Cleaning up a Spammy Domain VS Starting Fresh with a New Domain
-
Hi- Can you give me your opinion please... if you look at murrayroofing.com and see the high SPAM score- and the fact that our domain has been put on some spammy sites over the years- Is it better and faster to place higher in google SERP if we create a fresh new domain? My theory is we will spin our wheels trying to get unlisted from alot of those spammy linking sites. And that it would be faster to see results using a fresh new domain rather than trying to clean up the current spammy doamin. Thanks in advance - You guys have been awesome!!
-
Disavowing has nothing to do with traffic.
Disavowing is all about spam signals from spammy links. That and only that.
-
Thanks again for all the advice- Truly appreciated-
What are your thoughts on "disavowing" with google- murrayroofing.com so when it sends traffic to the new murrayroofingllc.com google will hopefully ignore...? Can you see our account in MOZ. You can see the old domain is sending traffic since it is listed on the spammy sites.
-
You are always welcome.
If you got more questions, you can always hit me up on my Twitter @DigitalSpaceman
-
Thank you!!
-
Hard to say who and why is putting you on those websites.
The only way to truly get rid of those backlinks is to reach out to those websites' owners. You'd have to obviously find someone who speaks the language.
Now, what you can do though is this:
- Disavow all those crappy links - that'll get Google to lower the "spam score" of your website;
- Block all traffic by IPs, geolocation and/or hostnames/referrers (that'll prevent from actual unrelated traffic)
That should clean it up pretty good.
Of course, that requires full control and ownership of that domain and website code. If you can't get that - again, my suggestion is just to part ways. -
This is awesome info! Thank you. What are your thoughts on trying to get backlinks removed from sites in China where we have no way to contact them - none of the wording o the sites are in our language- and it seems like it would be impossible to get removed from some of them. Additional thoughts greatly appreciated. In analytics we see "more" traffic from china than the US-
I'm convinced a competitor may be listing us on these sites- Or one of these SEO guys that get really pissed when we turn them down. Could they be out putting our domain on listing sites?
-
Yeah, your suggestion makes sense.
Keep the old one while the new one is ranking up.
Now, here is perfect scenario for you - keep working on the new site, and get full ownership of the old one. Then through IP blocks, cloudflare, removing all spammy backlinks etc, get rid of all or most of the spammy traffic and signals. And then redirect.
-
Thank you again!
I should have been more clear- The old website gets traffic that does convert- If it loaded faster than 10 seconds I'm sure a lot more would convert- Super high bounce rate due to slooooow loading of that site. But we do get "valid leads" every week from it. But not a lot of leads- maybe 5 a week- but our jobs are large dollar jobs.
What is your thought on running both sites separately? We could go in and make sure they are not duplicate and assign different addresses and phone numbers to the old site- But this "seems" black hat- We would not be doing it to get both site to rank- but just so we don't lose the traffic- then in a year or so get rid of it. what are your thoughts?
-
"... maybe a lot of traffic will convert. "
WILL convert? so it's not converting now? If so, it's kind of optimistic that will change, no?
Since you don't own old domain, you can't really reliably do anything about it anyway.
At this point, I would say not to forward at all, start from scratch.
-
Thank you- Yes some of the traffic - maybe a lot of traffic will convert. The problem is old "printed" directories and other places where we can't update the domain. We get a lot of business from a printed catalog that won;t change for a year or more.
I will look at the suggestions you made about IP limitations. The other issue is we don't "own" the original domain so we have to ask the owner who is also our IT guy to change settings. This is another reason we bough the new domain.
Again thank you!
-
Couple ways you can go about it.
-
Is any of the traffic going to the old spammy domain any good? Does it convert? If not, then don't worry about redirecting, there wouldn't be any point, only spam signals
-
If there is some good traffic, then do IP limitations, hostnames limitations etc. That can be done in htaccess or on the server itself. There are other more elaborate ways to filter out spam traffic as well, but that depends on how you or your IT guy is familiar with it. One of the simplest solutions is to route all traffic through CloudFlare, it has quite nice spam filtering, and it's free.
Hope this helps.
-
-
Thank you- we're talking about murrayroofinllc.com in particular- we are not sure how to forward the old domain to the new- We "know how" we just don't know if we should- The reason we developed murrayroofingllc.com is because murray roofing.com had a high spam score and we got advice from this string to go for a new domain-
Now the concern is- if we forward all the traffic from murrayroofing.com to murrayroofingllc.com that the new domain murrayroofingllc.com will be negatively affected by the spammy traffic- Somehow murrayroofing.com got on some spam sites and we get a ton of spammy traffic from china- we don't want this traffis - and these sites there is "no way" to ask them to remove our website from their spam sites in china.
All thoughts are welcome here-
-
Ta Larry
Ok nothing much of substance, that said if ranking worth trying as it is an easier or usually faster route to page 1.
Had a look at the Murray Roofing site and has not been optimised for customer queries a roofing contractor would seek to rank for. As it seems you are keen to start afresh - can do both in parallel. No harm to either.
That said would suggest you also look at your google my business structure - your effectively a local play. Getting reviews and appearing in the local search pack for roofing contractors Omaha etc we would consider a client priority.
All the best go get them.
-
only for a few and we are in position 49 and 50 for them.
-
Hi
Is the current site ranking for any terms of value?
-
Hi there,
Yes, absolutely get new domain. If you look at DA - it's only 15 (not too bad in some cases). But if you look at backlink profile - you'll see that most of the links are from listing sites - homestead, yellowpages, ezlocal etc. You can replicate that profile after a day of work. And, as you said, spam score will only bring troubles.
Hope this helps.
