301 redirect after penalty to domain which currently 301 to the penalised domain
-
Hello all,
As I have mentioned in another Q&A, one of our new clients got hit by manual penalty. I checked their link profile and there was a lot of black hat involved. Long story sort, I submitted a reconsiderationr equest which was not enough as it seems 99,9% of his links are bad links. We took the decision to move a newly launched web site from www.websitename.com to www.website-name.com with the latter being an old domain name with good authority and clean link profile.
The problem is that at the moment the www.website-name.com is set to 301 redirect to www.websitename.com and what we want to do now is take the web site off www.websitename.com and launch (not 301 as we dont want to pass the penalty to the clean domain) it to www.website-name.com. What is the best practise for this particular case and are there any things i should pay attention to?
I would appreciate your advise!
-
Hi There
Karl's answer was fantastic - and I just want to emphasize as well - if this is decently strong brand I would put some more effort into recovering from the manual penalty. As tedious as this can be, if it was just a "churn and burn" site I'd say just axe it and re-build.
But go to Keyword Planner - how much brand search volume does the company receive? Try [brand] [brand.com] [www.brand.com] etc - if this number is at least in the hundreds or thousands of brand searches a month, I'd work to remove that penalty and let the brand signals help you recover. Also, does the main site receive a lot of direct traffic? It just sounds like if you can get the penalty lifted it will be an easier recovery than just some exact match domain that's not really a brand.
-Dan
-
Hello karl and thanks for the feedback, much appreciated mate!
The reason we wanted to redirect is purely for customer experience, this is a site with 10,000 visits per day. The web site was hit with manual penalty and I am right now on the second reconsideration request.
Allow to give a bit more details.
The website when launched bought 2 domains.
www.website.com and www.web-site.com with "website" being the brand's name.
Previous SEO guy uploaded 2 different versions, dont ask me why, I have no idea why. Few months ago they decided to take down www.web-site.com and redirect it to www.website.com so link juice and bookmarks would land people to one version of the web site.
Now that the www.website.com got penalised, for brand purposes they want to use www.web-site.com So my 2 questions are:
-
Is this safe considering that www.web-site.com redirects all this time to the penalised www.website.com ?
-
What if I set **302 redirects **instead of 301 from www.website.com to the www.web-site.com until the penalty is lifted? Or even an iframe?
Kind Regards and thanks a million
iframe, 302 redirect
-
-
The first thing to consider is what type of penalty the website got hit by, if it was Penguin and 99.9% links built were spam then you can leave all your links and just take the content. If it was Panda then you can't even take your content and place it on the new/old website because you'd still get found. If it was both then don't even bother redirecting anything!
I'd question the importance of the website to any business if it wasn't worth spending time on finding ALL the spam links and fixing the penalty. The reconsideration request can take a while, you may have to submit 3 or 4 requests before it gets lifted. I know this can take a considerable amount of time, effort and money but it's got to be worth it to get the business back on the right footing. Put yourself in Google's shoes, they deal with these requests every day and have got a back log so if they see ONE link that looks spammy, then they aren't going to lift the penalty. Someone is going to have to sit down and look at your link profile manually!
If the www.websitename.com has bad links and poor content, then why 301 it? I know you are doing it for the customers but you could just put a banner on the homepage saying you've moved to www.website-name.com.
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
-
Where to put 301 redirects in my Wordpress htaccess file?
I have about 25 301 redirects in my Wordpress htaccess file, that look like this: <code>Redirect301/store/index.html https://www.notesinspanish.com/store-home/</code> At the moment they are at the bottom of my htaccess file, below the usual Wordpress rewrite rules: <code># BEGIN WordPress <ifmodulemod_rewrite.c>RewriteEngine On RewriteBase / RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule . /index.php [L] # END WordPress</ifmodulemod_rewrite.c></code> So they are below all that. Above my WP rewrite rules I have a number of other rules from plugins (caching, ssl). Are my 301's OK where they are at the very bottom of that file? They are working, and redircting pages correctly. Should they be somewhere else? Many thanks for any help. Thanks for any help.
