Using Redirects To Avoid Penalties
-
A quick question, born out of frustration!
If a webpage has been penalised for unnatural links, what would be the effects of moving that page to a new URL and setting up a 301 redirect from the old penalised page to the new page? Will Google treat the new page as ‘non-penalised’ and restore your rankings?
It really shouldn’t work, but I’m convinced (although not certain) that our clients competitor has done this, with great effect!
I suppose you could also achieve this using canonicalisation too!
Many thanks in advance, Lee.
-
Many thanks for the response, I was however referring to a 301 redirect on the same domain (just a new page on this domain). Would it still work?
-
I know if you get a manual spam penalty changing the domain & 301 redirecting will get around the ban. But if its an algorithmic change you would think that the new domain now has the same bad links still flowing to it so it would not matter. but i'd like to see a test on that subject
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
-
Broad keyword use
It seems that the broad keyword use is not very accurate. I have 3 very similar keywords: Dive Florida, scuba diving in Florida, Florida scuba diving. Why does the program not recognise them as broad usage when assessing the page title? And if the program cannot understand broad usage terms, how confident can we be that the program can properly measure for keyword stuffing?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Zambezikid0 -
What do you think of this "SEO software" that uses Rand's "proven method" ?
I saw an ad on Search Engine Roundtable and the call to action was... "What is the #1 metric that Google uses to rank websites?" I thought, "I gotta know that!". (I usually don't click ads but this one tempted me.) So I clicked in and saw a method "proven by Rand Fishkin" that will "boost the rankings of your website". This company has software that will use Rand's proven method (plus data from another unattributed test to boost the rankings of your website). I am not going to use this software. The video made my BS meter ring. But if you want to see it.... http://crowdsearch.me/special-backdoor/ Rather than use this "software", I would suggest using kickass title tags that deliver the searcher to kickass content. That has worked really well for me for years. Great title tags and great content will produce the same results. The bonus for you is that the great content will give you a real website.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | EGOL1 -
Penguin 2.1 Penalty- Can't Understand why hit by it?
Hi, I have lost all my rankings after Penguin 2.1 update. I haven't did anything wrong. Want to know the root cause of the penalty so that I can overcome this. Any help would be appreciated. Website: http://tiny.cc/hfom4w
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | chandman0 -
URL structure: 301 redirect or leave as is?
Hello, My website, www.coloringbookfun.com is very old and authoritative, but the URL structure is terrible. If you check out some of our subcategories such as http://www.coloringbookfun.com/Kung Fu Panda and individual printables such as http://www.coloringbookfun.com/Kung Fu Panda/imagepages/image2.html You can see that they aren't optimized. I am curious to know the pros and cons of fixing the URL structure and 301ing them to the new optimized url. Will 301ing lose authority and backlinks for the sites pages? Does optimizing the url structure outweigh losing the authority/backlinks?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com0 -
Redirecting an image url to a more SEO friendly image url
We are currently trying to find the best way of making the images on one of our sites more SEO friendly, the easiest way for us would be to redirect the image URL to a more SEO friendly image URL. For example: http://www.website.com/default/cache/file/F8325DA-0A9A-437F-B5D0A4255A066261_medium.jpg redirects to http://www.website.com/default/cache/file/spiral-staircase.jpg Would Google frown upon this as it's saying the image is one thing and then points the user somewhere else?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RedAntSolutions0 -
Penalty for all new sites on a domain?
Hi @all, a friend has an interesting problem. He got a manuel link penalty in the end of 2011...it is an old domain with domainpop >5000 but with a lot bad links (wigdet and banners and other seo domains, but nothing like scrapebox etc)...he lost most of the traffic a few days after the notification in WMT (unnatural links) and an other time after the first pinguin update in april´12. In the end of 2012 after deleting (or nofollowing) and disavow a lot of links google lifted the manuel penalty (WMT notification). But nothing happened after lifting, the rankings didn´t improve (after 4 months already!). Almost all money keywords aren´t in the top 100, no traffic increases and he has good content on this domain. We built a hand of new trust links to test some sites but nothing improved. We did in february a test and build a completely new site on this domain, it´s in the menu and got some internal links from content...We did it, because some sites which weren´t optimized before the penalty (no external backlinks) are still ranking on the first google site for small keywords. After a few days the new site started to rank with our keyword between 40-45. That was ok and as we expected. This site was ranking constantly there for almost 6 weeks and now its gone since ten days. We didn´t change anything. It´s the same phenomena like the old sites on this domain...the site doesnt even rank for the title! Could it still be an manuel penalty for the hole domain or what kind of reasons are possible? Looking forward for your ideas and hope you unterstand the problem! 😉 Thanks!!!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TheLastSeo0 -
Best use of domains with keywords
I own a domain with just the company name in it (no keywords) that I use as main domain. I also own some other domain with keywords inside that right now I redirect all to the main domain with a 301 redirect. What is the best use for these domains? Should I use them when I do link building or is better to use just the main domain? Can they be useful to increase the main domain link juice/page rank? If yes, how? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | darkanweb0 -
Anchor text penalty doesn't work?!
How do you think, does the anchortext penalty exactly work? Keyword domains obviously can't over-optimize for their main keyword (for example notebook.com for the keyword notebook). And a lot of non-keyword-domains do optimize especially in the beginning for their main keyword to get a good ranking in google (and it always works). Is there any particular point (number of links) I can reach, optimizing for one keyword, after what i'm gonna get a penalty?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TheLastSeo0