Penalties forcing us to move to a new domain
-
My ecommerce company has been under an unnatural link penalty for some time now. Over 2 months, removing 13,000 back links and submitting two reconsideration requests we have still been denied. We think the best route to take is to start a new domain. Does anyone have advice, resources, articles or anything else that can help us with this transition?
Just a recap : we want to move our existing site to a new site and pass no negative "link juice". Thanks in advance.
-
Ryan,
Thank you for the great information. Was your last sentence cut off or was that the end?
We do not believe it will be possible to fix the penalty in time frame we have so we have decided to just go with a new domain.
We would like to try and maintain any customers that happen to stumble upon our old site but want to make sure we do not get penalized in any way. We were thinking of just putting up a generic single landing page stating that we have moved but are afraid to actually mention or link to the new site as we do not want the new one to be penalized. Is this something we should be afraid of or could we link to the new domain? Or should we keep our current pages in place and link to the new corresponding page?
Do you have a recommendation / procedure to shutdown the old site properly and remove from Google before the new site is launched? Is there a problem just making small changes to the site but pretty much making an exact copy of the old site?
Thanks,
Brad
-
Hi Brad.
Your situation is somewhat common. If you acquired a manual penalty for manipulative links, you are highly unlikely to resolve the issue on your own. In most cases, even SEOs fail to resolve the penalty. Google is quite firm on the steps required to resolve the penalty.
If you decide to pursue the penalty removal, you should understand it does not matter how many manipulative links you remove. On my first penalized site I removed 3.5 million links which represented 97% of the links to the site, and the Reconsideration Request was declined. Google only removed the penalty after I gathered a list of every link to the site using multiple sources, then evaluated every link according to Google Guidelines, then turned in a spreadsheet demonstrating all the communication between the linking site and my client's site.
What matters is how many manipulative links remain. The number should be zero, which is not reasonably possible in most cases, so you need to thoroughly document for each link the efforts taken to remove the link. You need to solidly demonstrate you have taken every reasonable action possible to remove all manipulative links. If you complete this task, Google will remove the manual penalty 100% of the time in my experience.
we want to move our existing site to a new site and pass no negative "link juice"
In that case, do not 301 redirect the old domain to the new one. You will need to make a clean break. You can still salvage some good links by asking webmasters to update their links to your new site. Some links such as Dmoz or the BBB may be under your control and you can make the change yourself.
Otherwise, the standard advice to starting a new site apply. Choose the best domain possible. You basically have three choices:
-
a branded domain (i.e. Nike, Google, Twitter)
-
a keyword domain (i.e. carinsurance.com, seotools.com, etc.)
-
a hybrid (i.e. SEOmoz.org, burgerking.com, etc)
Each option has value. You should also thoroughly evaluate your website architecture, especially your URLs. You will have a clean chance to incorporate all best practices.
If you choose to begin a new domain,
-
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
-
How to avoid Google penalties being inherited when moving on with a new domain?
Looking for SEOs who have experience with resetting projects by migrating on to a new domain to shed either a manual or algorithmic penalty. My questions are: For algorithmic penalties, what is the best migration strategy to avoid inheriting any kind of baggage? 301, 302, establish no connection between the two sites? For manual penalties, what is the best migration strategy to avoid inheriting any kind of baggage? 301, 302, establish no connection between the two sites? Any other input on these kind of reset projects is appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | spanish_socapro0 -
Have You 301 Redirected Domain A to Domain B ?
I only have two questions.... Approximately when did you do it (year is close enough)? Did the rankings of Domain B go up? Any other information that you care to share will be appreciated. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EGOL0 -
Splitting and moving site to two domains - How to redirect
I have a client who is going to split their retail and wholesale business and rebrand the retail biz. So let’s say they are going to move everything from currentdomain.com to either retaildomain.com or wholesaledomain.com. The most important business for them is the retail site, so they want to pass on as much ranking power as they can from currentdomain.com to retaildomain.com. I see two choices here: We can 301 redirect all of currentdomain.com to retaildomain.com, and then redirect any wholesale pages to wholesaledomain.com. The advantage is that we can use GSC’s change of address tool to report the change to Google. The downside is that there is a redirect chain (2 hops) to wholesaledomain.com. Would this confuse Google? Or we can 301 redirect page by page from currentdomain.com to the appropriate page on either new site. This means no redirect chains but it also means that we can’t use GSC’s change of address tool. Which would you do and why? And is there another option that I'm missing? I appreciate any insights you can share.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rich.owings1 -
Interstitial Penalty?
We have an ecommerce website, and we show a popup for first time visitors to our desktop site to join our email list. Google has cached pages with the popup. Can I assume that this is a problem?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMHC0 -
Penalty after 301 redirect?
We run a training center. We had 1 main website and 2 dedicated websites to certain themes. The 2 dedicated websites are older and the main website is about 6 months old. The 2 dedicated websites had a top 5 ranking for their most important keywords. 2 weeks ago we imported all the content from the dedicated websites into the main website. Then immediately after we did a perfect 301 redirect of these websites to the main website. 2 SEO companies checked it for us and so I'm very sure this is done right. Google immediately caught this up and gave the main website a boost. We where in the top 10 for many important keywords for 1 week. The next week all our rankings dropped. We only have a top 50 ranking for 10 keywords. Before it was 75 keywords in the top 20. Do you know what could have caused this? Any suggestion, thought, ... is welcome!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wellnesswooz0 -
Does link equity to a page that is 301'd to a new domain pass juice on?
If we build some quality inbound links to certain pages, that are a later date 301'd to another domain, does any equity or juice get transferred across? Or is the inbound link's value wasted? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100 -
Why, oh why does Google hate us?
My URL is:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | candylotus
www.drupalgeeks.org I have tried my very best to cover all the usual SEO items.... But nothing... We are a legitimate company offering a legitimate service. Ideally we would come up in the results for: "Drupal Developers"
"Drupal Development" and
"Drupal Designers" Yet, we cannot break the top 50 for any of these.... We have:
Optimized Meta Tags
Written Quality Content
Maintained a Social Presence in Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest, Youtube, and Google Plus
Blogged with some consistency
Guest Blogged
Canonicalization
And dozens of other things And we are all around nice people and a good company....... Why oh why? Can anyone take a look and see if there is something blatantly obvious I am missing? Are we using "drupal" too much?? Thank you in advanced for any assistance. Candice1 -
Redirect gateway domain to main domain?
We have following scenario: Our main website - www.esedirect.co.uk which gets a 1800 visits a day with around half of those from organic search. It's been around since 2004. Our original website - www.ese.co.uk which gets around 30 visits a day and really is nothing more than a doorway page with links to the above site and couple of other sites that belong to the same company. This is an old domain that's had content since 1997 and has good domain authority with some good links. We are considering doing a 301 redirect from www.ese.co.co.uk to www.esedirect.co.uk to redirect the link juice. I welcome opinions to any possible negative effects this could give and how beneficial doing this will be. Thanks, Lee
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ese0