Penalized domain, starting over. 302 or just add a link that site has moved?

[advertisingtech]

Hello,

our .com domain got a fred update and to be honest we need to start over. Now my first idea was to 302 the domain as the penalty should not come with this. Other option is just to have a landing page saying, we have a new address its www.example.es . What would be better?

[Rajesh.Prajapati]

New address is better than 302 or 301

[seoman10]

You first need to be clear if you received an actual penalty or just got on the bad side of an update and your rankings have just dropped and you are getting a less traffic than normal.

If you have an actual penalty you only have two options

1. Work with Google web spam team to try and get the penalty lifted
2. Get a new domain

If it is the latter then just getting your act together with some good quality content and and a good quality best practice SEO strategy although it may take a bit of time it should help if not resolve the problem.

If you went down the route of a new domain as Joe said you need to be aware of country specific domains don't rank as well in other countries. On the flipside in theory a country specific can help you rank within that country slightly higher than more general TLD's.

I would be careful about doing redirects, if your side has had a penalty it wouldn't be very hard for Google to work out what you have done.

[Joe_Stoffel]

Hi there,

There are a lot of things to consider here. For instance, do you want to be available to customers worldwide or do you only care to operate within Spain? A .es TLD will be a strong international targeting signal for Google and non-Spain rankings are likely to drop.

Secondly, moving domains can resolve link based penalties, however, many people speculate that Fred was a quality update that targeted excessive ads and low-value/quality content sites that put revenue before their users (Search Engine Land article). If that is what caused your site to get penalized, popping the same site up on a different domain will not change anything. Your best bet would be to resolve the onpage/content issues on the current domain in order to maintain that link equity that would be lost by moving domains (302 redirects do not pass link value).

Do you have reason to believe you are being penalized for links? Have you engaged in link building practices that could cause a penalty? Have you reviewed the back link profile? If there is a link-based penalty, 301 redirecting to the new domain could pass that penalty along. At the same time, providing a single link or using a 302 redirect will not pass your SEO authority.

I recommend taking action based on the recommendations in QuickSprout's 'Actions for those affected by Google Fred Update' article. Hopefully this will help you find a solution that will not involve moving domains.

Hope this helps!