Penguin recovery, no manual action. Are our EMD sites killing our brand site?
-
Hi guys,
Our brand site (http://urban3d.net) has been seeing steady decline due to algorithm updates for the past two years.
Our previous SEO company engaged in some black-hat link building which has hurt us very badly. We have recently re-launched the site, with better design, better content, and completed a disavow of hundreds of bad links.
The site is technically indexed, but is still nowhere in the SERPs after months of work to recover it by our internal marketing team.
The last SEO company also told us to build EMD sites for our core services, which we did:
My question is - could these EMD sites now hurting us even further and stopping our main brand site from ranking? Our plan is to rescue our brand site, with a view to retiring these outlier sites. However, with no progress on the brand site, we can't afford to remove these site (which are ranking). It seems a bit chicken and egg.
Any advice would be very much appreciated.
Aidan, Urban 3D
-
Hi Erica, & Alan below...
Thank you both very much for taking the time to respond to my query. It's as much as we suspected, and it's great to get your expert views on this.
We will take your advice on board and go forth, and clean-up! Oh to have a time machine.
Thanks again guys, have a great week/weekend.
Aidan
-
I'm going to reinforce what Erica has stated.
Even a quick 30 second check reveals your main site and your http://3dvisualisation.co.uk/ site are competing for the same focus. That is both cross-site cannibalization (meaning Google would have to figure out which of the two deserves higher ranking through their imperfect multi-algorithm environment) and in direct violation of Google policies where you are attempting to have two sites rank for the same phrases.
Now - having said that, there's no way to know if THAT issue is the sole cause, a main cause, or even a contributing cause to your current problems. SEO is vastly complicated and involves many different signals and factors.
However you can be sure that the current multi-site approach is extremely toxic. The best practice solution would be to take those individual focus sites and 301 redirect all of them to their appropriate main site pages. But ONLY if you don't also have toxic links pointing to THOSE sites.
And if there ARE bad links to those, just kill those sites dead.
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go and vomit because of the fact that some genius SEO company foisted a horrific ranking "method" on your unsuspecting business.
-
We've definitely seen a lot of evidence that EMDs do not work the way they once did, and they could very well be hurting your rankings for your main domain. Dr. Pete wrote a great post about this a while ago that's still very applicable. Seems like since your products are related, it would be much better to integrate the sites together and put them in a subfolder of your main domain instead of separate sites. You'd, of course, want to 301 redirect and all that jazz to maintain most of your link equity and ranking signals.
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
-
Merging 5 Sites
Hi there We have 5 separate sites which handle different regions/niches that we work in, and we are planning to merge into one so we have a logical path for 301 redirects. The sites have DA's as follows: Site 1 - DA 36
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ben10001
Site 2 - DA 31
Site 3 - DA 29
Site 4 - DA 27
Site 5 - DA 20 Does anyone have any experience with how the DA would flow through to the new site? Each site currently relates to a different niche that we work with, and we are planning to keep the content structured similarly, probably like this: https://newtoplevelsite/site1/products, https://newtoplevelsite/site2/products and so on. That makes 301 redirects easy and also gives us more control in managing users and different teams in Wordpress. We would link the different niches through the top menu and links within the pages. Is there a better solution? Would it make more sense to have https://newtoplevelsite/products/site1, https://newtoplevelsite/products/site2, and so on? Thanks for the ideas0 -
No-Indexing on Ecommerce site
Hi Our site has a lot of similar/lower quality product pages which aren't a high priority - so these probably won't get looked at in detail to improve performance as we have over 200,000 products . Some of them do generate a small amount of revenue, but an article I read suggested no-indexing pages which are of little value to improve site performance & overall structure. I wanted to find out if anyone had done this and what results they saw? Will this actually improve rankings of our focus areas? It makes me a bit nervous to just block pages so any advice is appreciated 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Consolidate Local sites to one larger site
I am a partner in a real estate company that operates in 10 different markets across the country. Each of these markets has it's own individual domain. My question is should we consolidate each of these markets into one domain that services all markets? What would we possibly gain or lose from an organic traffic standpoint? In some of our more established markets (Indianapolis, Las Vegas, Tampa, Orlando and Charlotte) our organic traffic accounts for 50-60% of our total traffic. In some of our newer markets (Denver, Phoenix, San Diego) it accounts for less than 15%. We do operate under two different brand names. EasyStreet Realty and Highgarden Real Estate. EasyStreet has been around since 2000 with most of our Highgarden sites only up for 6-24 months. Another question is we are considering converting all EasyStreet divisions to Highgarden. I am a little reluctant to do so, since most of our organic traffic is coming from our EasyStreet sites. Thoughts? You can find links to all our sites at www.easystreetrealty.com or www.highgarden.com Thank you in advance for your insight.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EasyStreet0 -
How is my 301 redirected site stealing rankings from the main site?
Hello, I have a site, drhobelt.com, that 301 redirects to the main site, drhonow.com. Not only is drhobelt.com still indexed, but it recently stole rankings from drhonow.com for "decompression belt" related terms. What could be causing this? How do I reclaim the rankings for drhonow.com? Thanks for reading!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DA20130 -
Can a Hosting provider that also hosts adult content sites negatively affect our SEO rankings on a non-adult site hosted on same platform?
We're considering moving a site to a host that also offers hosting for adult websites. Can this have a negative affect on SEO, if our hosting company is in any way associated with adult websites?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | grapevinemktg0 -
Link Building Post Penguin?
I really am lost as to what to do these days.. The problem with my industry is the whole idea of link bait isn't very lucrative. There are no bloggers either, so guest blogging also isn't a very good option. Seems to me like the best thing I can do is just publish content! So, publish a lot of quality content? LOL, sounds like that's right up Google's alley. Where do you publish your content, and what would you say has shown the best results for you personally? We called an SEO company, Arteworks, a few days ago (Friday), and they really didn't go into any details about how they build links. We called them because I saw a post that you commented on, here, and it recommended a few companies at the bottom of the post. (Arteworks being one of them) Really, this is where I get so dang confused... The goal is to build links like the old days, except only use unique content, diversify your pages, and anchor text? Sound about right? Or, should I only create content on my site? Thanks in advance for your time and advice!! Sincerely, Tyler Abernethy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TylerAbernethy0 -
Redirect micro-niche site to bigger niche site?
I have a micro niche site that performs reasonably well (page 1 at least) for it's main keywords. It is an exact match domain. To save the ongoing maintenance of a site that gets less than 10 visitors a day, I was thinking of redirecting this micro niche site to a bigger site (a niche site that the micro niche fits into, if that makes sense!) Would I lose rankings because of the power that the EMD provided? Would it be better keeping it there for the backlink it provides to the bigger site (although on the same C Class IP)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BigMiniMan0 -
Site comparison - what is wrong with me?
www.bcspeakers.com/ vs www.psbspeakers.com/ with the search term "speakers" why does BC speakers show up in around #50-60 and PSB is not in the top #1000? From all metrics on seomoz PSB kicks BC in every area by a large margine! can anyone see why BC is listed for that keyword and PSB is not?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kevin48030