Launching a new website. Old inherited site cannot be saved after lifted penalty. When should we kill the old site and how?
-
Background Information A website that we inherited was severely penalized and after the penalty was revoked the site still never resurfaced in rankings or traffic. Although a dramatic action, we have decided to launch a completely new version of the website. Everything will be new including the imagery, branding, content, domain name, hosting company, registrar account, google analytics account, etc.
Our question is when do we pull the plug on the old site and how do we go about doing it? We had heard advice that we should make sure we run both sites at the same time for 3 months, then deindex the old site using a noindex meta robots tag.We are cautious because we don't want the old website to be associated in any way, shape or form with the new website. We will purposely not be 301 redirecting any URLs from the old website to the new.
What would you do if you were in this situation?
-
My site got a revoke in May 2013 and took until the refresh in Oct 2014 for it to show recovery in SERPS
One way around this is to use hreflang and set your main site to x-default and create a new site that targets your main language.
Basically set your new domain to hreflang "EN" and you should see an instant recovery!
-
Hi
If you are getting traffic and conversions still on your old site, leave it up and build equity in your new site by taking the steps above. But that's a business decision for you and your team. I don't know anything about how your site is performing other than what you have told me here.
Branded domains tend to do better than exact match domains, especially as search engines crack down on exact match. Just something to consider. Here are some best practices from Moz.
Good luck!
-
Hi
If you are getting traffic and conversions still on your old site, leave it up and build equity in your new site by taking the steps above. But that's a business decision for you and your team. I don't know anything about how your site is performing other than what you have told me here.
Branded domains tend to do better than exact match domains, especially as search engines crack down on exact match. Just something to consider. Here are some best practices from Moz.
Good luck!
-
Thanks again for replying.
No, the old domain name is not branded. Just curious why you ask?
Alright so since we are not migrating the site, flipping the switch on the new and shutting down the old will be fine to do?
-
Hi again
Is the old domain a branded domain?
You can play the waiting game for a few months if you're ultimately going to kill off the site and noindex it.
If you're not migrating the site, you should be fine.
Hope this helps - good luck!
-
Thank you for taking the time to address my question.
I apologize if I didn't explain the original scenario clearly. Even though we were able to have the manual action penalty lifted for the old website, we were never able to see rankings for our main keywords appear again. The website never fully recovered from the penalty. We had waited months after the penalty had been revoked but no progress in the rankings were made.
Although a drastic measure to kill the site, we decided that the old website was forever tarnished (and the client didn't want to keep pumping money into trying to revive the website) so we wanted to start fresh.
The point of the new website is to be in no way associated with the old. Are there any precautions or steps that we should take when launching the new website and shutting down the old? Should we literally flip the switch on the new site and then close down the old? Our biggest concern is that Google is going to pass on the poor reputation of the old website to the new one.
-
Hi there
I would first go through a backlink audit and change any old valuable URLs to the new domain you are choosing to develop.
I would also go through a content audit and update, consolidated, or remove any content based on the criteria in the resource.
From there, I would do a local SEO audit to make sure your citations and listings are upto date and contain correct information.
I do have to ask, why if the site is no longer penalized are you trying to completely sever ties from it? Just wondering.
Hope this helps - good luck!
-
The old site is actually still the current site and it's not generating much revenue at all. The new site is still in development.
-
Is the old site generating any revenue currently?
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
-
Moving site to new domain without access to redirect from old to new. How can I do this with as little loss to SERP results as possible?
I've been hired to build a new site for a customer. They were duped by some shady characters at goglupe.com (If you can reach them, tell them they are rats--phone is disconnected, address is a comedy club on Mission in SF). Glupe owns the domain name and would not transfer or give FTP access prior to dropping off the face of the earth. The customer doesn't want to chase after them with lawyers, so we are moving on. New domain, new site with much of the same content as previous site. All that I have access to is the old wordpress site. I plan to build the new site, then remove all pages/posts from the old site. Is there anything I can do to salvage the current page 1 ranking? Obviously, the new domain will take some time to get back there. Just hoping to avoid any pitfalls or penalties if I can. If I had complete access, I would follow all the standard guidelines. But I don't. Any thoughts? Thanks! Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | c_estep_tcbguy0 -
Domain switch planned - new domain accessible - until the switch: redirect from new to old domain with 307?
