New website on new url?
-
We have a new website on a new url (been up for around 2 years now) and our old website is slowly fading in the background, we are now at the point where the money is still ok but we are having issues running both side by side, we have a calculator on each page and are thinking about removing this and adding a box with please order from our new site here (with url of similar page).
Now the issue is we don't want to link for SEO purposes and google hammer us (thinking of no - following these) and we also have a penalty we got in 2012 on the site but we did get out of this, would this cause any issue to the new site?
-
I agree with the responses here: having two sites is generally not the way forward. I just want to add one other option. Most people who received link-based penalties were building links to 2 or 3 pages. If that's the case you could 301 redirect most of the site on a page level and let the pages with bad links 404.
If you have cleared the penalty it might not even be an issue to 301 redirect the whole domain. Just make sure that you update your disavow on the new domain.
-
Good point from Eric, if you have identified that there is a penalty then you can have it removed, and then 301 the old domain (or go on with the old one).
Let us know more about the penalty and we can help you to remove it. I suppose it´s based on links (most common).
- Look for messages (and Manual actions) in Google Search Console
- Use Open Site Explorer (https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/) to identify low quality links and remove them.
If there are some links you cant remove, you can tell Google to ignore them by using their Disavow-tool.
You find the tool here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-mainGood luck!
-
Eric said basically what my next recommendation would've been. Building a new site on a new domain is not the way to handle a penalty from Google.
Having 2 websites confusing for people; i.e. people who find both of your sites through a series of refined Google searches. Additionally, it's not likely to solve your problem. Unless you moved your physical location AND you re-branded your company, Google almost certainly knows that your new site is an offshoot of your old site. Therefore, your new site is fighting an uphill battle, competing against its older self, and with Google's preconceived notions of what you're trying to accomplish.
-
If the old domain has a penalty, you should be able to get that penalty lifted/removed/revoked. Then, later on you should be able to go ahead and redirect once the penalty is removed.
One of the concerns, though, is that if you redirect ANY page from the old domain to the new domain you may pass on the penalty to the new site. We recommend getting rid of the penalty on the old domain first--and then consider dealing with the issue of redirecting the old to the new domain.
-
we did not do it because the old site has a penalty and we do not want to pass anything over to the new domain?
We are thinking of just directing the customer with the url on the calculator rather than 301ing the whole domain as it still gets traffic.
-
Hi,
After reading your post, I'm wondering why the old domain hasn't already been 301 redirected to the new site? That would really be the ideal situation for not having your two sites compete against each other. You'd want to do this at the page level, so equivalent pages on the old site get redirected to the most relevant page on the new site.
For example: www.oldsite.com/calculator redirects to www.newsite.com/calculator
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
-
Changing Urls
Hi All, I have a question I hope someone can help me with. I ran a scan on a website and it has a stack of urls that are far too long. I am going through and changing the urls to shorter ones. But my question is regarding redirections. Wordpress seems to be automatically redirecting the old urls to the new ones, should i be adding a more solid 301 in as well or is the wordpress redirect enough? I ask as they dont all seem to stay redirecting Thanks in advance for the help
Technical SEO | | DaleZon2 -
Reverify website
Hello, I want to disavow some really dodgy links and although the website is verifed since we see a meta tag in the source code, we no longer have the login details for the email address used to verify it so can't access the tools console. So how do I upload a disavow file (the links i got were from Ahref and Moz analysis)? Should I reverify the website using a new email address and upload a new meta tag? Is there a problem with doing this? Sorry if this is obvious!
Technical SEO | | AL123al0 -
Removed Product page on our website, what to do
We just removed an entire product category on our website, (product pages still exist, but will be removed soon as well) Should we be setting up re-directs, or can we simply delete this category and product
Technical SEO | | DutchG
pages and do nothing? We just received this in Google Webmasters tools: Google detected a significant increase in the number of URLs that return a 404 (Page Not Found) error. We have not updated the sitemap yet...Would this be enough to do or should we do more? You can view our website here: http://tinyurl.com/6la8 We removed the entire "Spring Planted Category"0 -
301 for a Very Long URL
Hey gang, Thanks ahead of time for the help. I have a url somehow that is very very long: http://www.colbysphotography.com/wedding-caterers-knoxville-east-tennessee/Here is an extensive list of wedding venues in the Knoxville and East Tennessee region. If you find that any of these links are not working, that the venues are no longer in business, or have a suggestion for an additional venue (at no charge), please contact Colby. Colby's Photography works hard on keeping this list helpful. I have tried Yoast Premium on a wordpress site to redirect the url but it doesn't seem to keep. I've tried a few other redirect plugins with not help either. I would love some suggestions on this one! Colby
Technical SEO | | littlecolby0 -
Website Down
Hello guys, My website hasn't been reachable for couple of hours today and I can't really understand why as no links have been built, all the best practices have been followed regarding on page optimization. I also checked google webmaster tools and there are no warning messages, crawl problems or anything so I don't understand why this has happened. Now for some reason the website is up and running again.
Technical SEO | | PremioOscar1 -
Prospective new client it by webspam looking for new resource
Background:
Technical SEO | | tcmktg
Prospective client recently hit by webspam update. (I have verified hundreds of low-quality links, porn links, backlink exchanges etc.) They want us to step in and remove bad links and start over. Question:
What is the best way to examine all the links to determine which need to be removed? We can create the report from open site, but how can we identify the bad links? Here are the site metrics. 5000+ linking domains, so in this example we need to research the 5000 links, and possibly send notifications to thousands of webmasters to remove the links? Open site states about 25,000 total links, but root links are shown below. Yikes. Domain Authority 75
External Followed Links 112,000
Total External Links 115,000
Total Links 150,000,
Followed Linking Root Domains 3,900
Total Linking Root Domains 5,300
Linking C Blocks 2,7000 -
Why is my website banned?
IMy website is Costume Machine at www.costumemachine.com . My site has been banned for 1 year now. I have requested that google reconsider my site 3 times without luck. The site is dynamic and basically pulls in feeds from affiliate sites. We have added over 1,500 pages of original content. The site has been running great since 2008 without any penalties. I don't think I got hit with any linking penalty. I cleaned up all questionable links last November when the penalty hit. Am I being hit with a "thin" site penalty? If that is the issue what is the best way to fix the problem?
Technical SEO | | tadden0 -
Our Development team is planning to make our website nearly 100% AJAX and JavaScript. My concern is crawlability or lack thereof. Their contention is that Google can read the pages using the new #! URL string. What do you recommend?
Discussion around AJAX implementations and if anybody has achieved high rankings with a full AJAX website or even a partial AJAX website.
Technical SEO | | DavidChase0