7 years old domain sandboxed for 8 months, wait or make a domain change?
-
Hello folks
The questions is, if a domain, 7 years old being sandboxed due to "notice of unnatural links to website" does it make sense to make a domain change (301 permanent redirect and make a "domain change" under google webmaster tools) to another, aged(!) domain name?
Website being sandboxed for over 8 months already and there is no chance to do anything with those "unnatural" links to website...Any suggestions?
-
Thanks! Interesting article.
-
Thanks, Sorry, it took me sometime to reply, I left on 16 and ust came back from abroad...
-
Unfortunately, there's no easy answer. I agree with Zsolt that this isn't a "sandbox" issue - it sounds like a classic (and severe) link-based penalty. The 301 can work, but it's not risk-free. Usually, you'll retain some of the link-juice and not carry the penalty, but the penalty does transfer in some situations. There's no good way to tell when and if it will.
I'm afraid you're right on reconsideration - you'd have to cut the vast majority of the bad links, and that's going to be very tricky. Your only other option, if the bad links are generally low-quality links (spammy article marketing, for example, as opposed to paid links), is to build strong, relevant links going forward and let the bad links fade out over time. That depends a lot on the severity and type of bad links, though.
If you've been waiting for things to change for 8 months and building decent links in that time, the 301 may be your best recourse. It's a bit of a last resort and it's not guaranteed to work, but it sounds like you may need to try it.
-
Also you can look at this as it is on this subject:
http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/getting-back-from-a-penalty-second-time-around
It took a very methodical approach to a reconsideration which i am sure Google appreciated, as cheesy as this might sound..... We all make mistakes, but it is if we learn from those mistakes that Google seems to care about..
-
Recently i remember Rand Talking in a white board Friday that the OSE Algo does not account for any spam metrics that Google does, it does gives a Trust ranking metric based on best practices and . The trust metric may be a good metric to look at.
I look up to page 180.... Any ideas if a link from page authority of "1" is "bad" link?
Not necessarily.... a 1 just means it has not been indexed by OSE i believe.
Also I am not sure that "Unnatural Links" automatically equates to a penalized domain link, it may just simply mean you got to many links from too many sources in too short of a time that could only be achieved by automation....
So looking for "penalized" domains could be a wild goose chase. I think you are in a pretty tough spot. The best course of action could be just wait longer and see if the penalty passes as links fall off that are "suspect"
-
Thanks...
it will be hard to find those bad links with this info:
| Page Authority | Domain Authority | Linking Root Domains | Total Links |
|
|
|
|
| 78/100 | 74/100 | 2,250 | 17,366 |
|
|
|
|I look up to page 180.... Any ideas if a link from page authority of "1" is "bad" link?
P.S. but it might be a good idea for guys at seomoz to implement some tool that will show those bad links... I think they can do this by looking for same sources of links for penalized domains....
-
Try to run opensiteexplorer here on seomoz.
This will expose your backlinks. Additionally, you may also want to try virante.com.
We just found out that we had some bad IP's on a shared server, so we decided to pay the difference for a brand spankin' new dedicated server.
Hope this helps and good luck Ferray!
-
I think Alan's theory is correct, but of course in theory
I would think as well that the bad links would not pass anything as he says they have already been discounted by G.
It appears you really do not have a choice.... And have little to loose with attempting the 301 as described, as you are already penalized.
At least if you do.... POSSIBLY the Good will follow, and the bad stay behind, but I am not sure if this is how it works though, but seems plausible. Also I believe penalties "drop off" after a while (1 - 2 years) as the "unnatural links" themselves will eventually drop off of G's index altogether.... Which will possibly drop the penalty.
Personally i would have a "Post 301 Strategy" in place to begin a link building campaign to this new URL that is high quality and informational in nature utilizing social signals heavily (BUT ETHICALLY ) and even stay away from White hat for a while as well until you establish a new "reputation" for yourself.
w00t!
-
yes, asked for reconsideration already, few times actually, that didnt work, and as I said if anyone knows how write a reconsideration email, which will make G people cry, I would pay for that
-
- All links dropped to position 200+
- Received notification from them: "notice of unnatural links to website"
- and yes, sent reconsideration to them, didn't work out.
