Old site penalised, we moved: Shall we cut loose from the old site. It's curently 301 to new site.
-
Hi,
We had a site with many bad links pointing to it (.co.uk). It was knocked from the SERPS.
We tried to manually ask webmasters to remove links.Then submitted a Disavow and a recon request.
We have since moved the site to a new URL (.com) about a year ago. As the company needed it's customer to find them still. We 301 redirected the .co.uk to the .com
There are still lots of bad links pointing to the .co.uk.
The questions are:
#1 Do we stop the 301 redirect from .co.uk to .com now? The .co.uk is not showing in the rankings. We could have a basic holding page on the .co.uk with 'we have moved' (No link). Or just switch it off.
#2 If we keep the .co.uk 301 to the .com, shall we upload disavow to .com webmasters tools or .co.uk webmasters tools. I ask this because someone else had uploaded the .co.uk's disavow list of spam links to the .com webmasters tools. Is this bad?
Thanks in advance for any advise or insight!
-
- Just to add to this, I'd look at the backlink profile and see the ratio of good to bad. If it's nothing but terrible links, I'd kill the 301 redirect. Though honestly at this point any damage that's done has probably already been done. Do you see any notice of penalty in WMT? If so definitely kill the 301. If not, and there are some good links, probably just move forward. If there are any pages with particularly good/bad ratios, you can do page-level redirects rather than domain-level redirects.
If you have no reason to believe you're under penalty, it's probably best to simply move forward. Try to have the worst of the worst removed, build or re-build links to the .com, and work on getting legitimate links going forward. It's all very hard to say without looking at the site or the links, but hopefully this is helpful.
- Keep the disavow on the .com as long as spammy links are still more-or-less pointing (albeit through a 301) to your site.
-
Without seeing the data in detail, I'd have to give a pretty general answer: If your old site has a poor DA, been penalized, or is itself spammy, then having it redirect to a new site is only one step better than just staying on the old site. When you redirect, you're passing link-juice from website A to website B; both bad and good. It's the same reason why you disavow bad links in the first place, though in this case, the redirect is at least under your control.
Anything that points to your new site factors in its overall stats. It sounds like your old site is hindering your attempt to break away from the bad links. My recommendation would be to cut the redirect, and only reinstall the redirect when you've cleaned up website A.
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
-
What will SEO be like in the 2020's?
Hey guys, I would love to hear your thoughts on how you think SEO will change in the 2020's. The 2010's saw some pretty cool stuff like Panda, Penguin, penalties for non-mobile-friendly, non-secure and slow loading sites. What will be more or less important for SEO's in the 2020's than today? How will machine learning and AI change SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GreenHatWeb0 -
New site migration (multiple sites into one + new domain)
Hi, I have read so many very helpful guides and experiences from you guys that will greatly help me but I have a few questions please. Our company has 3 sites, the main site and 2 sites for different product ranges: BrandProductName.com (main site - DA = 22 raking well for product name) Productname2.com (DA = 10 ranking very well for product name and little competition) BrandProductName3.com (DA = 10 poor ranking) We wish to bring all the sites into one with categories for the 3 different product. The main site is an e-commerece site whereas the other 2 are not (currently). On top of this as the main domain has one of the product names in it they wish to change the domain to be just Brandname.com. So the plan is to combine site 2 and 3 into site 1 and change that domain name. As you can imagine this is going to be quite a job. I am fairly happy with the steps required (having read all the guides and migrated many sites in the past) but with the added domain name change this is a little daunting. So my questions are: Should I merge the 3 sites into 1 and then changed the domain at a later point? Should I change the domain of the main site first and then merge site 2 and 3 in later? Should I just do it all together? Or based on the data i have provided do you disagree with the plan, what would you recommend? We are not in a massive rush to complete all of this so we have the time to plan and execute this when we are fully ready. Any help / advise would be greatly appreciated. Thanks all
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | csimmo0 -
ECommerce Replatforming URL's
We are in the process of re-platforming our eCommerce site to Magento 2. For the most part, the majority of site content will remain the same. Unfortunately on our current platform, we have been inconsistent with the use of .html as a URL suffix. As a result, our category and product pages are half and half - /stainless-steel-hardware.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BoatOutfitters
&
/stainless-steel-hardware We are considering taking the opportunity to clean up and standardize our URLs. (Drop the .html from all URLs on the new site and 301 redirect these to the same URL without the .html) Our concern is that many of the .html pages are good categories with strong page rank and I've read many articles about page rank loss from 301 redirects. We are debating internally if it really makes sense to take an SEO hit for something is seemingly small as dropping the .html from the URL. It would be a no-brainer if we were taking the opportunity to change to more SEO friendly natural language URLs. However currently our URL's appear acceptable with the exception of the inconsistent suffix. Thanks in advance for any insight on how you would approach this!2 -
What's the average rank update time after site and/or backlink changes?
