Cleaning up a Spammy Domain VS Starting Fresh with a New Domain
-
Hi- Can you give me your opinion please... if you look at murrayroofing.com and see the high SPAM score- and the fact that our domain has been put on some spammy sites over the years- Is it better and faster to place higher in google SERP if we create a fresh new domain? My theory is we will spin our wheels trying to get unlisted from alot of those spammy linking sites. And that it would be faster to see results using a fresh new domain rather than trying to clean up the current spammy doamin. Thanks in advance - You guys have been awesome!!
-
Disavowing has nothing to do with traffic.
Disavowing is all about spam signals from spammy links. That and only that.
-
Thanks again for all the advice- Truly appreciated-
What are your thoughts on "disavowing" with google- murrayroofing.com so when it sends traffic to the new murrayroofingllc.com google will hopefully ignore...? Can you see our account in MOZ. You can see the old domain is sending traffic since it is listed on the spammy sites.
-
You are always welcome.
If you got more questions, you can always hit me up on my Twitter @DigitalSpaceman
-
Thank you!!
-
Hard to say who and why is putting you on those websites.
The only way to truly get rid of those backlinks is to reach out to those websites' owners. You'd have to obviously find someone who speaks the language.
Now, what you can do though is this:
- Disavow all those crappy links - that'll get Google to lower the "spam score" of your website;
- Block all traffic by IPs, geolocation and/or hostnames/referrers (that'll prevent from actual unrelated traffic)
That should clean it up pretty good.
Of course, that requires full control and ownership of that domain and website code. If you can't get that - again, my suggestion is just to part ways. -
This is awesome info! Thank you. What are your thoughts on trying to get backlinks removed from sites in China where we have no way to contact them - none of the wording o the sites are in our language- and it seems like it would be impossible to get removed from some of them. Additional thoughts greatly appreciated. In analytics we see "more" traffic from china than the US-
I'm convinced a competitor may be listing us on these sites- Or one of these SEO guys that get really pissed when we turn them down. Could they be out putting our domain on listing sites?
-
Yeah, your suggestion makes sense.
Keep the old one while the new one is ranking up.
Now, here is perfect scenario for you - keep working on the new site, and get full ownership of the old one. Then through IP blocks, cloudflare, removing all spammy backlinks etc, get rid of all or most of the spammy traffic and signals. And then redirect.
-
Thank you again!
I should have been more clear- The old website gets traffic that does convert- If it loaded faster than 10 seconds I'm sure a lot more would convert- Super high bounce rate due to slooooow loading of that site. But we do get "valid leads" every week from it. But not a lot of leads- maybe 5 a week- but our jobs are large dollar jobs.
What is your thought on running both sites separately? We could go in and make sure they are not duplicate and assign different addresses and phone numbers to the old site- But this "seems" black hat- We would not be doing it to get both site to rank- but just so we don't lose the traffic- then in a year or so get rid of it. what are your thoughts?
-
"... maybe a lot of traffic will convert. "
WILL convert? so it's not converting now? If so, it's kind of optimistic that will change, no?
Since you don't own old domain, you can't really reliably do anything about it anyway.
At this point, I would say not to forward at all, start from scratch.
-
Thank you- Yes some of the traffic - maybe a lot of traffic will convert. The problem is old "printed" directories and other places where we can't update the domain. We get a lot of business from a printed catalog that won;t change for a year or more.
I will look at the suggestions you made about IP limitations. The other issue is we don't "own" the original domain so we have to ask the owner who is also our IT guy to change settings. This is another reason we bough the new domain.
Again thank you!
-
Couple ways you can go about it.
-
Is any of the traffic going to the old spammy domain any good? Does it convert? If not, then don't worry about redirecting, there wouldn't be any point, only spam signals
-
If there is some good traffic, then do IP limitations, hostnames limitations etc. That can be done in htaccess or on the server itself. There are other more elaborate ways to filter out spam traffic as well, but that depends on how you or your IT guy is familiar with it. One of the simplest solutions is to route all traffic through CloudFlare, it has quite nice spam filtering, and it's free.
Hope this helps.
-
-
Thank you- we're talking about murrayroofinllc.com in particular- we are not sure how to forward the old domain to the new- We "know how" we just don't know if we should- The reason we developed murrayroofingllc.com is because murray roofing.com had a high spam score and we got advice from this string to go for a new domain-
Now the concern is- if we forward all the traffic from murrayroofing.com to murrayroofingllc.com that the new domain murrayroofingllc.com will be negatively affected by the spammy traffic- Somehow murrayroofing.com got on some spam sites and we get a ton of spammy traffic from china- we don't want this traffis - and these sites there is "no way" to ask them to remove our website from their spam sites in china.
All thoughts are welcome here-
-
Ta Larry
Ok nothing much of substance, that said if ranking worth trying as it is an easier or usually faster route to page 1.
Had a look at the Murray Roofing site and has not been optimised for customer queries a roofing contractor would seek to rank for. As it seems you are keen to start afresh - can do both in parallel. No harm to either.
