Same Branding, Same Followers, New Domain After Penalty... Your Opinion Please
-
I know I've asked a similar question in the past but I'm still trying to figure out what to do with my website.
I've got a website at thewebhostinghero.com that's been penalized by both Panda and Penguin. I cleaned up the link profile and submitted a reconsideration request but it was denied. I finally found a handful of additional bad links and I submitted a new disavow + reconsideration request a few days ago and I am still waiting.
That said, after submitting the initial disavow request, the traffic has completely gone and while I expected a drop in traffic, I also expected my penalty to be lifted but it was not the case.
Even though the penalty might be lifted this time, I think that making the website profitable again could be harder than creating a new website.
So here's my questioning:
The website's domain is thewebhostinghero.com but I also happen to own webhostinghero.com which I bought later for $5000 (yes you read that right).
The domain "webhostinghero.com" is completely clean as it's only redirecting to thewebhostinghero.com. I would like to use webhostinghero.com as a completely new website and not redirect any traffic from thewebhostinghero.com as to not pass any bad link juice.
Pros:
- Keeping the same branding image (which cost me $$$)
- Keeping the 17,000+ Facebook followers
- Keeping the same Google+ and Twitter accounts
- Keeping and monetizing a domain that cost me $5000
- webhostinghero.com is a better domain than thewebhostinghero.com
Cons:
- Will create confusion between the 2 websites
- Any danger of being flagged as duplicate or something?
Do you see any other potential issues with this? What's your opinion/advice?
- P.S. Sorry for my english...
-
You have some great responses here. To summarize some of the advice and add a little new advice, this is what I would do:
- Display a text warning at the top of the site that the site has moved. I'd not worry about the text somehow contaminating the new domain.
- Keep the old site running, and try to get the penalties removed on the side.
- Noindex (or delete, if it's not important to the user) all the content that you want to keep but has few links, then move it to the new site.
- If the penalty is lifted, redirect the old site over to the new site's counterpart. Still, don't 301 redirect pages with low-quality content or spammy links. (You can just kill the pages that are "all bad" now.)
The only question left is what to do with the content you want to keep and has with clean external links. You could probably redirect and cut the internal links without too much risk, which is what I'd do. The completely safe thing to do would be to avoid linking altogether, leaving it out there to gather what traffic it can.
Good luck!
-
I would just rewrite the outbound url to look like sub folder so abc(dot)com/visit and then block the sub folder /visit in the robots.txt file.
I may even run a really good competition and try to suck the users up into a email list so when the time is right, expose the other site.
Its a tough one because you can't indicate the move to another url to Google so it's like starting again but at least you have a few lists and some traffic to the old site.
-
I guess I would suggest you don't.
Hidden text and links: "Hiding text or links in your content to manipulate Google’s search rankings can be seen as deceptive and is a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines."
-
As far as structure is concerned, having the same layout and navigation will not get you into duplicate content troubles. Have the same content will.
-
How about redirecting visitors from the original site to the new one using Javascript?
-
There's also some content that's highly valuable on the original website. Suppose I wanted to transfer this content to the new website, how about setting it to "noindex" on the original website and once it's out of G's index, I'd publish it to the new website.
Does that makes sense or would it get me another slap from Google?
-
What about website structure? Would it be better to start off with a completely new layout and navigation to avoid duplicate content issues?
-
In theory, using a no-follow link would do the trick. However, looking at the list of backlinks from my GWT account, I also see lots of no-follow links, don't ask me why.
So in that regards, I would rather avoid any kind of hyperlink association between the two sites. I mean, if that fails, my $5000 domain name is screwed so I'm not taking any chances.
-
No-Follow will stop PR passing through but the bot will still go through.
You need to block the bot from going through using your robots.txt file.
-
Redirecting the old website would worry me, it wouldn't surprise me if you redirected the problem along with it.
I would do what you suggested, modal popup with something like 'Hey, we have built a bigger, better website just for you' then block the url pointing out in the robots.txt file.
But that's just me.
-
I'm interested to see what you will do in regards to redirecting the visitors to the new address. We're going trough a similar process at the moment where we are replacing the current site which was hit with panda and penguin updates to a new branded domain although with a new design and new content. Would placing a message asking visitors to visit your new address with a no-follow link do the trick?
-
Sorry. I was under the impression that you wanted to more or less shut down the penalized site. That is why I suggested the mass-redirection. It also would allow you to move all of your content from the penalized domain to the new domain and you wouldn't have to worry about rewriting completely new and unique content.
Solid idea about using an image. The only downside would be that users would not be able to copy and paste the URL into the address bar... but it would really be just removing "the"... so I would like to assume they could handle it
I would probably shy away from popups, because depending on a user's settings, they may be blocking popups or may disregard the popups if they think they are an advertisement.
Mike
-
I am not sure about redirecting all the subpages to the homepage of thewebhostinghero.com
The website still has about 300 visitors a day. It's for "money keywords" that it doesn't get any traffic. Redirecting all the traffic to the homepage would cause the website to fall quickly.
