Starting fresh on a new url after serious Penguin update down rank
-
Hi friends
My site www.acupunctureclinicvictoriabc.com was recently hit by the penguin update and i dropped to page 5 of local searchs for my key words. A while back I had some bad link building done and now paying for it:(
I thought the disavow tool (used 4 months ago) would deal with this issue but apparently not
The current url is feeling like a lost cause.
My question is if I start fresh on a new url, can I use my old content (or even clone the site and move it to a new url) without being punished for duplicate content on the new site?
Any recommendations for starting fresh?
I really appreciate any thoughts on this matter, as I am feeling a bit lost and bummed about this issue
thanks!
-
That is encouraging for me, thanks Vanja. Ill get busy on the content end of things
even with the hit I still seem to be getting some inquiries,
all the best
Silas
-
Since I've been a webmaster at several sites, some of them got hit by spammy links. Not going into why and how, the simple solution was always content for us! Getting a good article on why is acupuncture great, getting an article about real life help scenarios, you know, anything and everything an average reader would like to know about your service. If you provide a helpful article, it will get shared on other sites and blogs, social media and get the healthy link number up in a certain period of time. There are sites with 400-500 spammy domains pointing to them, but they aren't affected. Bear that in mind.
-
Hi Vanja
yes I think i have learned my lesson from this experience
I am still confused on how to get natural links, I do have some good content but this is a topic I will have research more
thanks for your thoughts
Silas
-
My idea is always do one thirds of everything - one third of time to contact spammy website owners to remove them, one third to have a fresh list of disavowed links and one third of building quality, healthy and great links through user help, great content, excellent services and such. Third part is the most important! I've seen from some cases on the web where websites had 300-400 spammy link domains pointing to them, algorithm penalty, rankings dropped, website owners and webmasters taking a complete turn in content creation, service creation, where the sites recovered and ranked on top pages for several keywords later on.
My thoughts are always make a website for human beings and provide a useful product, service, article, idea or whatnot. It will then help a great deal to make a website which garners tons of healthy and natural links since people find your site helpful and amazing. Nothing else is needed.
A link portfolio of a few hundred spammy links is what most sites come with these days. Unfortunately how ever Google and a ton of experts say negative link building is not that common, it really does get around in some highly competitive niches. Google has released the disavow tool just for that and it should definitely be used if you experience problems.
But bear in mind, Google devalues some spammy links with their ongoing daily procedures. When a website has 10-20 healthy links and 100-200 spammy ones which get devalued, rankings drop. Not just because there's a penalty, but because there simply aren't that much high quality links to start with.
Hope it clears it up somewhat. Thanks!
-
Thanks Vanja
yes I think you are right about letting cooler heads prevail
Do you think that I need to hunt down those bad links or will google forgive my sins over time?
I am not clear wither bad links put you on a permanent s$#t list
cheers
Silas
-
Well first ask yourself this question: Are the links leftover after disavow tool was put to use quality ones? I mean, people always say their disavow tool hadn't worked and they haven't fully recovered. It is almost always the issue of the leftover links not posing any relevance to move you up in rankings. Nothing more.
Honestly I wouldn't scrape that site by any means. Your PageRank 3 is still good, means you do have some good links coming to your site and doing rash decisions just a short time have passed after a major algorithm change is never a good thing to do. This means your rankings may improve later on when all things settle down.
But the biggest question still stands. Are you having a good amount of high-quality and healthy links, natural links, pointing to various aspects of your website? Or are you now leftover with just a few good links when you disavowed all the bad ones? Thanks!
-
HI Alan
thanks for your post and sorry for the false url - it is actually - www.acupunctureclinicvictoriabc.ca
In regards to content, I definitely made mistakes with key word stuffing in the past, but thought I had corrected this issue
based on the reports from SEOmoz
Grade A for on page and 31 for site authority
I did get 29 crawl errors (most due to duplicate content) and 91 crawl warnings (related to missing meta descriptions)
The issue seems to be with the bad links. There are currently 141 pointing to the site, I disavowed a bunch already
Based on me fixing the issues mentioned an focusing on natural link building from here on in I might recover over time?many thanks!Silas
-
First of all, that web address is not working so there's no way for anyone here who might have guidance, to be able to review anything.
Beyond that, if you're in a worst case situation, and you absolutely believe a new domain name is called for, yes, you can migrate the content of the old site over. However if you perform "301" redirects from the old site to the new site, some people have made anecdotal claims that doing so carries the bad link signals.
In that scenario, when the new site launches, the old site needs to be blocked from indexation to prevent duplicate content issues.
The other major issue I have found is sites are more likely to take a major hit for any high level flawed SEO if other aspects of SEO are also severely flawed. So for example, if the site was already weak on-site or over-optimized up to the edge of acceptability on-site, that site is more likely to have been nailed in a Penguin type update.
So that then begs the question - is the content you want to retain truly high quality and strong enough outside of the off-site signals? From topical focus to topical depth to internal linking methods and so on...
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
-
Is buying traffic from Internet traffic club harmful to rankings
From looking at one of our clients’ GA stats, we’ve discovered that they have signed up with a site called Internet Traffic Club (or they have asked someone to do it on their behalf). Their hits on one day went from a fairly standard low number to a few thousand. The hits came from cities all over the world, yet this client is a local UK solicitor offering a local town service. We feel doing this - if they do it regularly - would be harmful rather than beneficial to their rankings. Has anyone here any experience of using these traffic buying services and how Google views these hits? Of course it is also nonsensical to pay to buy traffic from Nigeria if you’re a local solicitor, but I want to explain to them the evidence behind the harmful effect it could have on their rankings.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mfrgolfgti1 -
What are legit ways to raise up you're ranking for a new website?
