Is it ok to 301 redirect this previously algorithmicly penalised site?
-
Hi All,
Is it OK to 301 redirect site A to site B?
Site A: http://goo.gl/P9Zp2y
Site B: http://goo.gl/ySDCzb
The story - in 2013 site a seemed to be penalised with some kind of anchor text algorithm penalty - SEO couldnt fix, so created site B and turned site A into a holding page with a no follow link to new site.
SEO company worked on disavow file etc, implemented in late 2013
301 redirect site A to B in late 2013 - SEO advised to stop 301 about 8 weeks later... This was my fault i didnt realise the implications of a redirect...
Stopped the redirect, but too late, as site B dropped in rankings in early 2014 - new disavow files uploaded to both sites, but damage seems done now.
No longer have a SEO company, and i would ideally like to 301 redirect site A to B, as it looks messy having a holding page - but wanted to check if SEO would still strongly advise against that?
please advise
James
-
Hi James, Yes I just meant to make sure there are no 302 redirects or no backlinks from the homepage of site A pointing back to site B.
Also, be aware that Google also knows that you own both domains unless you registered them as private, and you also have both sites in your Webmaster Tools account. Technically, this shouldn't matter, as each site should be treated as its own entity, regardless of who owns it.
The fact that those old 301 links are showing in webmaster tools doesn't mean much, perhaps their link indexing cache hasn't refreshed. If you've removed the 301, then those links are no longer pointing to your site no matter what any tool says.
There is a good service called Link Detox Boost. You load up all of those old backlinks into the tool, and the tool forces Google to crawl those links again. The theory is that once they crawl the pages those links are on and realise that the backlinks don't point back to your site anymore, it helps to remove the Penguin flag (penalty) from your site much faster.
It's ironic how this is achieved though. In order to prompt Google to crawl the pages those old links are on, they spam the pages your links are on with fresh new links. When Google visits the old link pages via the newly created soft spam links, it recrawls the page and adjusts the link index for your domain. Fighting Spam using Spam.
This is why those links may still be showing in your Webmaster Tools for site B. Perhaps if you ran a link Detox Boost campaign, all of these links would be removed from your Webmaster Tools account. And perhaps the Penguin anchor dragging your site down would become a bit lighter. (By the way I have no affiliation with Link Detox Boost - although I have used some of their tools, and I rate them as excellent)
-
hi Richard,
thank you for the reponse, what you explained is kind of what happened - initally after the 301 was started site B went up in rankings for a month or two... then it started to drop, the 301 redirect was removed - but site B still dropped and never recovered.
However you mention "i'd also advise you to disassociate the old site completely", do you mind me asking how?
I ask, because there is no redirect in place any more, has not been for a year or so, however if i look in the google webmaster tools "links to my site" of site B - it lists websites that link to site A... So it appears to me there is now some kind of association because of the previous 301 redirect - is it possible to clear this association, or ami stuck with it?
-
Hello James, The effects of a 301 from a penalised site are dependant on the site the 301 is pointing too. You say that your old site was penalised from over optimised anchor text. If you 301 this penalised domain to a more authoritative domain, then this domain will be able to handle all of the anchor text links you've effectively redirected to it via the 301.
Penalties do not pass through 301 redirects. People get confused about this because the new site often gets penalised too, but that's not because the 301 was from a penalised site. It's because the new site couldn't handle all of the keyword-rich anchor text backlinks either.
If penalties could pass through 301 redirects, then you could simply redirect a couple of penalised domains to an authority site like Amazon or eBay and cause them to be penalised. This is not the case.
Authoritative sites can easily absorb the influx of anchor text links from a 301 because their link profile is so strong and diverse. 1000's of exact match links won't do anything to them, it would probably help them.
There are many situations where 301's from penalised sites can help another site to rank better. If your penalised site was fairly small and you had a 100+ links with the same anchor text, then this domain would make for a great 301 to a bigger site. The bigger site would have to have very low anchor text ratios of about .5%. If all of the new domain's other links were generic and branded links, then the new 301 with 100+ anchor text links would do wonders for the new site. This is provided both sites are in the same niche, and the links were relevant, etc.
Another obvious caveat; if you're pointing 301's to a money site, then this is very risky business indeed. The site may flourish permanently with the new injection of links from the 301; it may also crash and burn a couple of weeks or months later.
In your situation, it sounds as though your new site wouldn't be able to handle the influx of new links via the 301 from your old site. Your new site is just too weak to cope with these potentially toxic links. I'd advise you to remove the 301. I'd also advise you to disassociate the old site completely from the new site too, and this means no 302 redirects or backlinks from the old site either.
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
-
301 redirect impact on ranking
If Website A is ranking 19th position in Google for a specific keyword, and Website B is ranking 30th position for the same keyword, What would be impact after 301 redirect? Will Website A drop to 30th position because of 301 or existing position would improve because of link juice?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | riyaaaz0 -
301 from old site to new one , Should I point to home page or sub category page ?
Hey Seo Experts, I have a small website ranking for few terms like cabinets sale, buy etc . However what i have now decided is to launch a New website with more different products like living room furniture, wardrobes etc . Out of all these categories on new website Cabinets is one of the SubCategory . Now I do not want to have 2 websites . So wanted to 301 from small cabinets website to newly created website. Some of the doubts I have at the moment is ? 1 Should I REDIRECT 301 to sub category (i,e cabinets) which is purely related to Cabinets or Do a Redirect to HOME PAGE . As I also need more Authority to home page as well , as this is relatively new website ? 2 Second question related to this. If you have multiple sub domains does it divide the total authority & TF.Or it is just Ok to have multiple Sub domains if needed ? Any advice appreciated !! Thanks .
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aus00070 -
Is it possible to avoid redirect of penalties for 301 forwards?
