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Cheers Evan, will DM

Looking for recommendations for a reliable & experienced contractor to help with a link cleanup project.  We've identified the problem links, we just need someone to assist with the actual outreach.  Would appreciate any suggestions.

Cheers Chris. Something like that would be a good fallback plan, but in our case the referral and direct traffic is way more important than organic search.

In the absence of any better solution and because we can't ditch the brand and all the non-SEO traffic we've decided to go down the cleanup route.  Even if it doesn't work it's better than sacrificing the referral and direct traffic the brand gets.  Sucks that there seems to be no better solution to this problem, it seems like a common issue.

I would still love to know if anyone has any more concrete information on this question.  At the moment it seems like people like my client find themselves in an intractable problem:

• Recovering is highly unlikely, so it's often easier to save the brand and move to a new domain

• But doing so means you have to relinquish all your previous brand recognition and loyalty (NOT your old site's SEO) because using a 301 OR a 302 redirect will pass along the penalty

So is there no way of redirecting a domain that will not pass any SEO value and/or the penalty?  If you don't care about the old site's SEO status or links and you just want to start anew, is it also impossible to retain the branded traffic & repeat visitors from the old site?

Thanks Greg,

I had seen that previous discussion, it's pretty much the most useful content I could find on the subject. Except it's well over 12 months old, and it pretty clearly establishes that 301 redirects do pass penalties immediately.

Given we're moving the site to escape a penalty it would be crazy to use a 301 redirect when we know that is going to pass on the penalty.

My question is whether a 302 redirect will pass a penalty. In theory it shouldn't because it doesn't pass PageRank or other SEO metrics, so would it pass a penalty?

It's nuts that there's no more definitive information on something that should be so easy to test and answer.  Is there no advice from Moz or any of the other authorities on this?

Thanks for taking the time to share your opinion Thomas, but respectfully it looks like you misinterpreted my question. I'm very clear that we're not trying to do this to benefit from any old spam links - we're doing this to wipe the slate clean on all that.  But this is a brand we're talking about - people reach the site from all sorts of sources, referrals & reviews, WoM, repeat/loyal visitors, etc.

We don't give a damn about the negligible SEO value of the old site but we care very much about not losing our non-organic search visitors as they're all that's sustaining the business right now.

So if it's true that both 301 and 302 redirects pass on a penalty that means that Google is screwing with us even when we're trying to wipe the slate clean.  That's just insane even by their standards - now they're trying to penalise people beyond the realm of organic search!

But does anyone have any incontrovertible proof that this is the case?  Have Moz or any other authorities done any experiments on this?

I'm having problems finding a definitive answer to this question, there is a lot of rumour and gossip out there but nothing I can rely on.

I'm working with a site that received an unnatural links notice followed by a massive drop in search traffic. Looking at the link profile it's pretty much jacked beyond repair and I have recommended that we move over to a fresh domain.

However, it's an established brand with many more sources of traffic than organic search. There's no way we can burn all their repeat visits, loyal customers, brand recognition that they've built up over the years so I want to redirect from the old domain to the new.  This is not to try and make any SEO gain from the previous site, frankly we don't give a crap about that. We just want to maintain the brand.

A 302 is a temporary redirect, this will be a permanent move BUT a 301 will pass on the penalty.  So can we safely use a 302 redirect in this situation or is there a better alternative (meta refresh?)

Thanks for your help!

MB.

Hi folks,

Curious to hear what people know about the TLA situation since reports surfaced that they'd been de-indexed.  It looks like it's all been quiet since those early reports. Not many people admit to using TLA so perhaps you've heard something on the grapevine... nudge nudge wink wink.

That's a very good point Moosa, thanks for that.

Hi folks,

We have noticed that our site has been directly duplicated by another site. They have copied the entire code, including the JS, CSS and most of the HTML and have simply switched their own text and images onto the template.  (We discovered it because they even copied over our analytics tracking and were appearing in our reports - duh!)

Does anyone know if there are potential SEO issues in copying the code like that, or do duplicate content issues only apply to indexable HTML content?

Thanks!  Matthew

(I didn't want to out them by sharing their URL because it could have been an external contractor that built the site and they probably had no idea.)

It's pretty clear that "AuthorRank" is going to be a big thing for SEO.

Although the main principles seem to be pretty straightforward (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/authorship-google-plus-link-building) what I'm less clear about is how we can start to think about author influence as a measurable metric.

Webmaster tools gives us Author Stats as an impact on the site's impressions/CTR, but how do we measure the influence of an individual author? Are those factors even defined?

Will we get to a stage where authors can be given a Klout-like score for Google Authorship? If not that, how will it look?

This will be a HUGE question to solve for future content development strategies, and is something I'm thinking a lot about right now.

Best, Matt.

Hi all,

I'm wondering if anyone's been able to get link vendors help clean up Penguin-related problems that they helped create?

I have a client who was sold years and years of AWFUL link building work from a major and prominent SEO vendor, that we are now battling to de-toxify.

There are no legal grounds for us as the ToS was watertight and the client is ultimately responsible (if naive), but has anyone been successful in getting vendors to cooperate with cleanups on ethical grounds? What's the best way to play that with a major vendor, I'm assuming they wouldn't want to be outed.

Cheers all,

Matt

My company provides search & content marketing services for a number of high end / luxury travel brands.  We don't really share your problem.  We don't build sites ourselves, but the sites we work with have usually been well built by SEO standards. When we come across a site that does need some work, it's usually very easy to explain to a client why they need to take a second look at their architecture, and how they can do that without sacrificing their branding.

There's absolutely no reason that a luxury brand shouldn't have content on its site. In fact, I'd say the opposite: a luxury brand should be finding every opportunity to communicate its unique expertise and authority in its field, using a variety of content to do that.

When it comes to content creation and off-site SEO working with luxury brands can be trickier than most since the bar is often much higher in the level of quality that is expected.  So our luxury clients usually end up spending more on content development, which means we have to be very careful how we deploy that content to ensure they get best value.

We also spend a lot of time on publisher & blogger outreach and building relationships with high end publications that we can partner with to help promote our client sites.

But in some respects, this is actually easier than doing SEO for a non-luxury brand, because the client already has an understanding of the need to invest in quality, and they don't expect results from cheap, spammy tricks.

Regards, Matthew

Thanks Kyle, much appreciated.

My first priority is to see if they'll consider a new HTML version, it remains to be seen if they'll be convinced.

The problem is that by definition long tail keywords have relatively low individual search volume, making it difficult to identify them in an algorithmic manner.   A lot of people stand by http://ubersuggest.org/ you could give that a go.

I prefer other methods, such as digging into analytics or site search data to figure out what information people are seeking from your site. If you can collect data from other sources, such as a sales team that answers queries from clients, that could also be useful.