Starting over after a Penguin Penalty
-
Hi,
Has anyone tried starting a new domain after being hit with a Penguin penalty? I'm considering the approach outlined here: https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2384644/can-you-safely-redirect-users-from-a-penguin-hit-site-to-a-new-domain.
In a nutshell, de-index the OLD site completely via Google's Removal Tool, and then relaunch old content under new domain.
This seems to have merit, unless Google keeps a hidden cache of content (or uses other sources like Wayback Machine). My concern is doing the above listed approach, but Google still passes the old links to the new domain.
We have great content, but too much spam (despite me removing a lot of the links + disavow).
Any feedback based on experience would be appreciated.
Thanks.
-
Pleasure. Keep me posted.
-
This helps a lot. Thank you. I'll update the results to help shed light on this.
Thanks again for your time.
-
Hey
This is tough and the article you link to covers many of the reasons why. Sure, there are penguin recoveries, but for every one of them I would venture there are ten sites still suffering. Many of these sites no longer have any (or many at least) dodgy links and it seems that algorithmic penalty is just lingering around. Will they see resolution when the algorithm updates and refreshes? At this point who knows? I don't think just because site A recovered you can make an assumption that site B will do the same.
In our experience we have seen sites really clean everything up and bounce back. We have seen sites clean everything up and not see resolution around the key pages / search terms all these years later. We have at least three folks we have worked with who don't want to change domain and who are waiting for the this somewhat overdue real time Penguin update.
It does not always seem very fair however we must accept that what is what is and look at solutions around that.
A new domain
We have seen some good results here. Sites that just could not recover using a new domain and bouncing back. We have seen this work with the same content when the other site is left up as a holding page (we have now moved). I don't think it hurts to just generally consider doing a refresh and renovation if you are going to move to a new site so you get all the on site signals 100% dialled in.
Your old site remains indexed. I would let all pages bar the homepage 404 to kill as many non homepage inbound links as possible but just have a good 404 page in place to let the user know what to do. I would likely disavow all the bad links to the old site as well so they are technically not considered.
Your new site will then exist on it's own merit so focus on getting any good links updated and just do good work on that site to make it as good as it can be. If you see keywords that are were previously 50+ jump into the 20s or so then you know you are on the right track.
My advice would be:
- clean up and disavow all links bad links to old site
- 404 all pages bar the homepage for the old site with a helpful 404 page
- add a nice little (unfollowed if you want) link to the new site
- freshen up the content and site so it is not an exact copy
- get any good links that you can updated to point at the new site
- track the old domain for a few terms to see if it does recover over time (so you can consider what to do with it then)
Experiment and report back
Ultimately you have to experiment. Keep that old site indexed. Freshen up the new one. Disavow and clean up the old links + keep an eye on the old one as it may well recover and give you more options (after careful analysis).
Much like the article you quote there is no hard and fast answer here. You have to make the best calls possible and review the results and keep tweaking.
Hope that helps!
Marcus
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
-
How long for a Disavow file to take affect for a non-manual penalty?
Hi guys, hope you're all good, quick question in regards to a Disavow file. A page of ours recently crashed from page 2 all the way to page 7ish. It's weird that it happened considering it was ranking on the 2nd page for around a year, then all of a sudden it came crashing down. I identified an affiliate link which was placed in a sidebar, webmaster tools picked up 24,000+ links coming from the site so I have decided to disavow it. I disavowed the site around 3 days ago, and in the mean time we have managed to grab ourselves some very good do-follow links from very authoritative sites. At the moment the page has gone up 1 page, sitting at 4-5th page, but the rankings have been very inconsistent. Any ideas to when we may see an increase in ranking for this page? I am being very impatient, at the moment my workload has been dedicated to get this one page ranking again. All comments greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brett-S0 -
Loss of rankings due to hack. No manual penalty. Please advise.
