Can i 301 redirect a website that does not have manual penalty - but definetly affected by google
-
ok, i have a website (website A) which has been running since 2008, done very nicely in search results, until january of this year... it dropped siginificantly, losing about two thirds of visitors etc... then in may basically lost the rest...
i was pulling my hair out for months trying to figure out why, i "think" it was something to do with links and anchor text, i got rid of old SEO company, got a new SEO company, they have done link analysis, trying to remove lots of links, have dissavowed about 500 domains... put in a reconsideration request... got a reply saying there is no manual penalty...
so new seo company says all they can do is carry on removing links, and wait for penguin to update and hopefully that will fix it... this will take as along as it takes penguin to update again...
obviously i can not wait indefinetely, so they have advised i start a new website (website B)... which is a complete duplicate of website A.
Now as we do not know whats wrong with website A - (we think its links - and will get them removed) my seo company said we cant do a 301 redirect, as we will just cause what ever is wrong to pass over to website B... so we need to create a blank page for every single page at website A, saying we have moved and put a NO FOLLOW link to the new page on website B....
Personally i think the above will look terrible, and not be a very user friendly experience - but my seo company says it is the only way to do it... before i do it, i just wanted to check with some experts here, if this is right?
please advise if 301 redirects are NOT correct way to do this.
thanks
James -
Algorithmic penalties like Panda and Penguin will be re-calculated on the refresh of the update. This is the reason you see conflicting answers on whether a 301 will pass the algorithmic penalty: it depends. It depends on a lot of variables that aren't really worth going into right now. The point is, IF your penalty is link-based, the penalty will almost definitely pass with a 301 redirect because the new site has no authority and no visibility.
If you haven't already, you'll want to make sure it's not something like Panda. It would be a shame to start over just to find that your UX and design were to blame all along. I've seen this happen several times because everyone just assumes it's the links.
Leaving both versions of the site will result in Google selecting one. They'll almost definitely select the original version of the site unless you take it down. You need to make the final decision: take the value of your current brand, domain, and legitimate links. Subtract that from the amount you think it will take to overcome the bad links either by removal or counter-balancing them with real links plus the opportunity cost of doing something else.
Starting over is generally the very last recourse, and I suggest it only if the are many links and the vast majority are heavy on the anchor text or clearly spam.
-
301 won't pass penalty. If it would work just as David said, I could 301 that domain to a competitor's domain and smash him down.
But David is right, this is not correct way. It's bad technique, sometimes working well but you never know when it will end and then you'll get hit.
For me the best what you can do is to take care of your backlink profile. If reconsideration request didn't help you must build stronger backling profile, take care of On Page SEO and OFF Page SEO and you will need time and patience.
I have had many situations like yours and it's always pain in the ass.
Ohh, one more thing. Take a look at your analytics and compare to the Google Update timeline. Then you will know what kind of creature caused this mess
If you have some more questions I'll try to help.
Thanks,
Jakub. -
301 is not the correct way to do this. A 301 will pass the penalty from the old domain to the new one.
Not sure about starting a new website that's a copy of the old one. I'd imagine Google would be smart enough to see the 2 domains were owned by the same person and have the same content so they may still hold you down in search results. And yes, putting a blank page saying you've moved without automatically redirecting visitors is a bad user experience.
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
-
Website in capital letters
Hello, Is website in capital letters affect SEO ?? or we can apply with it ?? please help thnx in advance..!!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | iepl20040 -
How will Google deal with the crosslinks for my multiple domain site
Hi, I can't find any good answer to this question so I thought, why not ask Moz.com ;-)! I have a site, let's call it webshop.xx For a few languages/markets, Deutsch, Dutch & Belgian, English, French. I use a different TLD with a different IP for each of these languages, so I'll end up with: webshop.de, webshop.nl, webshop.be, webshop.co.uk, webshop.com & webshop.fr They all link to eachother and every subpage that is translated from the other site gets a link as well from the other languages, so: webshop.com/stuff links to webshop.de/stuff My main website, webshop.com gets links from every other of these domain which Open Site Explorer as well as Majestic SEO sees as an external link. (this is happening) My question. How will Google deal in the long-run with the crosslinks coming from these domains? some guesses I made: I get full external links juice (content is translated so unique?) I get a bit of the juice of an external link They are actually seen as internal links I'll get a penalty Thanks in advance guys!!!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | pimarketing0 -
Pages linked with Spam been 301 redirected to 404\. Is it ok
Pl suggest, some pages having some spam links pointed to those pages are been redirected to 404 error page (through 301 redirect) - as removing them manually was not possible due to part of core component of cms and many other coding issue, the only way as advised by developer was making 301 redirect to 404 page. Does by redirecting these pages to 404 page using 301 redirect, will nullify all negative or spam links pointing to them and eventually will remove the resulting spam impact on the site too. Many Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Modi0 -
Can you have too many NOINDEX meta tags?