What's currently the typical time, ON AVERAGE, it takes to see ranking changes when significant improvements are made to significant ranking signals on a long-established (as opposed to brand new) website? Does the rank update associated with on-page optimization happen sooner than addition of quality backlinks?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JCCMoz0 -
GTM Migration from Old to New Verison as Old Version closing on 1st April
Hi Guys, Can you please tell me is it a correct configuration for tracking thank you page? In Old Version of Tag Manager - GA conversion Tracking, tag type - universal analytic, web property id - UA-12345678-9
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | devdan
track type - transaction, Firing rule -{{url}} contains ordersuccessful.aspx, {{event}} equals gtm.dom In New Version of Tag Manager - Choose Product - Google Analytic, choose tag type - universal analytic, configure tag - tracking id - UA-12345678-9, track type - transaction, Fire on -Name - order successful page, type - custom event, Filter- Page url contains ordersuccessful.aspx, event equals gtm.dom If i remove event equals gtm.dom will tag fire and transaction details will reflect in google analytic? I am doing Manually configuration in new version of GTM as i have only few tags so just want to know if all tags successfully configured & I placed new GTM code on my website then google analytic will start reflecting data at same moment right, it will not take 24 hours right? Thanks! Dev0 -
Moving categories to new domain
Hello Mozzers , I'm trying to find best possible solution for this situation. So there is a website (e-commerce) and since it's grew up too much we are looking to move several categories on different domain. The reason for this is that we introduce completely different product group (example: we have products that are related to watches and everything related to watch industry but now we introduce leather products: wallets, bags etc). Do you think it is worth it to move new categories to new domain in order to better target this product group? In case of positive answer which is the best way to do it - 301 redirect or leave the products on this site and build a new site with slightly different product description and names? Regards, Nenad
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Uniline0 -
Buying Domains from an auction and 301 redirecting to your new site.
Lets say I have a website in not to competitive niche. I was considering buying a few aged domains from godaddy auctions and 301 redirecting them to my new domain. Can this alone be enough to rank pretty high for a uncompetitive niche? Can this also be a link building technique in itself since the link juice from the domain purchased carries over? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | junkcars0 -
Best approach to launch a new site with new urls - same domain
www.sierratradingpost.com We have a high volume e-commerce website with over 15K items, an average of 150K visits per day and 12.6 pages per visit. We are launching a new website this spring which is currently on a beta sub domain and we are looking for the best strategy that preserves our current search rankings while throttling traffic (possibly 25% per week) to measure results. The new site will be soft launched as we plan to slowly migrate traffic to it via a load balancer. This way we can monitor performance of the new site while still having the old site as a backup. Only when we are fully comfortable with the new site will we submit the 301 redirects and migrate everyone over to the new site. We will have a month or so of running both sites. Except for the homepage the URL structure for the new site is different than the old site. What is our best strategy so we don’t lose ranking on the old site and start earning ranking on the new site, while avoiding duplicate content and cloaking issues? Here is what we got back from a Google post which may highlight our concerns better: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=62d0a16c4702a17d&hl=en&fid=62d0a16c4702a17d00049b67b51500a6 Thank You, sincerely, Stephan Woo Cude SEO Specialist scude@sierratradingpost.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | STPseo0