Best way to start a fresh site from a penalized one
-
Dear all,
I was dealing with a penalized domain (Penguin, Panda), hundred of spamy links (Disavoved with no success), tiny content resolved in part and so on ....
I think the best way is to start a new fresh domain but we want to use some of the well written content from the old (penalized site).
To do this task I will mark as NOINDEX the source (penalized) page and move this content to the new fresh domain.
Question: do you think this is a non-dangerous aprouch or do you know other strategy?
I'll appreciate your point of view
Thank you
-
Hi Claudio,
To the question of "is it dangerous to start with similar content to the old site", I would say that it's very hard to tell. Some sites in some niches all have very similar content (think or real estate aggregator sites in the same cities - it's not as if they have access to different properties on the same market - they generally list the same houses for sale and rent at any one time). However, Google is ver adept at processing text to understand it if has been recycled or "spun" from other content it has seen before. If the original content came from a severely penalised website, re-using it in this manner would definitely not be risk-free.
You would probably also want to take the old site offline completely as opposed to simply noindexing its pages if you were to do this.
Google understands very "similar" content due to content spinning having been such a popular way to create content in previous years. If you can re-work your existing content to be of a fairly different length (shorter or longer), take a different paragraph structure, and be placed on the new site that is very dissimilar to the old one in terms of structure, this may work out well. I cannot say that this is risk free however, for all the reasons Casey has brought up already.
-
Dear Casey,
The new domain is on a different C-class, the whois info is different and event locked as private, the WMT and GAnalitycs will be on a different account, the design will be different and even I have planed upload a few products (pages) to start, and also it will be blocked by robots.
But my question is "is dangerous start with similar content to the old site", (some pages has a great content well written)
At this time I was working for two years with the old site and the traffic is recovery too slow, so our time has finished this is why we want to start a new domain using some of the old pages (previously marked as NOINDEX on the old site
Thank you for your time and knowledge
-
Claudio, I've always been inclined to believe the following:
"If Google CAN know something about your site, assume they DO know something about your site."
So in your case, yes, there is always going to be a danger that Google will see you as the owner of both sites (the penalized domain and the new one) and eventually move any penalties from one site to the other. Now, you can certainly minimize this possibility by doing the following:
- Keeping the sites out of the same GW Tools account.
- Making sure the new domain has different WHOIS information.
- Keeping the sites off of the same C-Class Server
- Minimizing similarities between the two sites as much as possible (including NO 301 redirects and design options).
Regardless, even doing the above may not be enough. I will say though that although Negative SEO does exist, I find it "questionable" that it is the main reason you are having problems. Google advises specifically that it's enough to just "drop those kind of links into a disavow." Most likely though, you have MUCH larger issues impacting the domain, especially if it's been 2+ years.
Definitely consider a professional audit. I really want you to consider existing all other methods before trying this strategy.
-
Dear Mates,
To clarify, I was working two years trying to resolve it, for example the toxic links comes from spam blogs created by competitors, take a look at this samples there are 200 blogs containing exactly this page and our site is linked there:
My plan is to create a fresh new site NO-301 no redirections, but I want to use some of the well performing contents (more than 500 words, well written), using these steps:
1. Make on the old site the content as NOINDEX.
2. Wait 15 days.
3. upload this content to the new site.
Do you think it could be dangerous?
Thank you for your responses
-
Hi Claudio,
I would echo the guys above in saying that it sounds like you could do more to revoke the penalty on the original site. If you begin anew, I would definitely not 301 the old domain (not that it sounds like you were going to), but I'd also invest in completely new content, rather than duplicating the old content. Google's ability to track duplicate content is amazingly good, so even a noindex on the old content could still have G draw a connection between content it penalised in the past and the new site.
Moosa is absolutely correct that it is better (and unfortunately much harder) to remove bad links than it is to just disavow them. Google's spam team often appreciate genuine effort to remove links - disavowal appears to work best if you have been unsuccessful in your link removal and can prove that you got in touch with as many sites as possible (screenshots of emails unanswered or answered unfavourably, for instance).
The other very good thing about removing links is that they can never hurt you again in the future if Google one day decides to change the way it views previous disavowals... which we certainly can't count on it not doing.
-
Casey is right Panda and Penguin are different penalties and they should be resolved differently! Penguin has to do with links so if there is a penguin penalty then you must have some toxic link within your link profile.
My idea here is to collect all the links (GWT, Moz, Ahrefs, and Majestic SEO) and then either manually check each link or use Link Detox or Link Risk to kill all the links that are unhealthy. If the penalty is penguin you will receive a Google message to either remove more links (with some examples of the link) or it will give you a positive message that will say “The penalty has now been revoked”
Note: It is better to remove as many bad links as you can before disavow them.
In case of Panda, the problem is within your site and content so may be the content you think is high quality isn’t really high quality in the eye of Google and in this case you should considerer redoing your content.
All in all I believe the decision of going for a new domain is too early at this stage, my advice is to look in to the penalty details and deal with it.
Hope this helps!
-
To be blunt, moving from one penalized domain to another to escape a penalty is most likely a complete waste of time. It's been a known fact for years that penalties follow 301 redirects. But it was recently clarified by Google that "moving" your penalized site (and that includes content) to another domain to escape a penalty is also a foolish choice. Google now reserves the right to move a penalty to any new domain (something we've suspected for awhile, but now can confirm).
In your case, I'd strongly look at continuing to salvage the domain. If you weren't aware of the above, then I'm hesitant to believe that you've also done EVERYTHING you can to unwind your algorithmic penalty. Further, you reference both Penguin/Panda above and yet BOTH have clear different approaches to how they should be resolved. Maybe your "high-quality content" isn't really as high-quality as you think? Maybe you haven't disavowed all the toxic links/domains affecting your site? Have you tried to seek out a professional Google penalty site audit? I'm not convinced you've done all you can just based on your question.
