Need seo advice! At a fork in the road!
-
Hi,
I m having a difficult time deciding what steps to take next, about my marketing strategy. I have 2 e-commerce sites for more than 7 years, one of them got a google link penalty back in september 2012 and lost 80% of organic traffic. I have worked on the bad links, got some of them removed and others disavowed. After 5 months of hard work and getting high quality links from authority sites related in my industry, I received a message from google saying that the manual spam penalty was revoked. This was in feb 26th. Since then I have got couple more high quality links and content to the site, but the organic traffic is still how it was prior to penalty revoked (at 20%). I still have no revenue from this site and i don't see what else I can do or how long I should work on it to see some improvement on traffic. My other site on the other hand is doing just fine but has some conversion issues. I m thinking of dropping all seo related activities for my first site and focus on the second one to see if we can have some increase on the organic traffic of that site. If I was to do a 301 redirect from my first site to the second one, what kind of effect will this have on the second site, would that be a negative or positive impact in terms of traffic? also thinking of moving the site from x-cart platform to magento. I appreciate any advice i can get here.
Thank you
Nick
-
Hi Nick,
I think I'd echo what Alan said. Just because your manual penalty has been revoked doesn't mean you're not still suffering from an algorithmic one. As such I'd probably be inclined not to 301 the whole site.
Assuming your second site is topically similar you might consider reaching out directly to those high quality sites that are linking to you and asking them if they'd be willing to link to your other site instead.
Similarly you might consider moving the link worthy content to your second site and (assuming all the links to your content are 'good') just 301 those pages.
I hope this helps,
Hannah
-
For the most part, I agree with Chris, but I would like to make a point on the 301.
Google may have said that the manual penalty has been lifted, but it does not mean that you are not still being penalized via the algorithm. doing a 301 may damage your second site.
I would 301 redirect only the good links, by looking at the referrer header.
As for 301s passing as much link juice as a link, I also seen the matt cuts video, but I don't read it the same way.
if you make a link to pageA, then redirect to pageB, you will lose link juice twice.
Matt was not very clear in the video, he did say that a 301 loses as much as a link does. A link and a 301 both a make a request to the server. I think the better way at looking at it is that every request loses link juice. Having a link to pageA then redirected to pageB is 2 requests, and 2 loses of link juice
-
hi thanks for your reply, so, since the penalty was revoked on the first site, it is ok to do 301?
301 will not transfer anything negative to the other site right ? last question, will the high quality links to the first site that i got in the pas few week pass any juice to the second site ?
thank you
-
Nick,
First off its a tough call to throw in the towel on a site, but the bottom line is if its not making you any money it probably needs the axe. Especially if you've got another site that has conversion issues. Those are things that you have way more control over. My vote is cut the first site and focus on the second. As for the 301 I would do it if the two sites were similar enough to seen plausible. According to Matt Cutts a 301 passes as much juice as a link. That's my two cents.
Chris
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
-
SEMrush Backlink Damaging SEO?
I did a test recently with a sponsored article for some of my products, including my most popular product (https://www.spaceanswers.com/sponsored/sponsored-wear-a-piece-of-the-universe-with-the-space-collectives-meteorite-jewellery/) and it just so happens that recently this very product dropped from 2nd position to 51+, I have since managed to restore it to 6th position but I am wondering if this article is damaging my efforts? SEMrush is showing a page score of 4/100 and a trust score of 3/100, which is obviously very low. Is this helping or hurting my SEO?
Link Building | | moon-boots0 -
Should I dicard them in my SEO estrategy?
Hi there! Some of you guys told me that I shouldn't concede too much priority to the directories in my linkbuilding stratregy. But should I incorpore it (In case it has a little impact in SERPs) or directly discard it as it has NO influence at all, what would it be more important quantity or quality? Could it have more impact a directory with PR 7 as 100 directories of PR 3 or below? Thanks
Link Building | | juanmiguelcr0 -
Is it possible to do local SEO for 2 different business locations in same state?
Since you have to be consistent in all your review website information (business name, street, etc.) is it possible to have a website rank for both of their business locations which are about 50 miles from one another in the same state or do they have to pick just one location to promote offsite?
Link Building | | cakelady0 -
SEO Fightback
I just got a spam email company (SEO FIghtback) that claims they can create backlinks through trusted Wordpress networks that cannot ever be rejected by google. I believe it to be just another linking company wanting to suck $97 bucks a month out of me, I thought I would ask the experts on this site. The video was cool....for about 30 second......but that is all I could handle. It ultimately became one of the most irritating commericals ever and truly grated on my last nerve. Thanks
Link Building | | thompsoncpa0 -
SEO Powersuite
SEO PowerSuite Link Assitant Anyone use this tool? May I ask if possible tips about this tool? Just purchased an Enterprise edition, but Im afraid I dont have enough ample time to go over the instructions. Any tips you have will be appreciated..thank you.
Link Building | | SkyHigh810 -
I need suggestion on how to increase our page authority.
I'm looking for specific suggestions on how to increase PA on different pages. Specific site I could link a page to link Pintrest to increase PA.
Link Building | | cfield_splashmedia.com0 -
How important are directory submissions to my off-page SEO?
Hi Guys, One area of my link building that I carry out is looking for online directories and social bookmarking websites to submit my website to. I do this in order to gain some backlinks to my website. What I want to know is are they really worth my time, and if so, which types would you say are the most important? I have obviously been through many directory lists, both on SEOmoz and on other websites, and also performed various searches to find relevant directories to my website. I just feel that posting up a link that lies deep in a directory online that, more often than not, have very low PA and lots of outbound links will offer very little in terms of SEO. If anything, this could really bring down the quality of my links and be detrimental to my website, right? This is a subject that I have been thinking about for a while and especially with the recent algorithm update from Google and the attack on many web directories that are, lets say, 'not playing by the rules', I'm worried that this will have a negative impact for my website. Let me know your thoughts guys and if you have any tips on how to get higher quality links from these kind of submission then I'm all ears! Matt.
Link Building | | MatthewBarby0 -
Competitor seo
This might be a really obvious question but... If building bad links (spam links) negatively impacts and even sometimes draws penalties, what is there to prevent others from building links like to my site to try and strip me of my rankings (like from my competitors)? I ran a quick link analysis and noticed a bunch of spam links pointing to my site the other day. I haven't been affected yet but it was only like two days ago that I saw those. Just curious. Is hostile seo going to be an emerging trend? If so it will be a really easy job. Just go to fiverr and buy 20 bucks worth of links...
Link Building | | MikeShreeve0