Duplicate content when changing a site's URL due to algorithm penalty
-
Greetings
A client was hit by penguin 2.1, my guess is that this was due to linkbuilding using directories. Google webmaster tools has detected about 117 links to the site and they are all from directories. Furthermore, the anchor texts are a bit too "perfect" to be natural, so I guess this two factors have earned the client's site an algorithm penalty (no manual penalty warning has been received in GWT).
I have started to clean some of the backlinks, on Oct the 11th. Some of the webmasters I asked complied with my request to eliminate backlinks, some didn´t, I disavowed the links from the later.
I saw some improvements on mid october for the most important KW (see graph) but ever since then the rankings have been falling steadily.
I'm thinking about giving up on the domain name and just migrating the site to a new URL. So FINALLY MY QUESTION IS: if I migrate this 6-page site to a new URL, should I change the content completely ? I mean, if I just copy paste the content of the curent site into a new URL I will incur in dpolicate content, correct?.
Is there some of the content I can copy ? or should I just start from scratch?
Cheers
-
Hey Masoko -
In the past, I've had luck with 410ing the previous site and putting a link from it saying that we've moved. This way, you keep any direct traffic by referring them, but you also don't redirect your pages via 301.
Penalties pass through redirects. You don't want to keep both sites and duplicate content. I'd kill off the old site (it's only 6 pages, so that's pretty easy) and take the chance to, as has been said, refresh the content. Also, think about adding more pages to the site so you can rank for more longtail terms.
Good luck.
-
Thanks everyone for answering my question!!!
-
As long as you 410 (delete) the old pages, they are no longer indexed and will not cause a duplicate content issue.
-
You can safely move to a new domain, move the content over (upgrade it a little) and there should be no duplicate content issues. The duplicate content issues were designed for things like just scraping content from news feeds and posting them on your own site, and not having any unique or original. Or selling products as a reseller and not doing anything to the manufacturers text etc.
If you move the site to a new domain - I would just 410 the pages on the old site and not do any redirects. You were probably only ranking for a short period of time because of the unnatural back links. If you redirect them you will pass the negative link values over to the new site (those that were not fixed or disavowed anyway) and there is probably not much for good link metrics to warrant a redirect. You will lose any traffic from people who are trying to visit the old site, so maybe you can put up a message on the old site's homepage that it has moved to a new domain, but not link to it.
-
Masoko-T,
If you're sure that the penalty is from link building, you should have no problem. As mentioned above a refresh of the content, might be a good idea though.
-
Hi Tuzzel
Thanks for your reply. Are you sure there are no duplicate content risks?, I thought that, since google had already indexed the original content, finding the same content in a different (newer) site will cause the later to be considered "duplicate".
I hadn't thought about the 302 redirects, that's not a bad idea :).
-
If you're moving a site, Google's recommendations are to move the content and redirect. However, it sounds like you're looking for a fresh start.
Are you sure it's the links? Are you also concerned about EMD penalty or just hoping for a fresh start?
-
You should be ok just to replicate it, but by all means use the opportunity to refresh the content, 6 pages shouldn’t take too long. If you want to be extra safe then you can of course just rewrite from scratch. The Penalty will be at the domain level so you should be ok to redirect the existing pages to the New URLs, this will signal to Search engines that the pages have been moved and not to count the redirected pages as unique content, avoiding Dupe content issues. You can also use a cross domain Canonical tag.
If you don’t want to do any redirects to totally severe your links to the old domain profile then remove the original pages from Google’s index in your webmaster tools account and ensure you return 410 status codes to individuals that request the page. If you do still want the users to redirect however 302 the page to the new location as this won’t pass link equity.
Hope this proves useful.
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
-
Help, no organic traffic recovery after new site launch (it's been 6 months)!
I worked with a team of developers to launch a new site back in March. I was (and still am) in charge of SEO for the site, including combining 4 sites into 1. I made sure 301 redirects were in place to combine the sites and pretty much every SEO tactic I can think of to make sure the site would maintain rankings following launch. However, here we are 6 months later and YoY numbers are down -70% on average for organic traffic. Anyone mind taking a look at http://www.guestguidepublications.com and seeing if there's a glaring mistake I'm missing?!?!?! Thanks ahead of time!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Annapurna-Digital1 -
Can a move to a new domain (with 301's) shake off a google algorithm penalty
we have done everything under the sun using the holy grail of google guidelines to get our site back onto page 1 for our domain. we have recovered (penguin and panda) algorithm filters for keywords that were page 1 going to page 7 and now page 2. its been 2 years and we cant hit page 1 again. this is our final phase we cna think of.. do you thin kit will work if we move to a new domain. and how much traffic/rankings can we expect to lose in the short-term?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Direct_Ram0 -
Partial Match or RegEx in Search Console's URL Parameters Tool?