We have been doing a good amount of competitive research lately and have noticed sites that have been changing their TTLD quite often to escape manual penalties / DCMA filings. An example evolution: brandterm.com -> brandterm.bz -> brandterm.me These competitors are able to quickly rank for money keywords in the top 3 soon after another domain switch. What we have noticed is that while its obvious they received Google penalties they continue to 301 redirect the old domains to the new ones. We have experienced first hand that penalties travel along domains with 301 redirects. Does anyone have an explanation how these companies are able to achieve quickly high volume of organic search while 301-redirecting from burnt domains? The only option I see is to disavow all previous domains in GWT to be able to employ 301 redirects without risking carrying over the penalty. Are there other theories ppl can think of? T
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | petersocapro0 -
3 Wordpress sites 1 Tumblr site coming under 1domain(4subdomains) WPMU: Proper Redirect?
Hey Guys, witnessSF.org (WP), witnessLA.org(Tumblr), witnessTO.com(WP), witnessHK.com(WP), and witnessSEOUL.com(new site no redirects needed) are being moved over to sf.ourwitness.com, la.ourwitness.com and so forth. All under on large Wordpress MU instance. Some have hundreds of articles/links others a bit less. What is the best method to take, I understand there are easy redirects, and the complete fully manual one link at a time approach. Even the WP to WP the permalinks are changing from domain.com/date/post-name to domain.com/post-name? Here are some options: Just redirect all previous witinessla.org/* to la.ourwitness.org/ (automatic direct all pages to home page deal) (easiest not the best)2) Download Google Analytics top redirected domains about 50 urls have significant ranking and traffic (in LA's sample) and just redirect those to custom links. (most bang for the buck for the articles that rank manually set up to the correct place) 3) Best of the both worlds may be possible? Automated perhaps?I prefer working with .htaccess vs a redirect plugin for speed issues. Please advise. Thanks guys!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vmialik0 -
Does 301 Redirect solve many problems?
Hi, there are many problems with my site. I have a lot of duplicate page titles and a lot of missing meta tags. However, I think most of them are BECAUSE i have a lot of duplicate pages. So I have read some articles and I will 301 redirect all the duplicated pages. Will this solve the problem with duplicate titles and missing meta tags as well? For example, my homepage has like 10 duplicated pages. Since they are duplicated, they have the same titles and they are all missing meta tags. I am planning to fill in meta tags JUST for the canonical page and redirect all duplicated pages to that page. Is this a good practice? Also, just curious, do different title tags and different meta tag description make the pages "not duplicated?" I assume it will still appear as duplicated.... Sorry if this was confusing...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | waltergah0 -
Redirect
Hi, I have one domain which was redirected today (the main domain,root) was redirected to a new subdomain of the main root domain.site was ranking for several keywords and had an authority of 35 on root domain. Site after 12 hours disappeared from google results.dont even rank for its brand name. What will happened to the new subdomain? Will rank again? Have the same keywords plus some more.old keywords are 3 and new are 2. For the old keywords on page optimization gets a c , and for the new a+c. For the new keywords don't have backlinks at all. When my site will start to rank for its old keywords? How long will be down ? Will pass the link juice and authority? If yes how soon ? Because I will loose to much money if stay longer like 1-2 weeks down. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nyanainc0 -
Large Site SEO - Dev Issue Forcing URL Change - 301, 302, Block, What To Do?
Hola, Thanks in advance for reading and trying to help me out. A client of mine recently created a large scale company directory (500k+ pages) in Drupal v6 while the "marketing" type pages of their site was still in manual hard-coded HTML. They redesigned their "marketing" pages, but used Drual v7. They're now experiencing server conflicts with both instances of Drupal not allowing them to communicate/be on the same server. Eventually the directory will be upgraded to Drupal v7, but could take weeks to months the client does not want to wait for the re-launch. The client wants to push the new marketing site live, but also does not want to ruin the overall SEO value of the directory and have a few options, but I'm looking to help guide them down the path of least resistance: Option 1: Move the company directory onto a subdomain and the "marketing site" on the www. subdomain. Client gets to push their redesign live, but large scale 301s to the directory cause major issues in terms of shaking up the structure of the site causing ripple effects into getting pulled out of the index for days to weeks. Rankings and traffic drop, subdomain authority gets lost and the company directory health looks bad for weeks to months. However, 301 maintains partial SEO value and some long tail traffic still exists. Once the directory gets moved to Drupal v7, the directory will then cancel the 301 to the subdomain and revert back to original www. subdomain URLs Option 2: Block the company directory from search engines with robots.txt and meta instructions, essentially cutting off the floodgates from the established marketing pages. No major scaling 301 ripple effect, directory takes a few weeks to filter out of the index, traffic is completely lost, however once drupal v7 gets upgraded and the directory is then re-opened, directory will then slowly gain back SEO value to get close to old rankings, traffic, etc. Option 3: 302 redirect? Lose all accumulate SEO value temporarily... hmm Option 4: Something else? As you can see, this is not an ideal situation. However, a decision has to be made and I'm looking to chose the lesser of evils. Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks again -Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bacon0 -
301 Redirect for 2500 pages
Hi, We have an existing site done in DNN and we recreated it on a new platform (EPiServer) and now we're going live. However, there are 2500+ page URLs from the old site which is not exisitng on the new site. What do you reckon is the best way we can address this? Do we create a 301 redirect individually for each of these pages? These 2500+ pages have a domain authority 34-35 and I think it's best that we retain those. We'll be using the same domain name. Suggestions for ways to approach this issue would be greatly appreciated. I have access to the server and IIS. *Also, how do I create a virtual page in IIS? and redirect it to another URL within the site? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter.Huxley590