If anyone can write a reconsideration email, which makes G people cry, I would pay for that
-
So do i understand you have already asked for reconsideration?
I have reason to believe that if you 301 your links, bad news wont follow you, but that is just my opinon I have no way of proving it, just a exprience I had, I could be completely wrong.
My thinking is that your bad links have been discouned already, your domain has ben punished, your 301 will not get credit for bad links only the good ones.
Changing is always a headache, but if you dont you will always wonder if you ae doing as well as you should.
-
How do you know it is penalized?
Did they notify you?
Have you asked for reconsideration?
-
doesn't penalized domain loses its PR? as our domain still has PR4...
-
Tried to explain to G... didn't work out... stuck here with penalized domain trying to figure out if to try and continue the hard work of creating press releases and articles to this penalized domains in hope that it will be break out from the penalty or just start from scratch and do all this work on new domain...
if moving to new domain, cant do that without 301... another question if there is anything good or bad in doing this, like getting all previous PR to new domain or getting this domain penalized right away, or maybe just neutral as we will have to make all SEO from the scratch...
still need to decide what to do..
-
You need to ask for a reconsideration if you cannot get those links removed.
You need to explain what happened (Did you hire an SEO firm who got these "unnatural" links.) Explain exactly what happened and if you were inexperienced when you did this, there are lots of SEO firms out there that claim they use "100% White Hat Tactics" Which in most cases is complete BS as a white hat tactic is not thousands of links in a day..... No matter how you want to spin it. (Before anyone screams at me yes there are perfectly rational explanations for a thousand links in a day sometimes.... Sometimes....)
There is a CHANCE (small chance) Google will take this info into consideration and give you a "reprise" or second chance...
I am not sure I would 301 a penalized domain to a new domain, but of course understand this may be un-avoidable.
Sorry for your troubles
w00t!
-
Great question, honestly, i haven't got a good answer
-
Thanks Zsolt
I see. The problem is that this website was pretty high in SEO results before the penalty happened, and this domain has too many links – tens of thousand, it is just impossible to discover which links are "bad" and even more harder to remove them... The domain authority is 72 which is pretty high as I see it, PR 4...
so if this is not a sandbox, there is no reason to wait for website to get out of it by himself, so, does it worth to move website to a new domain, as I understand 301 should pass PR, not sure about authority rank...
-
The case you mention is not sandboxing but penalty due to bad links. Sandbox only occurs with totally new domains in the first few months. Maybe you or the previous owner of the domain have purchased bulk links and google discovered it. You should remove those links and ask for reconsideration in google webmasters.
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
-
Do I need to worry about sub-domains?
Hi Moz commnity, Our website ranking was good and dropped for couple of recent months. We have around 10 sub-domains. I doubt them if they are hurting us. Being said all over in SEO industry like the sub-domains are completely different websites; will they hurt if they are not well optimised? And we have many links from our sub-domains to website top pages, is this wrong for Google? How to well maintain the sub-domains? Do I need to worry about them? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Would changing permalink structure of 7,500 articles be good or bad?