Hi, Our magento store has a lot of duplicate content issues - after trying various configurations with canonicals, robots, we decided it best and easier to manage to implement Meta NOINDEX tags to the pages that we wish the search engines to ignore. There are about 10000 URL's in our site that can be crawled - 6000 are Meta No Index - and 3000 odd are index follow. There is a high proportion of Meta No Index tags - can that harm our SEO efforts? thanks, Ben
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | bjs20100 -
Is there a problem with google?
I have one or two competitors (in the UK) in my field who buy expired 1 - 8 year old domains on random subjects (SEO, travel, health you name it) and they are in the printing business and they stick 1 - 2 articles (unrelated to what was on there before) on these and that's it. I think they stick with PA and DA above 30 and most have 10 – 100 links so well used expired domains, hosted in the USA and most have different Ip’s although they now have that many (over 70% of their backlink profile) that some have the same ip. On further investigation none of the blogs have any contact details but it does look like they have been a little smart here and added content to the about us (similar to I use to run xxx but now do xxx) also they have one or two tabs with content on (article length) that is on the same subject they use to do and the titles are all the same content. So basically they are finding expired 1 – 10 year old domains that have only been expired (from what I can see) 6 months max and putting 1 – 2 articles on the home page in relation with print (maybe adding a third on the subject the blog use to cover), add 1 – 3 articles via tabs at the top on subjects the sites use to cover, registering the details via xbybssgcf@whoisprivacyprotect.com and that’s it. They have been ranking via this method for the last couple of years (through all the Google updates). Does Google not have any way to combat link networks other than the stupid stuff such as public link networks, it just seems that if you know what you are doing you get away, if your big enough you get away with it but the middle of the ground (mum and pop sites) get F*** over with spam pointing to there site that no spammer would dream of doing anyway?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
301, 404 or 410? what is the best practice
Hi I'm currently working on a project to correct some really bad practices from years of different SEO's. Basically they had made around 1500 pages of delivery counties and town, only change 3 words on every page. Now apart from duplicate content issues, this has really hammered the site with the latest round of Panda updates. I've pulled the pages, but i'm in several frames of mind on how to best fix this. The pages won't ever be used again, so i'm thinking a 410 code would be best, but reading another post: http://moz.com/community/q/server-redirect-query i'm not sure if i should just let them go to 404's if anyone ever finds them. Incidentally i'm Disavowing over 1100 root domains, so extremely unlikely to find links out there.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | eminent1 -
SEO from INDIA Smarter then Google?
Exploring this url: filterscanada.ca In Open Site Explorer, it is clear those guys bought one of those package available on site like eLance.com a low price over seas!!! Where freelancer around the word can be hired for a fews bucks. For example, I post a job on eLance for SEO and most of the freelancer submitting where from INDIA. For just a few hundreds dollars, you can get a complet SEO package. At first, the price was attractive, but when posting on seoMoz and doing research, I came to the conclusion, the techniques they use might hurt more the produce positive result... How can you get a D.A. of 45 using backlinks they get? I read all those things about Google algorithm, and Panda and Penguin and this and that... Being impossible to crack! Do you have a explanation? I work really hard ans spends lots of $$$ to have a clean site selling furnace filters
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BigBlaze205
I follow all the SEO guide lines, practice only white hat trying to built somethings, but with a P.A. of 19 and a competitors ranking like this, I ask myself: "Maybe INDIA is smarter then Google and I should do like this site, spend a couple of hundreds dollars and buy myself a high D.A."0 -
Switching prices for google base
We would like to be able to submit lower prices to google than we do to other sources. How i see it working is that at the end of each url we submit to google base there is a tracking code (source=googlebase). When a user visits the site via one of these urls we would knock 10% of the price of that item and store the item in a cookie to ensure that the price of that item, for that user would stay at the low price for 24 hours. My question is whether google would have a problem with us doing this? The second part of my question is whether they check the full url including the query strings? If theyt just checked the canocial URL they would see a price thats 10% higher than the one we submitted to base - which, of course - would be bad
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | supermarketonline0