That said would suggest you also look at your google my business structure - your effectively a local play. Getting reviews and appearing in the local search pack for roofing contractors Omaha etc we would consider a client priority.
All the best go get them.
-
only for a few and we are in position 49 and 50 for them.
-
Hi
Is the current site ranking for any terms of value?
-
Hi there,
Yes, absolutely get new domain. If you look at DA - it's only 15 (not too bad in some cases). But if you look at backlink profile - you'll see that most of the links are from listing sites - homestead, yellowpages, ezlocal etc. You can replicate that profile after a day of work. And, as you said, spam score will only bring troubles.
Hope this 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
-
New site migration (multiple sites into one + new domain)
Hi, I have read so many very helpful guides and experiences from you guys that will greatly help me but I have a few questions please. Our company has 3 sites, the main site and 2 sites for different product ranges: BrandProductName.com (main site - DA = 22 raking well for product name) Productname2.com (DA = 10 ranking very well for product name and little competition) BrandProductName3.com (DA = 10 poor ranking) We wish to bring all the sites into one with categories for the 3 different product. The main site is an e-commerece site whereas the other 2 are not (currently). On top of this as the main domain has one of the product names in it they wish to change the domain to be just Brandname.com. So the plan is to combine site 2 and 3 into site 1 and change that domain name. As you can imagine this is going to be quite a job. I am fairly happy with the steps required (having read all the guides and migrated many sites in the past) but with the added domain name change this is a little daunting. So my questions are: Should I merge the 3 sites into 1 and then changed the domain at a later point? Should I change the domain of the main site first and then merge site 2 and 3 in later? Should I just do it all together? Or based on the data i have provided do you disagree with the plan, what would you recommend? We are not in a massive rush to complete all of this so we have the time to plan and execute this when we are fully ready. Any help / advise would be greatly appreciated. Thanks all
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | csimmo0 -
Using a Sub Domain as a Main Domain?
Hi, I'm working on a site at the moment and the sub domain is acting as the main domain. This occurred when the site was redesigned and built on a sub domain for testing but it was never moved to the main domain when it went live (a couple of years ago). So little or no pages are live on domain.com but all on sub.domain.com. It's a large company but they have very poor rankings. Would you recommend that they move the sub domain back into the root folder? Does this involve renaming/re-pointing URLs? Thanks Louise
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MVIreland1 -
Redirecting main www. subdomain to new domain. Can you then create a new subdomain on the old domain?
Hi there, The scenario is this: We have been working on a rebrand and have changed the company name So, we want to redirect www.old-name.com to www.new-name.com However, the parent company is retaining the old brand name for corporate purposes So, in an ideal world, we'd be able to keep www.old-name.com active - but clearly that would sacrifice all of the authority built up over the years, so we do have to redirect the main www. subdomain in it's entirity. However - one suggested solution is to redirect www.old-domain.com to www.new-domain.com... but then create a new corporate subdomain: for example, business.old-domain.com business.old-domain.com will not be competing with the new site on any service/product related terms; it will only need to appear in SERPs for the company name I'd appreciate some thoughts on this, as I've not done this before or found any examples of anyone that has. Is that a massive risk in terms of sending a confusing message to Google? Thanks for your help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | edlondon0 -
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 -
URL for New Product
Hi, We are creating a section on our established existing website to display our new marketplace product & associated category pages. This marketplace will be a section of the site where our users can sell online training courses that they've created. It will be branded on our site as the Marketplace. Is it important to include 'marketplace' in the URL? Or would it be better to include a relevant keyword such as 'training-courses' instead? Or both? I've assumed I shouldn't use both as that would increase the length of the URLs and number of subfolders.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mindflash0 -
How do i redirect www.domain.com/ to www.domain.com/index.php
I keep getting in my analytics www.domain.com/ and www.domain.com/index.php how do i make it consistently redirect to one version and not to both. I know about htaccess redirect and am already using this so am puzzle to which is the best one to use. below is the example .htaccess file im using. Options +FollowSymlinks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mattmillen
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^domain.co.uk [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.co.uk/index.php$1 [r=301,nc] which is better for SEO should i forward to www.domain.com/ or www.domain.com/index.php0 -
Domain with a Virus History
Hi, I have a domain that I am working on that has a past we did not know about. Doing a bit of research it appears that back in 2010 the domain had a link to a virus or had a virus on the domain – because of this certain anti virus sites are blocking the domain. Interestingly Google, Norton, Firefox say the domain is fine.... IE, Kaspersky and a few still block it. I am going through and manually searching and trying to get them to agree the site is safe BUT I am having a problem with mywot.com. They refuse to take down the “reviews” staying its a virus site. Anything I can do? Any suggestions? Any legal action we can take? Is there anything else I can do or should be doing to check else where? Thanks in advance Fresh Fire One
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnW-UK0 -
Domain certificate
Hello, I would like to know if there is any certificate we can buy to increase the Seo of my website. Thanks very much for your time
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cartageno0