cleanup and according to the Link Detox Tool (from another SEO service), the number of "toxic links" went from about 350 to 50. Back link reports is as follow: 8% (52) Toxic Links; 57% (382) Suspicious Links; 35% (235) Healthy Links; Out of the 382 suspicious, most of them are coming from the same domain and they are all directories to which my website has been submitted automatically (not using any specific keyword anchor). On the opposite, healthy links are coming from different domains so I like to think they have a stronger impact than suspicious links. That said, my two remaining websites were still doing well until November 21 where it got hit by the Panda. Now traffic has dropped by 55% and income has dropped by 75% (yes I'll have to look for a job within a year if I don't fix this). (I want to add that none of my websites are "thin websites". One has over 1500 pages of content and the other has about 500 pages. All websites have content added 3 to 5 times a week.) What I don't get is that all my "money keywords" are still ranked in the top 10 results on Google according to multiple tools / services I use, yet the impressions dropped from 50% to 75% for those keywords?!? I have a feeling that this time it's not only a drop in ranking. There's a drop in impressions caused by something else. Is it caused by emphasis on local search? Are they showing more ads and less organic results? But here's the "funny part": For the last 5 years, I was never able to advertise my website on Google Adwords. Each time, I got a quality score of about 4/10 only to see it drop to 1/10 within a few hours of launching the campaign. On November 22nd, I build new PPC campaigns based on the exact same PPC campaigns I had the past (same keywords, same ads, same landing pages). Guess what? Now the quality score is between 7/10 and 10/10 (most of them have 10/10) for the exact same PPC campaign! What a "coincidence" huh?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sbrault740