I have a wallpaper website that i just made and bought a template that looks fine for the site so far for a month now, and i wanted to know what steps i cant take to better rank my site and build some traffic along the way. I use only specific directories, not sure how to get a press release done and also link back to other sites from pages that get a decent amount of traffic where i can leave a link to it, of course not leaving any type of spammy looking comments. This is the site i am working on right now, freehdwallpapers.be I have linked back from a few sites already, i look at the alexa rank if it will show a number at one point, the sites worth is still pretty low, and also i have added social networks on the site which has gained a number of followers to this day, so i got work to do still. I just don't want to go on about it the wrong way and get penalized by google.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | 1080HDWallpapers0 -
Better ranking competitors have paid links from blog pages
I have a trial of all the tools at the moment and it's a lot of fun. I have been delving into site explorer and found that some competitors have links to them from obvious seo promoting paid blog sites. One has no other links except a paid for blog from a site that openly admits it offers paid marketing and they shot up to 4th on page one for a main keyword phrase. The info from moz and matt cuts video's say not to do this, but it's so tempting. The blog is well written, while I sit here and do the right thing, my competitors have page one. If the blog is well written and is meaningful is it OK and if google ever decide it's paid and don't like it, wouldn't it be better to be page one for 6 months and then recover? I'd love to give the link to the seo, blogger thingy but don't want to come across as promoting it in any way. I am sure there are loads of them anyway.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Peter24680 -
RD and PA high but still not ranking
We picked up a client who before ourselves was just using link building as their SEO strategy. They came to us for on page SEO and overall guidance. We have done some targeted link building and did some work with their link building company to remove some links, however after doing some further diggings Im wondering if we still have some bad links? My reasoning for this is:- all the SEO work we have done on the pages are getting A reports in Moz (which is our back up check) the RD and PA for many of the pages we have focused on are higher RDs and PA's than the pages that rank on the first page Any suggestions?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SocialB1 -
Lot of new suspicious external links
I am running a small-language site and suddenly saw a lot of incoming English links in Moz Reports and Opensiteexplorer from various domains (the sites are in English, but anchor words are not). When I check the page sources of there is no link to the site (as there shouldn't). Any idea what is happening and what to do about it? Thanks for help in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | tjr0 -
My Penguin Recovery Attempt
So I have decided today to attempt to beat the odds and try and do a full recovery from the Penguin Update. I am going to create a Google Doc in which I will make public and link at the end of this post for all of you to see. I am going to meticulously go through a massive back link audit of my site and try to see if I can recover from my loss of some of my main keywords back from April 24th. I want to clarify that I DID NOT get effected from Penguin 2.0, but I did from 1.0 and have not recovered since. I have to be honest I feel like I have done everything up to now, but I realized I needed to make this a very long journey into a massive audit into my back link profile which contains thousands of back links which I have been honestly avoiding. I just want to see if I put the work, I will see the results and maybe it can help others I will document everything I do in detail as well as dates when I do them. I'm sure there will be plenty of coffee fueled nights of Jibber-Jabber...and I apologize for that ahead of time. I hope at the end there is light and can shed some on others. I am starting with a blank canvas, so keep checking back on my progress. I generally work at night so you will see most changes in the morning. Here is the link to my Doc - http://bit.ly/11dUkzc Wish Me Luck
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | cbielich1 -
Are directory listings still appropriate in 2013? Aren't they old-style SEO and Penguin-worthy?
We have been reviewing our off-page SEO strategy for clients and as part of that process, we are looking at a number of superb info-graphics on the subject. I see that some of current ones still list "Directories" as being part of their off-page strategy. Aren't these directories mainly there for link-building purposes and provide Users no real benefit? I don't think I've ever seen a directory that I would use, apart for SEO research. Surely Google's Penguin algorithm would see directories in the same way and give them less value, or even penalise websites that use them to try to boost page rank? If I were to list my websites on directories it wouldn't be to share my lovely content with people that use directories to find great sites, it would be to sneakily build page rank. Am I missing the point? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Crumpled_Dog
Scott0 -
New sub-domain launches thousands of local pages - is it hurting the main domain?
Would greatly appreciate some opinions on this scenario. Domain cruising along for years, top 1-3 rankings for nearly all top non-branded terms and a stronghold for branded searches. Sitelinks prominently shown with branded searches and always ranked #1 for most variations of brand name. Then, sub-domain launches that was over 80,000 local pages - these pages are 90-95% similar with only city and/or state changing to make them appear like unique local pages. Not an uncommon technique but worrisome in a post Panda/Penguin world. These pages are surprisingly NOT captured as duplicate content by the SEOMoz crawler in my campaigns. Additionally about that same time a very aggressive, almost entirely branded paid search campaign was launched that took 20% of the clicks previously going to the main domain in organic to ppc. My concern is this, shortly after this launch of over 80k "local" pages on the sub-domain and the cannibalization of organic clicks through ppc we saw the consistency of sitelinks 6 packs drop to 3 sitelinks if showing at all, including some sub-domains in sitelinks (including the newly launched one) that had never been there before. There's not a clear answer here I'm sure but what are the experts thoughts on this - did a massive launch of highly duplicate pages coupled with a significant decrease in organic CTR for branded terms harm the authority of the main domain (which is only a few dozen pages) causing less sitelinks and less strength as a domain or is all this a coincidence? Or caused by something else we aren't seeing? Thanks for thoughts!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | VMLYRDiscoverability0