So I currently have approximately 1000 of these URLs indexed, when I only want roughly 100 of them. Let's say the URL is www.example.com/page.php?par1=ABC123=&par2=DEF456=&par3=GHI789= All the indexed URLs follow that same kinda format, but I only want to index the URLs that have a par1 of ABC (but that could be ABC123 or ABC456 or whatever). Using URL Parameters tool in Search Console, I can ask Googlebot to only crawl URLs with a specific value. But is there any way to get a partial match, using regex maybe? Am I wasting my time with Search Console, and should I just disallow any page.php without par1=ABC in robots.txt?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ria_0 -
Investigating Google's treatment of different pages on our site - canonicals, addresses, and more.
Hey all - I hesitate to ask this question, but have spent weeks trying to figure it out to no avail. We are a real estate company and many of our building pages do not show up for a given address. I first thought maybe google did not like us, but we show up well for certain keywords 3rd for Houston office space and dallas office space, etc. We have decent DA and inbound links, but for some reason we do not show up for addresses. An example, 44 Wall St or 44 Wall St office space, we are no where to be found. Our title and description should allow us to easily picked up, but after scrolling through 15 pages (with a ton of non relevant results), we do not show up. This happens quite a bit. I have checked we are being crawled by looking at 44 Wall St TheSquareFoot and checking the cause. We have individual listing pages (with the same titles and descriptions) inside the buildings, but use canonical tags to let google know that these are related and want the building pages to be dominant. I have worked though quite a few tests and can not come up with a reason. If we were just page 7 and never moved it would be one thing, but since we do not show up at all, it almost seems like google is punishing us. My hope is there is one thing that we are doing wrong that is easily fixed. I realize in an ideal world we would have shorter URLs and other nits and nats, but this feels like something that would help us go from page 3 to page 1, not prevent us from ranking at all. Any thoughts or helpful comments would be greatly appreciated. http://www.thesquarefoot.com/buildings/ny/new-york/10005/lower-manhattan/44-wall-st/44-wall-street We do show up one page 1 for this building - http://www.thesquarefoot.com/buildings/ny/new-york/10036/midtown/1501-broadway, but is the exception. I have tried investigating any differences, but am quite baffled.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AtticusBerg10 -
How should I handle URL's created by an internal search engine?
Hi, I'm aware that internal search result URL's (www.example.co.uk/catalogsearch/result/?q=searchterm) should ideally be blocked using the robots.txt file. Unfortunately the damage has already been done and a large number of internal search result URL's have already been created and indexed by Google. I have double checked and these pages only account for approximately 1.5% of traffic per month. Is there a way I can remove the internal search URL's that have already been indexed and then stop this from happening in the future, I presume the last part would be to disallow /catalogsearch/ in the robots.txt file. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GrappleAgency0 -
Killing 404 errors on our site in Google's index
Having moved a site across to Magento, obviously re-directs were a large part of that, ensuring all the old products and categories linked up correctly with the new site structure. However, we came up against an issue where we needed to add, delete, then re-add products. This, coupled with a misunderstanding of the csv upload processing, meant that although the old urls redirected, some of the new Magento urls changed and then didn't redirect: For Example: mysite/product would get deleted re-added and become: mysite/product-1324 We now know what we did wrong to ensure it doesn't continue to happen if we weret o delete and re-add a product, but Google contains all these old URLs in its index which has caused people to search for products on Google, click through, then land on the 404 page - far from ideal. We kind of assumed, with continual updating of sitemaps and time, that Google would realise and update the URL accordingly. But this hasn't happened - we are still getting plenty of 404 errors on certain product searches (These aren't appearing in SEOmoz, there are no links to the old URL on the site, only Google, as the index contains the old URL). Aside from going through and finding the products affected (no easy task), and setting up redirects for each one, is there any way we can tell Google 'These URLs are no longer a thing, forget them and move on, let's make a fresh start and Happy New Year'?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seanmccauley0 -
Need to duplicate the index for Google in a way that's correct
Usually duplicated content is a brief to fix. I find myself in a little predicament: I have a network of career oriented websites in several countries. the problem is that for each country we use a "master" site that aggregates all ads working as a portal. The smaller nisched sites have some of the same info as the "master" sites since it is relevant for that site. The "master" sites have naturally gained the index for the majority of these ads. So the main issue is how to maintain the ads on the master sites and still make the nische sites content become indexed in a way that doesn't break Google guide lines. I can of course fix this in various ways ranging from iframes(no index though) and bullet listing and small adjustments to the headers and titles on the content on the nisched sites, but it feels like I'm cheating if I'm going down that path. So the question is: Have someone else stumbled upon a similar problem? If so...? How did you fix it.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gustav-Northclick0 -
I need to add duplicate content, how to do this without penalty
On a site I am working on we provide a landing page summary (say top 10 information snippets) and provide a link 'see more' to take viewers to a page with all the snippets. Now those first 10 snippets will be repeated in the full list. Is this going to be a duplicate content problem? If so, any suggestions.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | oznappies0