No judgments, but personally, no, I don't believe this is a "non-dangerous approach."
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
-
Best practice to consolidating authority of several SKU pages to one destination
I am looking for input on best practices to the following solution Scenario: I have basic product A (e.g. Yamaha Keyboard Blast) There are 3 SKUs to the product A that deserve their own page content (e.g. Yamaha Keyboard Blast 350, Yamaha Keyboard Blast 450, Yamaha Keyboard Blast 550) Objective: - I want to consolidate the authority of potential links to the 3 SKUs pages into one destination/URL Possible Solutions I can think of: - Query parameters (e.g /yamaha-keyboard-blast?SKU=550) - and tell Google to ignore SKU query parameters when indexing Canonical tag (set the canonical tag of the SKU pages all to one destination URL) Hash tag (e.g. /yamaha-keyboard-blast#SKU=550); load SKU dependent content through javascript; Google only sees the URLs without hashtag Am I missing solutions? Which solutions makes the most sense and will allow me to consolidate authority? Thank you for your input.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | french_soc0 -
Merging B2B site with B2C site
Hi, A mobile phone accessory client of ours has a retail site (B2C) and a trade site (B2B). The retail site does pretty well and ranks highly for a number of terms. The trade site doesn't really rank for anything as they don't optimise it. They would like to merge the two sites and allow trade customers to log-in and purchase goods in bulk for their business. If they were to merge the trade site into the already successful consumer site, what would be the best way of doing this and what, if any, implications would it have on the organic visibility of the B2C site? Would it be possible to target retail and trade customers on one website? Cheers, Lewis
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeaSoupDigital0 -
Best Way to Create SEO Content for Multiple, International Websites
I have a client that has multiple websites for providing to other countries. For instance, they have a .com website for the US (abccompany.com), a .co.uk website for the UK (abccompany.co.uk), a .de website for Germany (abccompany.de), and so on. The have websites for the Netherlands, France, and even China. These all act as separate websites. They have their own addresses, their own content (some duplicated but translated), their own pricing, their own Domain Authority, backlinks, etc. Right now, I write content for the US site. The goal is to write content for long and medium tail keywords. However, the UK site is interested in having myself write content for them as well. The issue I'm having is how can I differentiate the content? And what is the best way to target content for each country? Does it make sense to write separate content for each website to target results in that country? The .com site will still show up in UK web results still fairly high. Does it make sense to just duplicate the content but in a different language or for the specific audience in that country? I guess the biggest question I'm asking is, what is the best way of creating content for multiples countries' search results? I don't want the different websites to compete with each other in a sense nor do I want to spend extra time trying to rank content for multiple sites when I could just focus on trying to rank one for all countries. Any help is appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cody1090 -
Whats the Best way to Protect Wordpress Website from Getting Hacked.
Hi All, I just like to know whats the best way to protect wordpress website for getting hacked. I tried using Wordfence but nothing much happened. I m in shared Host and when ever there is a sign of attack my hosting company takes the site off which affects my site ranking a lot. I m trying to keep all my plugins updated but still it happens . Like to know what other people do . I am open for Paid tool suggestion as well. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Verve-Innovation0 -
How to know if your site has been penalized by Google
Hello, One of my clients ranking drop dramatically.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ogdcorp
We believe it was due to an upgrade to his site. While the site was live www.clientdomain.com
Work was being done on the new site www.clientdomain.com/new (1 month) I think google crawled the /new link and took as a content duplication since both sites had the same content. Is there a MOZ tool to see if a site has been penalized or any online tool? Thanks0 -
Bought a site with an old domain where to start?
Hi, I recently purchased the site www.forexnews.com. The domain is more than 10 years old and used to have a ton of content and traffic. A couple of years ago it was purchased by another firm who took down all the old content and made it into a news aggregation site. I am going to try and build the traffic back up by adding back original content and leveraging the domain authority that the site has retained. Besides doing some keyword research, building links, and writing original content is there any advice out there that the community can give me on what else to start with? Any resources that you can point me to which talk about this type of thing would also be appreciated. Thanks Dave
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fxtrader19790 -
Merging three sites to one
Hi guys, I just wanted confirmation if this is the right way to go about doing this. I need to merge three websites and I've never done three websites in to a brand new site before. Ok so we have Sitex.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Profero
Sitey.com
Sitez.com We've created a SiteB.com SiteB.com has SiteB.com/SiteXCat
SiteB.com/SiteYCat
SiteB.com/SiteZCat Each X,Y and Z have over 1,000 pages. They only have about 10 pages each with Page Authority above 10 and the domains arn't that strong. What i plan to do is: 301 redirect each site domain (X,Y,,Z) to it's corresponding category. e.g. Sitex.com > SiteB.com/SiteXCat 301 redirect each page off X,Y,Z that has a Page Authority above 10 to their new pages on SiteB.com Then, I'm unsure if i should 410 every other URL... I don't think its worht 301 every single URL if they arn't in search results much - but maybe it is if they have a lot of inbound links even with low page authority? Any ideas and does the above seem the best practise? Thanks.0 -
Best way to block a search engine from crawling a link?
If we have one page on our site that is is only linked to by one other page, what is the best way to block crawler access to that page? I know we could set the link to "nofollow" and that would prevent the crawler from passing any authority, and we can set the page to "noindex" to prevent it from appearing in search results, but what is the best way to prevent the crawler from accessing that one link?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0