Should I redirect my Google Update Effected Domain to brand new Domain?

[imran2078]

Hey Moz experts, I had a domain which was really doing better but after the Humming Bird update my traffic was decreased up to 90%. There are plenty of posts on my existing blog, Now what should I do? I mean should I redirect it to a brand new domain or Copy all the posts to a brand new domain and delete my existing domain? Note that the Old domain has PR1, DA 19 and PA 30.

[imran2078]

Thank You for such a nice and descriptive answer, you're 100% right and I did not received any manual penalty from Google. I even tried to add up new content but it does not made any difference so I thought to transfer all the content to new domain. By the way you've got semrush premium account? and how much useful is that?

[Philip-DiPatrizio]

Imran,

I looked at semrush.com and it looks like you had a spike of traffic in August 2013 and then it quickly died back down.  I also looked at your backlink profile and I see that the overwhelming majority of your links are from blog comments.  It's okay to have some blog comments but you don't want that to dominate your backlinks.  You also want to be sure that you're using your actual name for the anchor text of the link (and you are, so that's good).  I also noticed that you have some links from other sites linking to you, like androidcentral.us.  Since you also own that website, you're effectively creating your own little link network, which could become an issue, if it's not already.

The quality of the content is also lacking.  There are a lot of grammatical issues and that may be because English isn't your first language.  Your English isn't terrible, but Google wants high quality and unfortunately the level of English on your site won't be considered high quality.

What you should do is work on getting more high quality backlinks and diversifying your backlink profile.   I checked a few of your pages on copyscape and they didn't turn up any duplicates found.  Assuming this content is actually 100% unique and not just spun/rewritten from another source, you should also have someone fix up the grammatical issues.  If the content is spun/rewritten from another source, start adding new content that is completely unique and original.  You also need to remove the "Example Widget" text in your sidebar ASAP.  That makes your site look incomplete.

If you haven't already done so, please check Google Webmaster Tools to make sure you didn't receive a manual penalty from Google.

[imran2078]

And one thing more, almost 2 weeks ago, I also changed the permalink structure which encountered in so many 404s but then I manually edited all the links and made some redirection changes to my .htaccess file.

[imran2078]

Hey Philip thanks for your response, My domain is ohguideme.com, over the recent months i have made so many changes to its look and almost have edited many posts and even deleted some of the poor posts that I thought were of poor quality but then there is still no improvement in rankings. I even paid a guy who was boasting that he will recover my site but nothing happened. Do you have any suggestions or tips? What should i do with it???

[Philip-DiPatrizio]

I have not heard of any websites receiving a penalty from Google due to the Hummingbird update.  In my opinion, there is something else going on that affected your rankings.  I would not recommend you delete your domain and redirect posts to another domain.  That isn't solving the problem.  That's just a way to try and avoid the issue.  Like I said, a penalty can follow you to your new domain.

Are you referring to the androidrootcental.com website in your tagline?  Or is this a problem with another website?

[imran2078]

Well I still don't know why was my site hit by Humming Bird update and it was in Mid-August, My site content was original but I guess it was due to poor internal backlinks.. So what should I do now? Delete my existing domain and transfer all the posts??

[Philip-DiPatrizio]

Matt Cutts has said that a penalty CAN follow you to your new domain if you just simply recreate the site on a new domain exactly as it was on the penalized domain.

Do you know why you were penalized?  Was it for duplicate content, poor site quality, spammy backlinks, or something else?  When did your rankings drop?  Mid-August?