Hi Stephane,

All the below assumes you feel there is some value in keeping the original website live at all.

My first reaction would be to do a full review of all your old content and carefully consider which ones may have been hit by Panda - is there keyword stuffing, content duplicated from other sites, thin content...etc? Then either fix or completely rewrite those.

After that you should avoid publishing duplicated content so my view would be
1. Remove the rewritten/fixed articles completely from the old site
2. Don't implement the 301 so you don't get any redirected bad Penguin vibe
3. Put a block on those URLs using robots.txt
4. Remove the URLs from Google's index in Webmaster Tools

Then you are free to publish your new, Panda-friendly content to your new website.

Not sure what other mozzers would say, but that's my view. This is not about 'spinning content' but removing poor content and republishing great content. Hope it makes sense.

It sounds to me as though most of the content from old site is staying but that 3 enigmatic 'tools' are being moved to a new domain.

In which case I would want to be sure that the functionality being moved wasn't the cause of the previously lifted penalty, especially from a Panda perspective (given that the tools on the new domain presumably won't have any links pointing to it, Penguin shouldn't be an issue) - as a penalty would be re-applied if the tools are not Panda-friendly.

So:

• if you want to have the tools on both sites, I'm with Pete - noindex the tools on the old site.
• if you are permanently moving the tools, review them for Panda-friendliness and then noindex the old site's URLs, probably worth blocking the old URL in robots.txt as well.
• If your previous penalty was nothing to do with the tools at all, and the link profile of those pages is good (or if there aren't any links) then 301 the old URLs to the new.

That's if between Pete and myself we've understood correctly what you're trying to achieve.

Good Luck!

Heya there,

Thanks for asking your question here

My first point would be that human visitors don't like to be given forms when they first visit a site, so would suggest you don't do this.

My alternative strategy would be to provide a home page of good content talking about the data etc that is available on your site and then provide a button for people to register if they want to.

Don't detect the user agent and provide alternative content as, however good your intentions are, that could be considered cloaking. Google is against you providing Google different content to humans, so don't do it.

Do things differently

Not yet. I think there's a feature request to add more, but that's not currently the case. In the interim I suggest you diarise when you want to update your competitors and do a manual spreadsheet and load in data from http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/ as you can get a 'snapshot' of competitor data at any time that way instead. Then make regular updates to your spreadsheets.

Hope this workaround helps.

Okay... two main points I think here

1. Yes, which domain/sub-domain the links are pointing to makes a difference - so if you have a www version and your links point to the non-www version then it's not quite as great. (Still has value for your site, though, it's important to remember). So you need to decide which is the most important and keep the canonicalisation (is that a word?) consistent throughout.
2. In Wordpress you should be able to change the direction of the redirect, have a shuffle around the 'settings' section and you should be able to find it.

Hope this is helpful.