Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
How to avoid Google penalties being inherited when moving on with a new domain?
-
Looking for SEOs who have experience with resetting projects by migrating on to a new domain to shed either a manual or algorithmic penalty.
My questions are:
- For algorithmic penalties, what is the best migration strategy to avoid inheriting any kind of baggage? 301, 302, establish no connection between the two sites?
- For manual penalties, what is the best migration strategy to avoid inheriting any kind of baggage? 301, 302, establish no connection between the two sites?
Any other input on these kind of reset projects is appreciated.
-
Spanish,
I think you really need to consider what you are doing and why you are doing it. First, a manual penalty means you are on Googles radar and you are outside their terms of service in some way. If your decision is to get a new domain then what you should do is put the old one in the trash and forget it ever happened. You are starting from square one if you are smart IMO. Why? because if it is a penalty around linking and you redirect to a new domain, you are going to carry that wait to the next site. That doesn't mean that the penalty will show up on your new domain at point just because of the old, but there is no real value in the links so why risk it? There are just too many reasons not to try and save the old and move it to the new with redirects. BUT, is there a reason you would not simply address the penalty? Maybe it is cost as cleanup is expensive; if so, you weigh cost of cleanup versus cost of rebuild to all new site with new domain.
Second, an "algorithmic penalty" is something we say from time to time, but if you are using that as a line of thinking - "the algorithm has in some way penalized us" - you are then setting yourself up for further pain down the road IMO. With a site failing to rank because you have bad links, poor content, ads everywhere, I suggest you not look at it as a penalty. Look at is as: "What must we do in order to grow our site in value to our customer and in ranking against our competitors?" If you believe you have a "penalty" of sorts you are really saying things are not as good as they could be. Why not change things? If it is linking, disavow bad domains and links and move on. If it is Panda in your thinking, what can you do to change the content, etc.?
Often, when this type of question arises there have been a series of missteps by a site owner trying to shortcut really building a web property. If there were true short cuts without risk, I can tell you I would have found them or learned of them from people on various forums like Moz. I simply do not know of any.
Clean things up and move on or start over and move on. I think that is the only choice you face. I wish it were easier for all of us.
Best -
What is your domain authority, age and indexed page number?
If you've come to the point where you've tried every possible e.g. cleared all crawl errors, disavowed and removed 7/10 links on the spam score link scale in OSE. Remove pages that Google may perceive as invaluable. Then and only then would I go to a completely new domain.
I wouldn't use any content from the previous site either as your original site would most likely be given credit for the original source since it's in Google's index already.
As you can tell it would be a last resort for me to move domains unless I had very few indexed pages / valuable inbound links and a low domain authority I could easily build up again.
-
Thanks Cian,
It is an algorithmic penalty (likley primarily Panda). Significant recovery work has happened since over a year ago but we are not seeing any recoveries despite the recent Panda refreshes.
What I hear you saying is try to avoid any cross connections (including GA id etc) and start fresh and maybe repoint some valuable links?
-
Are you moving domains just because you've been hit with an algorithmic or manual action?
I'd personally try and solve the penalties before I'd make the decision to move to a new domain. If you don't want to solve the penalisation issues on your current site and move directly to a new one I'd try and distance myself from the old domain and establish no connection between the two sites.
If you feel your old domain has a high authority and you desperately want to keep the value you have built up then it's quite simple. You need to solve those penalisation issues. Work with the Google Manual action team to disavow spammy or illegitimate links. Focus on only keeping unique and engaging content on your site and adhere to Google Panda's solution criteria - duplicate content, titles, descriptions etc. Use Screaming Frog or Moz Pro to detect these issues.
Focus on helping the user while not breaking Google terms and conditions and you'll be fine.
One last note. A client of mine was hit with a manual action and I believe algorithmic penalisation. His site was able to recover in three months with a lot of work. The back and forth between Google's Manual Action team was the most time consuming.