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
-
Translated Content on Country Domains
Hi, We have blogs set up in each of our markets, for example http://blog.telefleurs.fr, http://blog.euroflorist.nl and http://blog.euroflorist.be/nl. Each blog is localized correctly so FR has fr-FR, NL has nl-NL and BE has nl-BE and fr-BE. All our content is created or translated by our Content Managers. The question is - is it safe for us to use a piece of content on Telefleurs.fr and the French translated Euroflorist.be/fr, or Dutch content on Euroflorist.nl and Euroflorist.be/nl? We want to avoid canonicalising as neither site will take preference. Is there a solution I've missed until now? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoeuroflorist
Sam0 -
301 redirecting staff Domain to Company Domain
My colleague owns a domain (A) for about 10 years that he does not use. The domain's content is the same as my company's website (B) content.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi5
Question: Can I 301 redirect domain A to domain B's homepage or is it better he just closes down his website since this would not be SEO best practices? thank you0 -
Constructing the perfect META Title - Ranking vs CTR vs Search Volume
Hello Mozzers! I want to discuss the science behind the perfect META Title in terms of three factors: 1. Ranking 2. CTR 3. Search Volume Hypothetical scenario: A furniture company "Boogie Beds" wants to optimise their META Title tag for their "Cane Beds" ecommerce webpage. 1. The keywords "Cane Beds' has a search volume of 10,000 2. The keywords " Cane Beds For Sale" has a search volume of 250 3. The keywords "Buy Cane Beds" has a search volume of 25 One of Boogie Beds SEO's suggests a META Title "Buy Cane Beds For Sale Online | Boogie Beds" to target and rank for all three keywords and capture long tail searches. The other Boogie Bed SEO says no! The META Title should be "Cane Beds For Sale | Boogie Beds" to target the most important two competitive keywords and sacrifice the "Buy" keyword for the other two Which SEO would you agree more with, considering 1. Ranking ability 2. Click through rates 3. Long tail search volume 4. Keyword dilution Much appreciated! MozAddict
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MozAddict1 -
Bought a site with an old domain where to start?
Hi, I recently purchased the site www.forexnews.com. The domain is more than 10 years old and used to have a ton of content and traffic. A couple of years ago it was purchased by another firm who took down all the old content and made it into a news aggregation site. I am going to try and build the traffic back up by adding back original content and leveraging the domain authority that the site has retained. Besides doing some keyword research, building links, and writing original content is there any advice out there that the community can give me on what else to start with? Any resources that you can point me to which talk about this type of thing would also be appreciated. Thanks Dave
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fxtrader19790 -
Sub Domain or New Domain?
Hi All, We have a client that has a business with three different services. 2 of these services compliment each other in a really obvious way, but the 3rd, while related is not such a obvious complimentary service. For this reason, service 3 kind of weakens the content of the website SEO wise for the two main services. Also, internally at the business it is run by an entirely different team so it feels culturally somewhat different. So, the client wants to pull all the content about service 3 and put it on a different website. Which would you chose as a domain for this new site: service3.existingdomain.co.uk or www.service3+brandname.co.uk
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NoisyLittleMonkey0 -
Should we get a new domain that has our main keyword in it.
We have been running our site about 10 years under the domain www.islesurfboards.com and we are referred as "Isle Surfboards" when linked to in the anchor text. Our core product line and keyword focus has always been on "surfboards" and its related long tail keywords. However in the last several years we have began to sell "paddle boards" and now they have become our best selling product accouting for 80% of our business. We really want to rank well for "paddleboards" and related words but noticed we always seem to fall below people who have websites with "paddleboard" or "sup" in the domain and company name. will they always rank better unless we also inlcude it in ours? Should we move to a New Domain that focuses on the new target keyword "paddleboard" or a combo of both "surfboards" and "paddleboards"and would this make any difference or even hurt us since it would be a new domain. Then in addition rebrand our company name to include surfboards and/or paddleboards in the company name or some combo of both so the anchor text when people who refer to us relate to both paddle boards and surfboards?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | isle_surf0 -
301 Redirecting multiple domains to brand new domain
Hi guys, I have read quite a bit of stuff on 301 redirects after Penguin. Hoping someone could help me out. im looking at a way to do a legit 301 redirect without passing the penalty. I have acquired two businesses, business1 and business2, that both had websites that were hit by penguin. Ive anaylsed there backlinks and theres a lot of spammy forum links and comments and I was also informed they were both using buildmyrank. A side note, buiness2 only started using BMR after it noticed business1 have large amounts of high PR links. business1.com was ranking at position 1 till the penguin hit. Business2.com was ranking around page 2 I work in the same arena as these two businesses and didnt generate any business via the internet. When these 2 businesses failed (due to loss of rankings and traffic) i decided to take them over. What I am thinking of doing is 301'ing both business domains to my brand new, zero links, domain which will be the name of my new company. I will combine the content from both sites, around 1000 pages, in to the new one. So my question is, does 301'ing multiple domains, that target the same keywords, and operate in the same niche, look less "spammy" then 301'ing 1 domain? I'm trying to look at it in the eyes of google. It is a legit merging of businesses. Thanks for your help, really appreciate your time
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters0 -
How do i redirect www.domain.com/ to www.domain.com/index.php
I keep getting in my analytics www.domain.com/ and www.domain.com/index.php how do i make it consistently redirect to one version and not to both. I know about htaccess redirect and am already using this so am puzzle to which is the best one to use. below is the example .htaccess file im using. Options +FollowSymlinks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mattmillen
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^domain.co.uk [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.co.uk/index.php$1 [r=301,nc] which is better for SEO should i forward to www.domain.com/ or www.domain.com/index.php0