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301 with nofollow ?
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Hi,
our ecommerce link penalty was revoked by google back in Feb 26th 2013, but to this day we have not seen any improvement on our rankings. Due to 80% revenue loss we had to layoff quite a few people to stay alive. Situation now is more dire then ever for our company. We have millions of dollars invested in our business and google just busted it for some "low quality" or "spammy links" as they call it. We want to try to move to a different domain and do a 301 from the old domain to make sure our previous customers can still find us as a last effort to stay alive. But doing so we do not want to the bad links juice to flow to our new domain. Can we do a 301 with nofollow and will that have any negative impact or any impact at all.? any suggestion is greatly appreciated.
Thank you
Nick
We are planning on moving to a different domain after 10 years, and laying off bunch of people due to loss of revenue.
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Google have said that if you have the same site at a different URL then they may apply the same penalty to the new site as they did to the old one, therefore if you wish to redirect a site, I would recommend doing it at the same as you make some other significant changes to it.
I came up with a way of doing this which should work.
On the old domain redirect everything to the home page and then on the home page create a noindex, nofollow page with the following line of code in it:
Where example.com is your NEW domain name.
This way you're using a redirect at the html level, but telling search engines to not index or follow the page. This should work!
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Nick
Your 301 redirect will take place on the server level and your nofollow will take place on the page level. The server is going to redirect the bot to the new resource before it gets to the nofollow. As far as whether you can use a 301 to escape a penguin penalty is the subject of substantial debate but it's generally not thought so. Here's one of the most authoritative and interesting threads on that subject: Google 2.0 - How To Recover.
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Hi Nick,
My hart goes out to you and your company for having to deal with this. However I do believe that you should use a 302 redirect along with a no flow just to be certain. Here's some more information.
http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/11285/SEO-Are-Nofollow-Links-Still-Valuable.aspx
http://moz.com/blog/nofollow-is-dying-the-impact-of-microblogging-and-nofollow-on-seo
Google lists the three main intended uses of nofollow as:
- Linking to untrusted content
- Paid links
- Crawl prioritisation (typically linking to yourself with nofollow)
Leaving aside for a second the ability / likelihood of webmasters using nofollow correctly (which means that the search engines need to work even with broken implementations just as they often rank HTML code that doesn't validate), there are two big uses of nofollow that are breaking the model:
- Complete "silo-isation" of large sites
- Domain owner not trusting trusted content authors' links
"Silo-isation"
Disregarding the fact that I just made that word up, there is a very real trend of powerful sites nofollowing all (or nearly all) outbound links even though they are the very definition of editorial links. The site owners have presumably seen the ranking power achieved by Wikipedia nofollowing all outbound links and are trying to form their very own black hole.
Lack of trust
My understanding of the original intent of proffering nofollow as a solution to the problem of linking to untrusted places was that it was mainly intended for situations like blog comments, profile links, etc., where users of your site could create links to wherever they pleased.
This is definitely valuable (as anyone who has ever had to moderate blog comments can attest) but what about once you do trust the commenter? Since so many sites have no mechanism whereby that nofollow is ever removed, we end up in a situation where people are creating huge amounts of really valuable content and the links they create are nofollow.
Sincerely, Thomas
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