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
-
SEO implications of moving fra a sub-folder to a root domain
I am considering a restructure of my site, and was hoping for some input on SEO implications which I am having some issues getting clarity in. (I will be using sample domains/urls because of language reasons, not an english site), Thinking about moving a site (all content) from example.com/parenting -> parenting.com. This is to have a site fully devoted to this theme, and more easily monitor and improve SEO performance on this content alone. Today all stats on external links, DA etc is related to the root domain, and not just this sub-department. Plus it would be a better brand-experience of the content and site. Other info/issues: -The domain parenting.com (used as example) is currently redirected to example.com/parenting. So I would have to reverse that redirect, and would also redirect all articles to the new site. The current domain example.com has a high DA (67), but the new domain parenting.com has a much lower DA (24). Question: Would the parenting.com domain improve it's DA when not redirected and the sub-folder on the high-DA domain is redirected here instead? Would it severly hurt SEO traffic to make this change, and if so is there a strategy to make the move with as little loss in traffic as possible? How much value is in having a stand-alone domain, which also is one of the most important keywords for this theme? My doubt comes mostly from moving from a domain with high DA to a domain with much lower DA, and I am not sure about how removing the redirect would change that, or if placing a new redirect from the subfolder on the current site would help improve it. Would some DA flow over with a 301 redirect? Thanks for any advice or hints to other documentation that might be of interest for this scenario 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Magne_Vidnes0 -
Linking from & to in domains and sub-domains
What's the best optimised linking between sub-domains and domains? And every time we'll give website link at top with logo...do we need to link sub-domain also with all it's pages? If example.com is domain and example.com/blog is sub-domain or sub-folder... Do we need to link to example.com from /blog? Do we need to give /blog link in all pages of /blog? Is there any difference in connecting domains with sub-domains and sub-folders?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Subdomain replaced domain in Google SERP
Good morning, This is my first post. I found many Q&As here that mostly answer my question, but just to be sure we do this right I'm hoping the community can take a peak at my thinking below: Problem: We are relevant rank #1 for "custom poker chips" for example. We have this development website on a subdomain (http://dev.chiplab.com). On Saturday our live 'chiplab.com' main domain was replaced by 'dev.chiplab.com' in the SERP. Expected Cause: We did not add NOFOLLOW to the header tag. We also did not DISALLOW the subdomain in the robots.txt. We could have also put the 'dev.chiplab.com' subdomain behind a password wall. Solution: Add NOFOLLOW header, update robots.txt on subdomain and disallow crawl/index. Question: If we remove the subdomain from Google using WMT, will this drop us completely from the SERP? In other words, we would ideally like our root chiplab.com domain to replace the subdomain to get us back to where we were before Saturday. If the removal tool in WMT just removes the link completely, then is the only solution to wait until the site is recrawled and reindexed and hope the root chiplab.com domain ranks in place of the subdomain again? Thank you for your time, Chase
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chiplab0 -
Google Penalty Checker Tool
What is the best tool to check for the google penalty, What penalty hit the website. ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Michael.Leonard0 -
"Null" appearing as top keyword in "Content Keywords" under Google index in Google Search Console
Hi, "Null" is appearing as top keyword in Google search console > Google Index > Content Keywords for our site http://goo.gl/cKaQ4K . We do not use "null" as keyword on site. We are not able to find why Google is treating "null" as a keyword for our site. Is anyone facing such issue. Thanks & Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vivekrathore0 -
When i search for my domain name - google asks "did you mean" - why?
Hi all, I just noticed something quite odd - if i do a search for my domain name (see: http://goo.gl/LBc1lz) google shows my domain as first result, but it also asks "did i mean" and names another website with very similar name. the other site has far lower PA/DA according to Moz, any ideas why google is doing this? and more inportantly how i could stop it? please advise James
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | isntworkdull0 -
Unique domains vs. single domain for UGC sites?
Working on a client project - a UGC community that has a DTC model as well as a white label model. Is it categorically better to have them all under the same domain? Trying to figure which is better: XXX,XXX pages on one site vs. A smaller XXX,XXX pages on one site and XX,XXX pages on 10-20 other sites all pointing to the primary site. The thinking on the second was that those domains would likely achieve high DA as well as the primary, and would passing their value to the primary. Thoughts? Any other considerations we should be thinking about?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | intentionally0 -
Bing Penalty
I am working with a client who apparently has been penalized by Bing. The site has been around for many years and they are an industry leader in their field. The site was previously indexed and received a substantial amount of traffic from Bing. Last week the site disappeared from Bing's index. A site: and url: search both show no results. Does anyone have a significant amount of knowledge or experience related to Bing penalties? Here is what I have done so far: http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2009/03/19/getting-out-of-the-penalty-box.aspx This 2009 article states Bing's Summary Tool offers a "Site Status" section with a "Blocked" indicator which informs webmasters if a site is penalized. I have seen it before a long time ago, but apparently the field no longer exists. Is there a definitive means of determining if Bing has manually penalized a site besides a response from their Content Inclusion Request? Danny Sullivan wrote a great article about how Bing removed some sites for thin content last month. It seems two of the sites which were a focus of the article have been re-included in Bing's index. Bing claims an algorithm change where Danny seems skeptical. Either way this could be the same issue. http://searchengineland.com/bing-bans-holiday-deals-sites-102856 there are two recent complaints on Bing's forums about a similar issue where various webmasters shared their sites have been removed. There are no responses to these posts from Bing: http://www.bing.com/community/webmaster/f/12252/p/670360/9665163.aspx#9665163 and http://www.bing.com/community/webmaster/f/12252/t/670550.aspx?PageIndex=1 (the comments are relevant but not the initial post). Any ideas or suggestions would be helpful.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RyanKent0