Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Is it safe to 301 redirect old domain to new domain after a manual unnatural links penalty?
-
I have recently taken on a client that has been manually penalised for spammy link building by two previous SEOs.
Having just read this excellent discussion,
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/lifting-a-manual-penalty-given-by-google-personal-experience
I am weighing up the odds of whether it's better to cut losses and recommend moving domains.
I had thought under these circumstances it was important not to 301 the old domain to the new domain but the author (Lewis Sellers) comments on 3/4/13 that he is aware of forwards having been implemented without transferring the penalty to the new domain.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/lifting-a-manual-penalty-given-by-google-personal-experience#jtc216689
Is it safe to 301?
What's the latest thinking?
-
Thanks Karl.
-
Thanks Francis, that example is useful.
-
Ok, you'll probably be able to get the good links for your new domain then. Good luck with it all.
-
My skepticism is based on what I have tested myself by redirecting a single page with too many spammy links (I would say, an infected page) to a new page tanked the traffic of the website. If you scale that, redirecting a penalised old domain to a new domain may give you the same bad result. Simple logic on my part.
I would rather work on reviving that established same old domain. Keep going. Do what you are supposed to do - clean it, brand build it further, etc.
-
Hi Carson,
Thanks for your considered reply.
I was very interested to hear your opinion about unnatural links warnings via GWT and whether they can be necessarily interpreted as manual penalties.
As usual there are conflicting opinions and the particular wording in the warning I saw is different from the wording I have seen quoted in other examples on the web. It has a feel of being slightly more tailored ... although algorithms can do tailoring!
It seems logical that Google would use an algorithmic approach wherever possible in the interests of economy and consistency but there have to be sanity checks by real people so maybe GWT emails can be triggered by algorithm or human override.
The first sentence in both your "manual penalties" and also your "refreshing adjustments" suggest to me that it might not be possible to outmanoeuvre penalties by side-stepping (domain switching).
Maybe there's also an argument here that what's best for the user should be what's best for SEO?
What's best for the user must surely be not to confuse them or change domains so maybe that's the best approach also from an SEO POV.
Oh boy. I love SEO but I think I'll do some gardening tomorrow.
-
Hi Karl,
Thanks. The situation is I reckon > 90% low quality or spammy links. I estimate I might be able to get between 10% and 30% deleted with several days work but which still produces no certainty of a successful re-consideration request. There are only a handful of good links which I know I could get re-coded to a new domain. This is a small business so flogging a dead horse is precious money down the drain .
The domain is businessnamemainkeyword.com and I could host on businessname-mainkeyword.com i.e. only difference is the dash.
-
Hi Scott,
Thanks for your answer.
Undoubtedly the safest decision is to take no risk at all i.e. use no redirects. That might not be the decision with the most profitable expected outcome. What if you knew, with hindsight, that you could have used redirects with only a 2% probability of a minor adverse impact on the new domain? That could have been a big opportunity lost by taking the safest option..
Again, I'm trying to get away from hunches and better understand the size and nature of the risks (probably by reference to empirical data i.e. specific cases) to give the best chance of making the best decision.
-
Hi Francis,
Thanks for your answer. From what you say, you have seen cases where redirects have been fine but you're skeptical which is a slightly mixed message.
I am aware that there might be a risk of 'infecting' the new domain. I'm just trying to get some kind of handle on the level of that risk (if that is possible).
Would you say:
1. Don't touch a 301 with a barge pole under any circumstances or
2. You should be OK under 'these circumstances' or
3. It's pot luck or
4. No need to worry about the consequences of 301s because Google will give you a fresh start. They know your motive for ditching the old domain and will filter the bad links from impacting the new domain, recognising you're a business that's been established for 1,000 years (from your business name, address, telephone number, company number etc.). Yeah, I know that last bit is probably my idealism getting the better of me.
How to quantify the risk to make the best decision?
-
Hi Ewan,
This is a question that probably deserves a blog post at some point, along with a number of related questions about link-based penalties. I've been gathering info for some time, and have seem many instances of redirecting sites that have been penalized. I wish I could collect data on penalized sites more scientifically, but we work with what's available.
Manual Penalties
Manual penalties appear to carry through to new domains almost instantly when redirected to pages housing the same content. Google appears to use a number of signals to make sure that the redirect is to the same site and not to a competitor.
Some Googlers have claimed that if you received an "unnatural link" warning in WMT, it's manual. I'm not entirely convinced of this, but it's now harder than ever to differentiate between manual link-based penalties and Penguin algorithmic adjustment. That brings us to...
Refreshing Adjustments (Penalties)
Panda, Penguin, and a few other updates are a little different. We've seen instances where a user makes a big change (a complete redesign for Panda, or redirecting the entire site); the trend seems to be a brief recovery followed by a drop once the algorithm refreshes.
The obvious up-side here is that if you were going to recover from the penalty anyway, you may start to recover a bit sooner and don't have to wait for the next refresh. The downside is that it's a lot of work to do correctly, and it might be a very short-lived change.
--
Generally, I'd say it's best to clean up the site and keep going on the same domain. If you have a lot of bad links pointing to a specific page, you may want to 410 that page and start a new one, then mention this in your reconsideration request. Otherwise, it's the old process of removal (keeping notes) and using disavow if reconsideration and clean up prove insufficient.
