Dump Penguin Hit Domain
-
Just wanting to get some feedback from others dealing with Penguin hits on client's websites. We've got one particularly client that has been hit badly because of a high proportion of link toxicity. After running the Cemper Detox Tool we found that only about 25 links are healthy. We're actually thinking of dumping the domain and moving the website to a new domain and starting again with link building (manually grabbing as many of the existing healthy links as possible on the way).
Has anyone out there used this strategy? What do you think of the potential of the Sandbox of the new site vs. the Penguin hit on the old site. Do you think the 'drag' of Penguin is higher than the 'drag' of the Sandbox on rankings?
Thanks guys, look forward to your insight!
-
Hi Linda
Do NOT redirect - If you set up a redirect you will pass the penalty to the new domain and you will have the exact same results. I suggest you clean the profile and once you see your traffic picking up then do 301.
Try to think why you got penalised. Go to webmaster tools and download your latest links - there is a tab and you can select it. Since you were hit with the latest update I would start to check links within the 2 update dates. Disavow those links or try to remove them. I am sure you will pick up.
I can have a look for you if you want should you give me the web site url on a PM.
Best of luck!
-
Thanks for your responses so far guys. Just to clarify, there has not be a manual penalty, just a hit from the Penguin 2.1 algo update on October 3rd.
My concern is that given that there is not manual penalty, we can't ask for re-consideration and therefore have no idea when the next algo update will happen and if it will fix the problem.
With regard to traffic, they are getting around 500 visitors a month from direct traffic and almost nothing from referrals, however I was thinking that I would just set up an automatic redirect of the domain, or alternatively just set up a simply page telling customers 'we've moved'. The domain would be similar, so brand name recognition would be ok going forward.
-
I agree with Federico if we are dealing with a "manual penalty" case which seems to be the case since he is mentioning reconsideration requests. You have to remember that there is not a one size fits all solution for penalised domains, each client is a unique case that needs a unique action from your part.
For example:
- Is the cost of your extra hours of work and the time he is going to lose in order to revoke the penalty less thanbuying a domain, uploading the site and rank it again.
2) Is the domain a branded domain? If so you need to try and clean it, if not maybe worth changing it? - Does the client have referral web sites driving good quality traffic to the site? This is extremely important. For example one of my clients who got penalised (manual penalty) was getting 6000 visits a month from a referal web site Google pointed out as against their "quality guidelines". Needless to say I did not disavow the site and carried on cleaning the rest of the domain. Few months later the penalty timed out and client got back all his rankings and traffic, also impressions got increased on google webmaster tools.
Up to date everything seems fine.
- Is the cost of your extra hours of work and the time he is going to lose in order to revoke the penalty less thanbuying a domain, uploading the site and rank it again.
-
Is the site still getting customers accessing the site directly? As if you established a brand name, that people is used to, I should consider cleaning up the domain instead.
I've done it myself, 95% of the links were toxic according to Link Dtox, we tried disavowing just the worse ones, reconsideration declined, then we disavowed over 1500 domains and left around 50 that were healthy links, reconsideration approved and penalty revoked. The very next day we started seeing 100% increase in search traffic, and although we are not ranking as high as we expected, Google's Matt Cutts told a few days ago that even after a penalty is removed, it may take some time until Google trust the site again.
All the work was done KNOWING that we couldn't just "dump" the domain as we had over 100,000 customers accessing our site directly. And if you change to a new domain and redirect the penalized one, chances are the new domain gets the hit too.
So as a first step, I would ask myself if it is worth the clean, depending on how many direct traffic you have, brand, etc.
Hope that helps!
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
-
Cross Domain Duplicate Content
Hi, We want create 2 company websites and each to be targeted specific to different countries. The 2 countries are Australia and New Zealand. We have acquired 2 domains, company.com.au and company.co.nz . We want to do it like this and not use different hreflang on the same version for maximum ranking results in each country (correct?). Since both websites will be in English, inevitably some page are going to be the same. Are we facing any danger of duplicate content between the two sites, and if we do is there any solution for that? Thank you for your help!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Tz_Seo0 -
Was I hit by Panda/Payday Loan/Penguin?
Good Mozzing, So, as some of you may know based on my previous post, I am working with an odd situation here. I have taken over an account for a company and the Main domain pretty much falls into the category of everything Google hates. I have suggested to the CEO that the practices they did before me were sorta in the Grayhat realm bordering on Blackhat but I need empirical data before I can make any drastic changes. In May and June of 2013 Panda, Penguin, and Payday Loan all had updates. Our company has nothing do to with porn, apartment rentals, finances, or anything like that, but the SEO methods used were, as I said, questionable. In June of 2013 there was a drop from 8,000 sessions to 5,000 sessions from organic traffic. If I switch over to all referring traffic the loss increases to 11,000 to 7,000 sessions. To me that seems pretty substantial. Not only that, but according to the data we have not been able to recover.There was a steady climb for about 5 months before the drop, and then now we are in this middle ground. I have only been here for about 2 weeks, so the things I have been uncovering are pretty amazing. Is that enough to assume that we were indeed hit by the updates?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | HashtagHustler2 -
Does this graph look like a Penguin 2.0 hit?
Hello,Does the attached graph look like a Penguin 2.0 hit? Keep in mind that on our eCommerce site most purchases are from return customers. I forgot to add here that we cut a bunch of paid links in May 2013 as well. We quit cutting paid links when our rankings dropped - we thought it was the paid links. We currently have 30% paid links. Penguin 2.0 was on May 22. ga2.png
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Do you choose PA/DA over PR when purchasing expiring domains?
Hey guys, So a lot has been said about private blog network. I have but only 1 question: Do you choose PA/DA over PR when purchasing expiring domains or PR is most critical? Thanks a lot!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | nicenike0 -
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 -
Would the same template landing page (placed on 50+ targeted domains) help or hurt my ranking?
Scenario: Company ABC has 50 related domains that are being forwarding to the main company URL. Q1: Would there be SEO value by creating a template landing page for each domain that includes product info, photos and keyword links to the main URL? Q2: If all 50+ landing pages were the same, would that penalize the main site due to duplicate content?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | brianmeert0 -
Purchased an expiring domain, Now the pagerank has gone.
A few days ago I had asked a question regarding purchasing an expiring domain to redirect to a new related site. The post can be found here >>> http://www.seomoz.org/q/purchasing-an-expiring-domain-with-quality-related-links The domain has some great links with several being from PR5 pages on nih.gov aswell as several keyword rich domains. This made my day and I ended up paying $309 for it. So today I have the domain with the registrar network solutions who I believe are owned by Google, not sure if that is the truth or not as I can't find any info on that. now my domain is no longer indexed in Google and the toolbar's pagerank has dropped from a 4 to a 0. It was not my choice to use network solutions but namejet only use them or ENOM. I have now installed a wordpress site on the domain to see if any pagerank exist, if it does then the site will shortly be indexed in Google without me building any links to it. Just 2 days ago the site was in Google, had the correct info:domainname.com command and now the info: command shows nothing. the site is either banned or all of the actual pagerank has been removed by Google. I am a little bit dissapointed in this even though it was initially an experiment to see if I could purchase good links through expiring domains. The thing is I am seeing people purchase domains with good links in excess of $3000. Has anyone else experienced anything like this?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | umtmedia0