Morning everyone, I'm the tech at a large men's lifestyle publisher and we're currently running the old /year/month/ URL structure in Wordpress. Now I've read countless articles about pro's and con's of month date vs post type formats (/2016/06/sample-post/ vs /sample-post/) and considering we produce both evergreen and daily news content we're stuck with making a decision. Currently we receive about 10,000 organic referrals per day (has been stuck at this for 12 months) but considering we have 7,500 articles, have 10 full-time staff and have been around for close to 7 years we think we're underperforming. Now providing we 301 redirect every old article to the new structure is there any other reason not to do this change? Any advice would be appreciated. Axps36D
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lucwiesman0 -
Referring domain issues
Our website (blahblah).org has 32 other domains pointing to it all from the same I.P address. These domains including the one in question, were all purchased by the website owner, who has inadvertently created duplicate content and on most of these domains. Some of these referring domains have 301's, some don't - but it appears they have all been de-indexed by Google. I'm somewhat out of my depth here (most of what I've said above has come from an agency who said we should address this before being slapped by Google). However I need to explain to my line manage the actual issues in more detail and the repercussions - any anyone please offer advice please? I'm happy to use the agency, or another - but would like some second opinions if possible?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LJHopkins0 -
Cleaning up backlinks and changing URLs
Currently we are performing very poorly in organic clicks. We are a e-commerce site with over 2000 products. Issues we thought plagued us: Copied Images from competitors Site wide duplicate content duplicate content from competitor site Number of internal links on a page (300+) Bad backlinks (2.3k from 22 domains and ips) being linked to from sites like m.biz URLs URLs are abbreviated, over 50% lack our keywords Lack of meta descriptions, or too long meta descriptions Current State of fixing these issues: 50% images are now our own Site wide duplicate content near 100% completed Internal links have been dealt with Rewrote content for every product 90% of meta descriptions are fixed From all of these changes we have yet to see increase in traffic...10% increase at best in organic clicks. We think we have penalties on certain URLs. My question for the MOZ community is what is the best way to attack the lack of organic clicks. Our main competition is getting 900% more clicks than us. Any more information you need on the topic let me know and will get back to you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TITOJAX0 -
Content From One Domain Mysteriously Indexing Under a Different Domain's URL
I've pulled out all the stops and so far this seems like a very technical issue with either Googlebot or our servers. I highly encourage and appreciate responses from those with knowledge of technical SEO/website problems. First some background info: Three websites, http://www.americanmuscle.com, m.americanmuscle.com and http://www.extremeterrain.com as well as all of their sub-domains could potentially be involved. AmericanMuscle sells Mustang parts, Extremeterrain is Jeep-only. Sometime recently, Google has been crawling our americanmuscle.com pages and serving them in the SERPs under an extremeterrain sub-domain, services.extremeterrain.com. You can see for yourself below. Total # of services.extremeterrain.com pages in Google's index: http://screencast.com/t/Dvqhk1TqBtoK When you click the cached version of there supposed pages, you see an americanmuscle page (some desktop, some mobile, none of which exist on extremeterrain.com😞 http://screencast.com/t/FkUgz8NGfFe All of these links give you a 404 when clicked... Many of these pages I've checked have cached multiple times while still being a 404 link--googlebot apparently has re-crawled many times so this is not a one-time fluke. The services. sub-domain serves both AM and XT and lives on the same server as our m.americanmuscle website, but answer to different ports. services.extremeterrain is never used to feed AM data, so why Google is associating the two is a mystery to me. the mobile americanmuscle website is set to only respond on a different port than services. and only responds to AM mobile sub-domains, not googlebot or any other user-agent. Any ideas? As one could imagine this is not an ideal scenario for either website.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andrewv0 -
Primary Domain or Redirect?
We are starting a new travel guide for a resort town. I have bought an expired domain with decent related links and PR (which seems to have survived the transfer (4 months ago). Beofre we launch the new site I am trying to decide if we should use this expired domain as the primary URL for the new site or just do a permanent redirect and buy a new domain that better matches the theme of the site. I am obviously concerned with starting from scatch with a new domain. I am confident we can build some good rellevant links in a short time but this space is very competetive. Any input would be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Locals0 -
Keep multiple domains or combine them?
I need some help figuring out if I should combine multiple domains or if I should let them be separate? I have domain1.com, domain2.com, and domain3.com. Well, domain1.com owns domain2.com and domain3.com. And currently domain1.com points to domain2.com and domain3.com from the homepage. They are going through some changes at their business, and now the option is on the table to combine the domains or still let them be separate as long as they link to each other. What is the best way to handle this and are there more things I should go through before making a decision? None of them have a ton of links to them, and they aren't super robust, but would just to have some advice. Thanks a lot
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rocket.Fuel0 -
Changing URL Structure
We are going to be relaunching our website with a new URL structure. My question is, how is it best to deal with the migration process in terms of old URLS appearing whilst we launch the new ones. How best should we launch the new structure, considering we've in the region of 10,000 pages currently indexed in Google.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NeilTompkins0