-
The best thing would be to clean up the bad links, file a reconsideration request and then 301 the old domain to the new one...that is if you have some good links to the old domain. If you only have spammy links then starting afresh would probably be easier.
-
We were in a similar situation and opted not top take the chance. We started from scratch and did not 301. Better safe than sorry.
-
I have seen a certain case I analysed who did 301 redirects. They were fine but I am still skeptical doing such move.
Personally, to 301 redirect a penalised site to a new domain may mean acquiring the spammy links from the old domain. I will not recommend it. If you think the old domain is no longer worth reviving then simply start a new website. This is a matter of calculating your resource spend vs benefits.
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
-
Backlinks from old domain
Hi, We have gone through a change of company brand name including a new domain name.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Agguk
We followed google recommendations at: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/83106?hl=en and it seems to have worked really well, the new domain has replaced the old in the google search results. My question: Still most of our backlinks, both anchor text and links use the old brand name and domain and it´s a slow process trying to update all references. Although they get redirected fine to the new domain (also following google recommendations), I wonder if the current scenario is doing any harm, SEO wise (other than the missed visual exposure of the new brand name) ? ...since the old brand name is not present at the new site I´m thinking of including "New brand name - previously old brand name" somewhere just to provide some sort of connection to all old backlinks, would that be unnecessary? I should mention that the old brand name actually includes our most important keyword but the new brand name does not. Thanks!0 -
Multilingual Site and 301 redirection
Hey there awesome people of Moz I have this site that has many languages in it. The main language is English and my developer did the following www.example.com ( is the main site ) which redirects with a 301 to www.example.com/en if your geo location is supported by our languages then you will automatically be redirected to whatever language you have in your country but does the first language with is english have to 301 redirect to www.example.com/en ? I thought that the right way is to just leave /en at the root file. Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Angelos_Savvaidis0 -
Php 301 redirect
Hi I am migrating an old wordpress site to a custom PHP site and the URL profiles will be different, so want to retain all link profiles and more importantly if a user visits the old urls via search then they are seamlessly transferred to the new equivalent page For example www.domain.com/about-us is going to need to redirect to www.domain.com/aboutus.php www.domain.com/furniture is going to need to redirect to www.domain.com/furniture-collections.php etc What is the best way of achieving this apart from .htaccess as not 100% confident of doing this. Could it be done via PHP or using meta tags?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ocelot0 -
Merging Sites: Will redirecting the old homepage to an internal page on the new site cause issues?
I've ended up with two sites which have similar content (but not duplicate) and target similar keywords, rather than trying to maintain two sites I would like to merge the sites together. The old site is more of a traditional niche site and targets a particular set of keywords on its homepage, the new site is more of an authority site with a magazine type homepage and targets the same set of keywords from an internal page. My question is: Should I redirect the old site's homepage to the relevant internal page on the new website...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lara_dar
...or should I redirect the old site's homepage to the new site's homepage? (the old site's homepage backlinks are a mixture of partial match keyword anchor text, naked URLs and branded anchor text) I am in two minds (a & b!) (a) Redirecting to the internal page would be great for ranking as there are some decent backlinks and the content is similar (b) But usually when you do a 301 redirect the homepage usually directs to the new homepage and some of the old site's links are related to the domain rather than the keyword (e.g. http://www.site.com) and some people will be looking for the site's homepage. What do you think? Your help is much appreciated (and hope this makes sense...!)0 -
Redirect ruined domain to new domain without passing link juice
A new client has a domain which has been hammered by bad links, updates etc and it's basically on its arse because of previous SEO guys. They have various domains for their business (brand.com, brand.co.uk) and want to use a fresh domain and take it from there. Their current domain is brand.com (the ruined one). They're not bothered about the rankings for brand.com but they want to redirect brand.com to brand.co.uk so that previous clients can find them easily. Would a 302 redirect work for this? I don't want to set up a 301 redirect as I don't want any of the crappy links pointing across. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jasonwdexter0 -
Language Detection redirect: 301 or 302?
We have a site offering a voip app in 4 languages. Users are currently 302 redirected from the root page to /language subpages, depending on their browser language. Discussions about the sense of this aside: Is it correct to use a 302 redirect here or should users be 301 redirected to their respective languages? I don't find any guideline on this whatsoever...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zeepartner1 -
How To 301 Redirect .html pages
I need to redirect a page/URL that is purely .html to a new location. I don't know how to do this. All the redirects I can find are for server side code pages .php/.aspx etc. From my understanding I can't put a server side redirect in a .html file. I am hosting on a microsoft server, however the new page I am redirecting to is .php. I am running some WordPress (.php) files on the server. I need to make it redirect before the old page loads so visitors don't start reading something that is about to get redirected Can someone please help me?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MyNet0 -
301 Redirect With A Message And Delay
Hello, I'd like to sell a site I own. I'd like the site to be redirected to the buyers site with a 301 redirect. But I'd like the viewer to be informed that the site was purchased by this company and they will be redirect in 5 seconds.I'd like for the redirect to be a complete 301 and pass as much linklove as possible. Are you familiar with how to do this? Thanks, Tyler
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tylerfraser0