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Yeah, I get what you're saying and totally agree, since a radical overhaul is what I recommended from the start, but only got a no-can-do response... until now. But their "yes" is more like :

• Ok, rebuild our website entirely, just don't touch our website.

• Errr what ?

Anyway, so a similar domain name and brand was in fact a bad idea.

Thanks a lot for your input (and your awesome moz posts !

Cheers,

Johann.

Hi everyone,

Some news on this story that may (or may not) be of interest for some (even if I can't give the domain name), and a new question (I may also start another discussion for that one) :

• The website has lost a significant amount of trafic over the passing year, even with the massive noindexing of 200 000 pages (I finally convinced him to do it, but it clearly wasn't enough). About a 40% loss gradually with some panda updates (dates coincide nicely).

• We've worked hard on it to offer a new section of interesting content (not a blog but nearly) that presented interesting original statistics on the niche with visual presentations, and a bunch of related content, about a hundred pages total. It's like a drop in the ocean, but it gained a bit of popularity, some nice links and good branding. I think it's probably the reason why the website is still standing, it even made a few top positions on new important keywords.

• Last but not least, we've improved the user experience and bumped up our conversion rates so the loss in trafic is partly compensated by the gains in conversion (not completely though).

It still drags nearly a million pages of thin content, and still takes a little hit with every Panda roll-out... So no recovery, but a controled descent, as it's still alive.
Now I got the green light to a complete do-over, starting a rebuild with a completely new (lighter) structure and a new design. We're pumped full of ideas of great content and user experience, so it's gonna be a fresh new start. BUT, (there's always a but), the webmaster wants to keep the old website while it's still alive and I wonder if we can take a similar domain name to capitalize on the brand popularity. Like www.brand-domain.com instead of www.branddomain.com (in case it's not clear, we'll take the same domain name with a dash in it, so the brand stays recognizable).

Is it gonna look manipulative for Google to have two websites with nearly the same domain name, the exact same brand, the same service (so the same keywords targeted) ? Any other caveats ?
(I know they are going to compete with each other, but they'll have different contents, and it would be temporary : as soon as the new one reaches the first one's popularity, we'll prepare a proper redirect - could be a month, could be a year later)

Thanks for any input ! I'll wait before trying to start a new discussion to avoid any clutter^^

Johann

No hosting with them, just the domain names.... (my server is with another host)

Guess the only option is to point them all to my server. bummer

Thanks

They are brand new domains so no links point to them (that I know of).

Thanks for your answer

Hello,

I have a few domain names with orthographic variations that I'd like to redirect to my main site. The problem is my registrar (OVH) does only 302 redirects, so what are my options ?

Can I keep a dozen 302's ? Do I have to change all their DNS (it's a load on my server...) ?

Thanks for any ideas

Johann.

Thanks Highland and Donnie for your input.

It's not a sitewide, though there are three links from it. AVG's tool confirms the threat so it's definitely a bad seed (thx for the link).

I know it's not that bad and that link alone can't penalize the website I work with, but that one gives me a lot of work : borderline spammy profile, with two "satellite site" heavily linking to it that were penalized (because of abuse of anchor text precisely)... not quite natural, though itself wasn't penalised by Penguin. I guess old numerous triangle links between the same webmaster's websites aren't triggering the algo, even if they're penalized, but I prefer to do a little bit of cleaning now before it's too late^^

Hi,

During some netlinking analysis I found that a website linking to one of the sites I do SEO for triggers my antivirus... It seems infected by JS/Dldr.Scripy.A Java script virus.

Being the first time I deal with this kind of problem, and having not found any info on the Q&A or anywhere else, I wonder a few things :

1°) How to verify the reality of the threat and be sure it's not a false positive ? Is there some tool to scan the website, maybe an online vrus scanner ?

2°) How to contact the webmaster since I cannot look for a "contact us" page ? I looked in a whois, but I only got the e-mail of his hosting service, can I contact them directly ?

3°) Any tips or important things I should know ?

Thanks for your help

Huh not sure since I'm not a developer (and didn't work on that website dev) but I'd say all of the above^^. If useful, here are their url structure, there's two kind :

• /searchpage.htm?action=search&pagenumber=xx&query=product+otherterms

So I guess they are generated when a user makes a search

paginated (about 15 pages generally),

and I can approximately know how much they are duplicates, I can tell some are probably overlapping when there's a lot of variations for the product. There are just a few complete duplicates (when the product searched is the same with different added terms, doesn't happen a lot in this list).

• /searchpage-searchterm-addedterm-number.htm

Those I find surprising, I don't know if they are pages generated with a fixed url, or if they are rewritten (Haven't looked at the htaccess yet, but I will, god I have a headache just thinking about reading that thing lol)

There's about a thousand of them all (from GGanalytics, about half of each sort, and nearly all are indexed by Google), on a website with about 12 thou total in pages.

Maybe the traffic loss will be compensated by the removed competition between those search pages and the product pages (and the rel=canonical is surely way less brutal than a noindex for that matter), but without experience in these kind of situations it's hard to make a decision...

Really appreciate you guys taking the time to help !

Not a lot of real duplicates, they're more alike, and the most visited are unique, so I'll keep the most important ones and just toss a few duplicates.

Thanks a lot for your help, problem solved !

Thanks for your answer

Ok you're saying indeed it will act like a noindex over time.

So if one of the result page would have ranked for a particular query, it will not rank any more, like with a noindex => it will lose the 13% of traffic it generated...

Otherwise it would be too easy to make a page rank for the keywords used in a bunch of other pages that refer to it via rel=canonical... wouldn't it ?

I'm starting to think I can't do anything... Maybe just noindex a bunch of them that cause duplicates, and leave the rest in the index.

Damn, even by saying pages that don't generate traffic now won't much more in the future, and by giving an educated estimation of 0.05% potential future gains by keeping them versus the boatload of progress it could mean for the website to noindex them, it couldn't convince the webmaster to cut them out of the index...

Anyway thanks for your help everyone !

The less you put in robots.txt the better...

If there exists anywhere (on your site or on another) a link to some page that you put in robots.txt, it won't stop google from indexing it, and it will look bad (no title, no description since the bot can't access them). Worse, if you wan to noindex that page in the future it won't work !

So block content if you know there's no link to it and there won't ever be, otherwise the right move is the noindex meta tag.