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
-
301 redirect recovery
Hello Please understand that English is poor. I used to run a site called A This time, I am running a site called B. I need to set up a temporary 302 redirect from A to B
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jinseok
I accidentally set a 301 redirect Site A has many spam links
For now I have removed the 301 redirect source to B. Will A's spam links affect site B?
For your reference, Site B is putting a lot of effort into SEO. Help me.0 -
Site Migration - Pagination
Hi, We are migrating our website and an issue we are facing is how to handle paginated content in our categories. Our new website will have the same structure but with different urls. Should we 301 redirect all the paginated content (if crawled by Google) to the url of the main category? To put this into an example: Old urls: www.example.com/technology/tvs (main category of TVs & also page 1) ** www.example.com/technology/tvs?v=0&page=2 ** ( page 2 of TVs) New urls: **www.example.com/soundvision/tvs **(main category of TVs & also page 1) **www.example.com/soundvision/tvs?page=2 **(page 2 of tvs) Should we redirect all of the old TV urls (also the paginated) to www.example.com/soundvision/tvs ? The is no rel next, prev tag in our site and no canonicals. Also there is a view all products page in each category, BUT it doesn't contain all the products(max. is 100 per page - yes the view all page is also paginated). The same view all products page (paginated) will exist in the new website also. I checked google search console, and Google has decided to treat as canonical page the first page www.example.com/technology/tvs . Also, all the organic traffic of our categories goes to these pages (main category page - 1st page). I would appreciate any thoughts on this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HellasSITES0 -
What do you think about SEO of big sites ?
Hi, I was doing some research of new huge sites for example carstory.com that have over million pages and i notice that many new sites have strong growing for number of keywords and then at some point everything start going down (Image of traffic drop attached) there are no major updates at this time but you can clearly see even on recent kewyords changes that this site start loosing keywords every day , so number of new keywords are much less that lost keywords. How would you explain it ? Is that at some point when site have more than X number of indexed pages then power of domain is not enough to keep all of them at the top and those keywords start dropping ? Please share you opinion and if you have any experience by yourself with huge sites. Thank You very appreciated 2LC3AxE
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | logoderivv0 -
Merging Niche Site
I posted a question about this a while ago, but still haven't pulled the trigger. I have a main site (bobsclothing.com). I also have a EM niche site (i.e shirtsmall.com). It would be more efficient for me to merge these site, because: I would have to manage content, promos, etc. on a single site. In other words, I can focus efforts on 1 site. If I am writing content, I don't have to split the work. I don't have to worry about duplicate content. Right now, if I enter a product URL into copyscape, the other sites is returned for many products. What makes me apprehensive are: The niche site actually ranks for more keywords than the main site, although it has lower revenue. Slightly lower PA, and DA. Niche site ranks top 20 for a profitable keyword that has about 1300 exact match searches. If you include the longer tail versions of the keyword it would be more. If I merge these sites, and do proper 301s (product to product, category to category) how likely is it that main site will still rank for that keyword? Am I likely to end up with a site that has stronger DA? Am I better off keeping the niche site and just focusing content efforts on the few keywords that it can rank well for? I appreciate any advice. If someone has done this, please share your experience. TIA
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | inhouseseo0 -
SEO Priorities for Ecommerce Sites
Hello All! What is the best way to rank SEO tasks by PRIORITY for Ecommerce sites to improve?? It can be quite overwhelming with all the types of projects/tasks needed to improve organic rankings... How would you rank the most CRITICAL tasks to spend the MOST TIME on to the tasks you spend less on. Appreciate your input in advance 🙂 Thank you! Mark
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wickerparadise0 -
Was my site hit by Panda or Penguin? Looking for diagnosis help
My URL is: www.westlakedermatology.com Hello Mozers, I'm looking for some help or guidance as to why my site fell off the "rankings cliff" on 9/5. In the forums I hear a lot of others with a similar issue, and some speculation it is due to a Panda refresh. However, looking at our site we have unique content with each page having over 300-400 words (so it's not light or duplicate content). We get a lot of leads that verbally tell us our content helped answer some of their questions so I'm pretty confident its good for users. Can anyone see an issue with the content on our site? In terms of Penguin, I think our backlink profile is clean, our physicians do take part in providing content to various high quality and relevant websites/blogs. But we do not buy links or do anything in violation of Google's guidelines. In terms of brand, we are the biggest dermatology and plastic surgery group in the Austin area. So any brand implications to search should be on our side. Just looking for some sort of guidance or help, any suggestions would be great! Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iderma
Adam Paddock0 -
Sites banned from Google?
How do you find out sites banned from Google? I know how to find out sites no longer cached, or is it the same thing once deindexed? As always aprpeciate your advice everyone.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pauledwards0 -
Acquisition of a new site in the same field.
Hello, I work with SEO for a company that just bought another in the same field. What is better to do? Just a 301 domain? Make 301 per page for a related page (more than 10,000 URLs, i'am afraid that this may be interpreted as blackhat ) or make crossdomain canonical tag urls related to (I believe this is not good, because the pages are not fully equal). thank's
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | j0a0vargas0