Hi there, We are going to switch our local domain oldsite.at to newsite.com in November. As our IT department wants to use the newsite.com already for email traffic till then, the domain newsite.com has to be accessible for public and currently shows the default Apache page without useful content. The old domain has quite some trust, the new domain is a first time registered domain (not known by search engines yet and no published anyhow). The domain was parked till now. I am aware of the steps to take for the switch itself, but: **what to do with the newsite.com domain until everything is prepared for the switch? **I suppose users or search engines find the domain and as there is no useful information available it harms us already. My idea was to 307 redirect newsite.com to the oldsite.at but the concern is that this causes problems as soon as we switch the domain and redirecting with 301 from oldsite.at to newsite.com? Do you have any objections or other recommendations? Thank you a lot in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | comicron0 -
Want to merge high ranking niche websites into a new mega site, but don't want to lose authority from old top level pages
I have a few older websites that SERP well, and I am considering merging some or all of them into a new related website that I will be launching regardless. My old websites display real estate listings and not much else. Each website is devoted to showing homes for sale in a specific neighborhood. The domains are all in the form of Neighborhood1CityHomes.com, Neighborhood2CityHomes.com, etc. These sites SERP well for searches like "Neighborhood1 City homes for sale" and also "Neighborhood1 City real estate" where some or all of the query is in the domain name. Google simply points to the top of the domain although each site has a few interior pages that are rarely used. There is next to zero backlinking to the old domains, but each links to the other with anchor text like "Neighborhood1 Cityname real estate". That's pretty much the extent of the link profile. The new website will be a more comprehensive search portal where many neighborhoods and cities can be searched. The domain name is a nonsense word .com not related to actual key words. The structure will be like newdomain.com/cityname/neighborhood-name/ where the neighborhood real estate listings are that would replace the old websites, and I'd 301 the old sites to the appropriate internal directories of the new site. The content on the old websites is all on the home page of each, at least the content for searches that matter to me and rank well, and I read an article suggesting that Google assigns additional authority for top level pages (can I link to that here?). I'd be 301-ing each old domain from a top level to a 3rd level interior page like www. newdomain/cityname/neighborhood1/. The new site is better than the old sites by a wide margin, especially on mobile, but I don't want to lose all my top positions for some tough phrases. I'm not running analytics on the old sites in question, but each of the old sites has extensive past history with AdWords (which I don't run any more). So in theory Google knows these old sites are good quality.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gogogomez0 -
New website from scratch and redirects or maintaining domain?
Hi friends, I have to face a big challenge. My client has an online store with about 250 products. The store is based on a web service provider whose CMS gives critical duplicate content issues. My client is considering to rethink the store from scratch and choose a CMS that offers more guarantees. I have two options: Starting the store from scratch with new domain and make redirects (whole domain or page to page?) Maintaining the domain, careful to keep the current structure of the URL, which is currently pretty bad I hope you could help me. Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sergio_redondo0 -
Need Reviews on my new website
Hi, I recently developed this website: http://goo.gl/fl5a5 And started link building to that website and getting some very good links so far. So far ok, but i would request some experienced guys here to post some reviews and help me with your suggestions so that i can rank better. Its been a month since i started link building to this site. . PS: I have cloned my competitors site with unique content. Will this becomes an issue? You can check my competitors site by Google'in my site entire title. Please let me know your thoughts on this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Vegit0 -
Brand new domain with a lot of old links.
So I just bought http://penny-auctions.co/ a couple of days ago, ignore the fact it's not set up yet and generally just a mess, and something kept bugging me about why the domain authority kept showing as 25 in the SEOmoz toolbar. Now initially I'd set it up as www. and with the trailing slash so the PA was 1, however after a bit of exploration it seems that someone has been building links to the non-www version of the domain for at least a year! The site has never been owned before so I've now made the non-www version the default and have a 5 day old site with PA 35 and DA 25! SEOmoz shows PA - 45 links, 20 domains and DA - 341 links, 113 domains. Majestic Historic - 8598 links, 236 domains and Fresh - 160 links, 62 domains. Brilliant! Except they're all spamtastic. What do you think this will do for my future attempts at ranking? Should I create pages that have links to them or just 301 them?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | StalkerB0 -
Multi-language, multi-country localized website with duplicate content penalty
My company website is multi-language and multi-country. Content created for the Global (English-language only, root directory) site is automatically used when no localization exists for the language and country choice (i.e. Brazil). I'm concerned this may be harming our SEO through dupe content penalties. Can anyone confirm this is possible? Any recommendations on how to solve the issue? Maybe the canonical tag? Thanks very much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IanTreviranus0 -
Any Tips For putting up a new site and not loosing rankings?
We are switching one of our sites to a magento site and dont want to loose current rankings what are the best practices for this? Same Domain but the deep url pages will change urls
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DavidKonigsberg0