Technical SEO | | Benspain0 -
Google is still indexing the old domain a year after 301 redirects are put in place
Hi there, You might have experienced this before but for me this is the first. A client of mine moved from domain A (www.domainA.com) to domain B (www.domainB.com). 301 redirects are all in place for over a year. But the old domain is still showing in Google when you search for "site:domainA.com" The HTTP Header check shows this result for the URL https://www.domainA.com/company/cookie-policy.aspx HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently =>
Technical SEO | | iQi
Cache-Control => private
Content-Length => 174
Content-Type => text/html; charset=utf-8
Location => https://www.domain_B_.com/legal/cookie-policy
Server => Microsoft-IIS/10.0
X-AspNetMvc-Version => 5.2
X-AspNet-Version => 4.0.30319
X-Powered-By => ASP.NET
Date => Fri, 15 Mar 2019 12:01:33 GMT
Connection => close Does the redirect look wrong? The change of address request was made on Google Console when the website was moved over a year ago. Edit: Checked the domainA.com on bing and it seems that its not indexed, and replaced with domainB.com, which is the right. Just Google is indexing the old domain! Please let me know your thoughts on why this is happening. Best,0 -
Changing a domain name, pages redirection
when changing a domain name, should we redirect all the pages to their new pages or only the indexed pages? Thanks
Technical SEO | | bigrat950 -
Domain redirection and seo implications
We have an existing site that is a subdomain but we recently acquired an exact match domain. Will building links to the exact match domain and having the domain point at our existing subdomain work or should we convert the entire site and redirect our existing subdomain to the new domain? What I'm trying to figure out is how to maximize the benefit here and how the existing mass of links pointing to our existing subdomain (shop.domain.com) can be used. New domain: keywordshop.com Existing URL: shop.domain.com
Technical SEO | | CHarkins0 -
301 redirect Issues
my clients site is www.greenbayharvest.co.uk When you enter that URL it redirects to www.greenbayharvest.co.uk/shop, dont ask why, thats the way they set it up and thats what im stuck with. So, how do i resolve the 301 issue here. we want all things to point to www.greenbayharvest.co.uk, in terms of SEO but does the fact that there is a redirect going to /shop make this an issue? we appear to have: www.greenbayharvest.co.uk/shop www.greenbayharvest.co.uk greenbayharvest.co.uk greenbayharvest.co.uk/shop all these URL's go to the same same page so what is the best way to correct this? thanks for any help on this Lee
Technical SEO | | IPIM0 -
IP address URLs being indexed, 301 to domain?
I apoligize if this question as been asked before, I couldnt' find in the Q&A though. I noticed Google has been indexing our IP address for some pages (ie: 123.123.123.123/page.html instead of domain.com/page.html). I suspect this is possibly due to a few straggler relative links instead of absolute, or possibly something else I'm not thinking of. My less-evasive solution a few months back was to ensure canonical tags were on all pages, and then replaced any relative links w/ absolutes. This does not seem to be fixing the problem though, as recently as today new pages were scooped up with the IP address. My next thought is to 301 redirect any IP address URL to the domain, but I was afraid that may be too drastic and that the canonical should be sufficient (which it doesn't seem to be). Has anyone dealt with this issue? Do you think the 301 would be a safe move, any other suggestions? thanks.
Technical SEO | | KT6840 -
301 Single Page Redirects in IIS7?
Hey all -- I am working with a client, getting ready to make a full domain level change to a brand new domain. The existing domain has solid domain importance and trust, and the home page has a 5/10 GPR, so the transfer of all existing link juice is very important. Of course, I will be utilizing 301's to permanently redirect all existing pages to their new permanent homes. It will be a 1-1 structure, which I know is also best when possible. My question comes in specific to IIS. There is a wealth of information out there on the net regarding implementing permanent 301's using Apache and .htaccess, but nada when it comes to doing it in IIS7, which is what the client is using. For instance, today I am seeking to help them redirect 2 single pages to new destinations within the same domain, just diffferent folders. When you open up the IIS7 Control Panel (yes, with full Admin access), you can navigate to the directory, but the individual pages that I am looking to redirect with 301's do not show in IIS7, so you can't just right click on each page and choose "A redirection to a URL," etc. Any help on exactly how to redirect a single page using a permanent 301 in IIS 7 would be huge! Thanks guys!
Technical SEO | | Bandicoot0 -
How to Redirect only specific pages to new domain
My HTACCESS FILE IS AS FOLLOWS: rewriteengine on
Technical SEO | | askthetrainer
rewritecond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mydomain.com$
rewriterule ^mydomain/(.*)$ "http://www.mydomain.com/$1" [R=301,L] #4d864805b49b5 I want to move ONLY specific pages from this domain to a new domain How do I edit my HTACCESS (which redirects http:// to www.) to move specific pages from old domain (which I have to delete) to new domain.... I.e. http://mydomaon.com/move.html needs to move to http://mynewdomain.com/move.html Where i can delete the original domains0