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
-
Domain name in URL
Hi we are targeting local cities across the UK with landing pages for our website. We have built up a few links for https://www.caffeienmarketing.co.uk/bristol/ and recently advised that I should change the URL to https://www.caffeienmarketing.co.uk/marketing-agency-bristol/ and 301 directing the old one 2 questions really: 1. is there any benefit in doing this these days in that this is the main keyword target we have for this page? 2. Do I get 100% benefit for all the links built up on the old page
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Caffeine_Marketing0 -
Migration to a new domain
Hi everyone, So i have one project where I'm planning to move current content on new domain, two reasons: 1. It seems current domain has some google penalty (backlink related, not manual) 2. Client wants rebranding and already has domain with new brand name. So as content is high quality and there is no content related penalty from google, what would be the best way to migrate existing content without passing any penalty AND without Google treating it as duplicate content. If i do 301 i suspect any penalty there is might follow, if i just copy existing content it won't be original content, what is the best solution here? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | joelsemy0 -
Domain Authority
Hi I wanted to find out if anyone knew how to discover why DA may have dropped? Ours has gone from 26 to 25 - I know it's not much, but I wanted to find the reason. One thing which happened was our developer company wiped redirects, which did impact rankings - would this also have affected domain authority or do I need to review our backlinks again? Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey1 -
HTTPS entire domain Vs. one URL
Long time no Moz! Ive been away with some server related issues, installing an AD at the company I work for, but I'm back. Our SSL cert just expired and I'm trying to determine the pros and cons of making an entire site SSL vs just the URL. Our previous set up was just a single domain. I know Google has hinted toward SSL preference, and I know its a little early to know for certain how much that's going to help, but I just wanted to know what everybody thought? It expired yesterday, so I have to do something. And we lost our previous credentials so I can't just renew the old one. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HashtagHustler0 -
Working to Start an Shopping Idea Site - Which Totally Based On Scraping product from Ecom. How Quickly I should Add products and categories in this new domain.
How Quickly I should Add products and categories in this new domain. We are going to start its promotional by google adwords and facebook. I worrying about 10000's of product pages. kindly guide me.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | innovatebizz0 -
Why do some domains out rank stronger authority domains
Hi, If we take the Moz stats into account here, how comes sometimes weak Moz stat domains out ranking strong Moz stat domains? For example: A inner page with DA56 / PA40 is outranking a Wikipedia inner page with DA100 / PA82. That's a massive difference basically twice as strong on the Wikipedia page but being out ranking. In this case I assume the onpage SEO is playing a big part, but can onpage optimisation be that powerful? And I see this all the time, what SEO factors cause this? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bondara0 -
Domain Issue
Starting a new local travel guide site. Would like to buy a domain and have found one with decent Domain Authority and Trust, but they want $2500 for the domain which I feel is a bit steep since I will be not using any of the content and it is generating hardly any revenue now. . I would rather not start from scratch with no links and no trust. I have a few questions.... -Any suggestions on sites to look for domains or strategy for finding and offering to buy? Any guidelines on how to value domains? If I but it and change registration do I risk losing all the value? Cold I just change technical contact info? Any other suggestions are welcome. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Reportcard0 -
Purchased a high ranking domain and want to transfer my site to the new domain
I recently purchased a highly ranked domain. The link profile is very good and I don't want to lose to many links however I want to transfer my site to that domain. What is the best way of doing this without losing the current rank on search engines? Also how much does the transfer of registrar information impact my SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ydop0