I have a client who's site was hacked. The hack added a fake directory to the site, and generated thousands of links to a page that no longer exists. We fixed the hack and the site is fully protected. We disavowed all the malicious/fake links, but the rankings fell off a cliff (they lost top 50 Google rankings for most of their targeted terms). There is no manual penalty set, but it has been 6 weeks and their rankings have not returned. In webmaster tools, their priority #1 "Not found" page is the fake page that no longer exists. Is there anything else we can do? We are out of answers and the rankings haven't even come back at all. Any advise would be helpful. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | digitalimpulse0 -
How to handle a pure spam penalty (from GWT) as a blogging platform
Hello, I have a blogging platform which spammers unfortunately used a few years ago to create spam blogs. Since them, we've added spam filters and even if I can't not assume there isn't any spam blog left, I can say that most of the blogs are clean. The problem is, in Google Webmasters Tools, we have a Pure spam message in the Manual actions page. (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2604777?hl=en), with a list of 1000 blog links. All these blogs have been marked as spam in our system for at least 1 year, technically it means they return a 410 header and display something like "this blog doesn't meet our quality requirements". When I've first seen the manual action message in GWT, I have asked for reconsideration request. Google answered within a week saying that they had checked again our website, but when I go went to the manual actions page, there was still a "pure spam" message, with a different list of blogs, which have already been marked as spam for a year at least. What should I do ? Ask for reconsideration requests as long as Google answers ? Thank you in advance,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KingLouis0 -
Internal page links and possible penalties
If one looks at a page on our client's website, (http://truthbook.com/urantia-book/paper-98-the-melchizedek-teachings-in-the-occident for example), there are a huge amount of links in the body of the page. All internal links are normal links. All external links arerel="nofollow" class="externallink" We have two questions: 1. Could we be being penalized by google for having too many links on these pages? Will this show i our webmaster reports? 2. If we are being penalized, can we keep the links (and have no penalty) if we made the internal links rel="nofollow" class="externallink" as well? We need these internal links to help people use these pages as an educational tool. This is why these pages also have audio and imagery. Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jimmyzig0 -
Could large number of "not selected" pages cause a penalty?
My site was penalized for specific pages in the UK On July 28 (corresponding with a Panda update). I cleaned up my website and wrote to Google and they responded that "no manual spam actions had been taken". The only other thing I can think of is that we suffered an automatic penalty. I am having problems with my sitemap and it is indexing many error pages, empty pages, etc... According to our index status we have 2,679,794 not selected pages and 36,168 total indexed. Could this have been what caused the error? (If you have any articles to back up your answers that would be greatly appreciate) Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0 -
Penalties forcing us to move to a new domain
My ecommerce company has been under an unnatural link penalty for some time now. Over 2 months, removing 13,000 back links and submitting two reconsideration requests we have still been denied. We think the best route to take is to start a new domain. Does anyone have advice, resources, articles or anything else that can help us with this transition? Just a recap : we want to move our existing site to a new site and pass no negative "link juice". Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brads070 -
Panda / Penguin Testing on a Site - Has anyone see this?
Hi, Trying to diagnose the fall of our site. We fell mainly with Panda 3.4 and then a little more with Penguin. We have a main site with 200 pages and an attached blog. example domain.com/blog Then blog that was really small with only 7 posts. One keyword phrase example: "ace widget software" has ranked # 2 and 3 through the entire storm. The page that is ranking is in our main root site (not the blog). We used to rank for 200 phrases now only rank for about 10 Over the past week I stumbled on the fact that if I create a new post in my blog, those pages rank in 3 days. Good rankings, #2 on one and at least first page on the other 5 pages. One page ranked #2 in 17 hours. The test I am conducting: I am now testing to see if maybe there is some coding issue on our site, we do not use a template but a 3 column design built in Dreamweaver using older style tables etc. 1. Putting a new page on the old design. 2. Taking an existing page and putting into new design without side columns. 3. Already testest - adding new page to blog (success on this test) Seems if it was a coding issue/ design the two or three keywords phrases that stayed steady through the storm would have fallen. our site: www.TranslationSoftware4u.com Has anyone else been adding new content to see it rank really good but cannot get the other pages to bounce back up in rankings? Open to ideas of why this is happening. Thanks in advance! Force7
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Force70 -
Time for a new domain post-Penguin?
Hi there, Quick overview of a client who came to us after having the vast majority of their link value slashed by Penguin. Client only has a limited 'recovery budget' Client had been outsourcing SEO to a foreign company The website was 'keyword stuffed' when we arrived Links were of poor quality, the company clearly majoring on quantity rather than quality. Client was ranking #4 or #3 for a keyword which was bringing in sales. Post penguin, dropped to page 5 and then out of the top 100 for that keyword, losing 70% of sales. The client, under our supervision has Rewritten spammy content so they work for human beings (so it now reads well) Gone through the website and is removing old/duplicate and low-quality content De-emphasised other pages for the target keyword so that only one page majors on it. After doing the above has submitted a reconsideration request (about 2 weeks ago, so I know there's time). We are focussing on ensuring her content is written well and on building decent links to the site (i.e. to put some good-uns where the bad ones were). We're into month 2 of the 'clean-up exercise' and the site is still only ranking #90 for the keyword. Given the client's budgetary limitation, could it be more beneficial to consider a new brand identity and domain name to start afresh (without a 301 redirect) or should we just continue along the track we are doing with this client? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Nobody15609869897230