Need seo advice! At a fork in the road!
-
Hi,
I m having a difficult time deciding what steps to take next, about my marketing strategy. I have 2 e-commerce sites for more than 7 years, one of them got a google link penalty back in september 2012 and lost 80% of organic traffic. I have worked on the bad links, got some of them removed and others disavowed. After 5 months of hard work and getting high quality links from authority sites related in my industry, I received a message from google saying that the manual spam penalty was revoked. This was in feb 26th. Since then I have got couple more high quality links and content to the site, but the organic traffic is still how it was prior to penalty revoked (at 20%). I still have no revenue from this site and i don't see what else I can do or how long I should work on it to see some improvement on traffic. My other site on the other hand is doing just fine but has some conversion issues. I m thinking of dropping all seo related activities for my first site and focus on the second one to see if we can have some increase on the organic traffic of that site. If I was to do a 301 redirect from my first site to the second one, what kind of effect will this have on the second site, would that be a negative or positive impact in terms of traffic? also thinking of moving the site from x-cart platform to magento. I appreciate any advice i can get here.
Thank you
Nick
-
Hi Nick,
I think I'd echo what Alan said. Just because your manual penalty has been revoked doesn't mean you're not still suffering from an algorithmic one. As such I'd probably be inclined not to 301 the whole site.
Assuming your second site is topically similar you might consider reaching out directly to those high quality sites that are linking to you and asking them if they'd be willing to link to your other site instead.
Similarly you might consider moving the link worthy content to your second site and (assuming all the links to your content are 'good') just 301 those pages.
I hope this helps,
Hannah
-
For the most part, I agree with Chris, but I would like to make a point on the 301.
Google may have said that the manual penalty has been lifted, but it does not mean that you are not still being penalized via the algorithm. doing a 301 may damage your second site.
I would 301 redirect only the good links, by looking at the referrer header.
As for 301s passing as much link juice as a link, I also seen the matt cuts video, but I don't read it the same way.
if you make a link to pageA, then redirect to pageB, you will lose link juice twice.
Matt was not very clear in the video, he did say that a 301 loses as much as a link does. A link and a 301 both a make a request to the server. I think the better way at looking at it is that every request loses link juice. Having a link to pageA then redirected to pageB is 2 requests, and 2 loses of link juice
-
hi thanks for your reply, so, since the penalty was revoked on the first site, it is ok to do 301?
301 will not transfer anything negative to the other site right ? last question, will the high quality links to the first site that i got in the pas few week pass any juice to the second site ?
thank you
-
Nick,
First off its a tough call to throw in the towel on a site, but the bottom line is if its not making you any money it probably needs the axe. Especially if you've got another site that has conversion issues. Those are things that you have way more control over. My vote is cut the first site and focus on the second. As for the 301 I would do it if the two sites were similar enough to seen plausible. According to Matt Cutts a 301 passes as much juice as a link. That's my two cents.
Chris
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
-
Looking for a reliable SEO company at a reasonable budget
Good day I've tried to contact most the recommended seo companies MOZ has but loads of them are mostly for MID-LARGE business and are out of my budget I have a monthly budget of 750-1,500 USD The niche is related not competitive and should be easy to rank, stoped doing seo 11 months ago and still rank 4-8th for the keywords im interested in anybody knows any good company for my budget? thanks a lot
Link Building | | recreoviral1 -
External Backlinks - Should I remove/disavow external blog posts done by SEO company?
Last year my company hired an SEO company to build backlinks for targeted achor text keywords. It turns out that they wrote average to below average blog posts that had content related to my business, but that were placed on odd websites, not related to my business. They did this for about one year before I fired them. Should I try to get each of those blog posts removed and then disavow them? If the external links back to my site are nofollow then it is my understanding that I don't really need to worry about them...is that accurate? Is it too risky to keep any external backlinked content alive when it is on a site that is unrelated to my business?
Link Building | | ajgrossman0 -
How to choose a third party agency to help with linking building / SEO strategy?
Hi all, we've not been link building for some time now as we are a small team and been concentrating on other things, such as getting our new look site built and implementing Magento etc. We've historically used external companies to help with link building & SEO... some experience has been good, some bad. Does any one have any suggestions on how a small company can try to choose a decent external company that can help with SEO strategies? There are a lot of options, a LOT of rubbish and a lot of very expensive large agencies that are well out side of our budget (or for a "small" fee simply produce a standardised report on "how to improve your SEO" that can basically be read on the net). We've tried local, smaller companies in order to limit our options .... but that didn't go well either. Any suggestions welcomed. Next is where / how to weight our expenditure and / or our SEO time. Should it be 50% gaining external links (be it by what ever means such as social, checking out where competitiors have links and chasing those possibilities etc) and then 50% internal page SEO, blog content creation, internal linking etc? Thanks again.
Link Building | | jasef0 -
Negative SEO
I have a client who is being spammed really bad with links. Using porn keywords and keyword with porn in anchor text with the site URL. Anyone had experience with this?
Link Building | | ToddFosterSEO0 -
Seo industry for seasonal items
Just wondering what type of link building people do for seasonal sites take http://www.sukkahworld.com or http://www.wreathsgalore.com as an example Out of season nobody wants to talk about a Christmas wreath. Do you just a get links off topic or focus on on site content and then get all your links during your season?
Link Building | | DavidKonigsberg0 -
SEO Drop rename pages
Some of key product pages have dropped due to what I think is overused anchor text. Can we rename them, and start again?
Link Building | | jj34340 -
Should I outsource any SEO work or can I do it all?
My website needs a lot of improvement and we are working on it but I also don't want to fall behind on the SEO work. I am guessing that I can do much of it myself through SEOmoz.org but is there a part that busy folks should get others to do? Any feedback will be greatly appreciated. Thank you, Utah Tiger
Link Building | | Boodreaux0 -
How to SEO how-to website?
I've launched the website www.ComoFazer.com.br, which is a Brazilian how-to website (the domain is literally how to in Portuguese). How can I get to the top rankings? My strategy so far: made all the on-page SEO stuff put 4 sidebar links in family websites bought the $90 package in GetLinksPro for 100 dofollow links spent about $100 in Facebook Ads to get 2k followers there I want help regarding SEO and strategy for this kind of sites.
Link Building | | kikocherman0