If I wanted to keep as much of the visitors from the old site as possible, what about displaying a message at the very top of every page stating that the new website is at webhostinghero.com (I'd use an image instead of text to avoid any issue). Or what about showing a popup to each visitor?
-
It sounds to me like you already have a pretty good plan in place.
I would maybe suggest redirecting all of the sub-pages of thewebhostinghero.com to the homepage of thewebhostinghero.com. And on the homepage write something like, "Our website has moved. Please visit webhostinghero.com for blah blah blah." I would leave this as plan text so that you are not passing bad link juice to your new domain.
I don't know how co-occurrence (webhostingher.com being listed in text on thewebhostinghero.com) would play any role in your rankings; however, doing this would hopefully help eliminate some of the confusion your old customers would have and redirecting all of your sub-pages to the homepage would help ensure that you wouldn't have any duplicate content issues on the new site.
Does that help/make sense?
Mike
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
-
Hreflang and canonical tag for new country specific website - different base domain
I have a little different situation compared to most other questions which asks for hreflang and canonical tags for country specific version of websites. This is an SEO related question and I was hoping to get some insight on your recommendations. We have an existing Australian website - say - ausnight.com.au now we want to launch a UK version of this website - the domain is - uknight.co.uk please note, we are not only changing from .com.au to .co.uk.... but the base domain name as well changed - from ausnight to uknight as you can understand, the audience for both websites is different. Both websites has most pages same with same contents.... the questions I have is - Should we put canonical tag on the new website pages? If we don't put canon tag on new website pages, what is the impact on the SEO ranking of current website? I believe we need to put hreflang tag on both websites to tell google that we have another language version (en-au vs en-gb) of the same page. Is this correct?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TinoSharp0 -
Footer no follow links
Just interested to know when putting links at the foot of the site some people use no-follow tags. I'm thinking about internal pages and social networks. Is this still necessary or is it an old-fashioned idea?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman100 -
Changing Brand and Domain Name - SEO Impacts
Hi everyone I'm hoping a few of you can help me out... We're an online-one retailer and we're currently looking at rebranding.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | piazza
This is for commercial reasons: Our current name is difficult for customers to spell It's not wholly representative of what we now offer We want to push offline and social marketing to help increase or DA In a nutshell, our current name implies 'cheap' and we're moving more upmarket.
Our DA is only 10, and a re-brand will make our brand more marketable.
A stronger brand and DA will help us climb up the rankings quickly - last year we ranked no 1 for a relatively competitive term before dropping a few places. In terms of current traffic: 30% is via SEO (we have a low DA but rank ok for certain phrases) 70% is via adwords We had our website redesigned last year and it performs well.
The idea is to have a new brand logo and colours and move to a new domain.
We will keep all our existing products and content. Please could anyone let me know the implications of this move?
What are potential pitfalls, and what will we need to do to alert Google?
I have read about 301 redirects, would these be required? As always, any help is very much appreciated. Many thanks Abs0 -
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 -
Sub domain on root domain
Hello,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dror999
I have a question that I can't find a good answer on.
I have a site, actually a "portal"/ "directory" for service providers.
Now, for start, we opened every service provider own page on our site, but now we get a lot of applications from those providers that thy want sites from their own.
We want to make every service provider his own site, but on sub domain url. ( they don’t mind… its ok for them)
So, my site is www.exaple.com
There site will be: provider.exaple.com
Now I have two questions:
1. can it harm my site in SEO?
2. if one from those sub domain , punished by google because is owner do "black hat seo" , how it will affect the rood domin? It can make the root domain to get punished?
Thanks!!0 -
Should we get a new domain that has our main keyword in it.
We have been running our site about 10 years under the domain www.islesurfboards.com and we are referred as "Isle Surfboards" when linked to in the anchor text. Our core product line and keyword focus has always been on "surfboards" and its related long tail keywords. However in the last several years we have began to sell "paddle boards" and now they have become our best selling product accouting for 80% of our business. We really want to rank well for "paddleboards" and related words but noticed we always seem to fall below people who have websites with "paddleboard" or "sup" in the domain and company name. will they always rank better unless we also inlcude it in ours? Should we move to a New Domain that focuses on the new target keyword "paddleboard" or a combo of both "surfboards" and "paddleboards"and would this make any difference or even hurt us since it would be a new domain. Then in addition rebrand our company name to include surfboards and/or paddleboards in the company name or some combo of both so the anchor text when people who refer to us relate to both paddle boards and surfboards?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | isle_surf0 -
URL for New Product
Hi, We are creating a section on our established existing website to display our new marketplace product & associated category pages. This marketplace will be a section of the site where our users can sell online training courses that they've created. It will be branded on our site as the Marketplace. Is it important to include 'marketplace' in the URL? Or would it be better to include a relevant keyword such as 'training-courses' instead? Or both? I've assumed I shouldn't use both as that would increase the length of the URLs and number of subfolders.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mindflash0