Launching a new website. Old inherited site cannot be saved after lifted penalty. When should we kill the old site and how?
-
Background Information A website that we inherited was severely penalized and after the penalty was revoked the site still never resurfaced in rankings or traffic. Although a dramatic action, we have decided to launch a completely new version of the website. Everything will be new including the imagery, branding, content, domain name, hosting company, registrar account, google analytics account, etc.
Our question is when do we pull the plug on the old site and how do we go about doing it? We had heard advice that we should make sure we run both sites at the same time for 3 months, then deindex the old site using a noindex meta robots tag.We are cautious because we don't want the old website to be associated in any way, shape or form with the new website. We will purposely not be 301 redirecting any URLs from the old website to the new.
What would you do if you were in this situation?
-
My site got a revoke in May 2013 and took until the refresh in Oct 2014 for it to show recovery in SERPS
One way around this is to use hreflang and set your main site to x-default and create a new site that targets your main language.
Basically set your new domain to hreflang "EN" and you should see an instant recovery!
-
Hi
If you are getting traffic and conversions still on your old site, leave it up and build equity in your new site by taking the steps above. But that's a business decision for you and your team. I don't know anything about how your site is performing other than what you have told me here.
Branded domains tend to do better than exact match domains, especially as search engines crack down on exact match. Just something to consider. Here are some best practices from Moz.
Good luck!
-
Hi
If you are getting traffic and conversions still on your old site, leave it up and build equity in your new site by taking the steps above. But that's a business decision for you and your team. I don't know anything about how your site is performing other than what you have told me here.
Branded domains tend to do better than exact match domains, especially as search engines crack down on exact match. Just something to consider. Here are some best practices from Moz.
Good luck!
-
Thanks again for replying.
No, the old domain name is not branded. Just curious why you ask?
Alright so since we are not migrating the site, flipping the switch on the new and shutting down the old will be fine to do?
-
Hi again
Is the old domain a branded domain?
You can play the waiting game for a few months if you're ultimately going to kill off the site and noindex it.
If you're not migrating the site, you should be fine.
Hope this helps - good luck!
-
Thank you for taking the time to address my question.
I apologize if I didn't explain the original scenario clearly. Even though we were able to have the manual action penalty lifted for the old website, we were never able to see rankings for our main keywords appear again. The website never fully recovered from the penalty. We had waited months after the penalty had been revoked but no progress in the rankings were made.
Although a drastic measure to kill the site, we decided that the old website was forever tarnished (and the client didn't want to keep pumping money into trying to revive the website) so we wanted to start fresh.
The point of the new website is to be in no way associated with the old. Are there any precautions or steps that we should take when launching the new website and shutting down the old? Should we literally flip the switch on the new site and then close down the old? Our biggest concern is that Google is going to pass on the poor reputation of the old website to the new one.
-
Hi there
I would first go through a backlink audit and change any old valuable URLs to the new domain you are choosing to develop.
I would also go through a content audit and update, consolidated, or remove any content based on the criteria in the resource.
From there, I would do a local SEO audit to make sure your citations and listings are upto date and contain correct information.
I do have to ask, why if the site is no longer penalized are you trying to completely sever ties from it? Just wondering.
Hope this helps - good luck!
-
The old site is actually still the current site and it's not generating much revenue at all. The new site is still in development.
-
Is the old site generating any revenue currently?
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
-
New Website SEO Implications
Hi Moz Community, A client of mine has launched a new website. The new website is well designed, mobile friendly, fast loading and offers a far better UX than the old site. It has similar content but 'less wordy'. The old website was tired, slow, not mobile responsive etc but still ranked well. The domain has marketing leading authority and link metrics. Since the launch, the rankings for virtually every word has plummeted. Even previously ranked #1 words have disappeared to page 3 or 4. New pages have different URLs (301s from the old urls are working fine) and still score the same 98% (using the Moz page optimiser tool). Is it usual to experience some short term pain, or are these rankings drop an indication that something else is missing? My theory is that the new URLs are being treated like new pages, and that those new pages don't have the engagement data which is used for ranking. Thus, despite having the same authority of the old pages, as far as user data is concerned, they are new pages and therefor, not ranking well - yet. That theory would make logical sense but I'm hoping some experts here can help. Any suggestions welcome. Here's a quick checklist of things I have already done: complete 301 redirect list
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | I.AM.Strategist
New sitemap
Submitted to console
Created internal links from within their large blog
Optimised all the new pages (img alts, H1s etc) Extra info: Platform changed from Wordpress to Expression engine
Target pages now on level 3 not level 2 (extra subfolder used)
Less words used (average word count per page from 400+ to 250) Thanks in advance 🙂0 -
How long should you leave keywords on your site related to your old brand?
We rebranded our organization 2 years ago. We decided to leave some of our archived content with our old name because it was already serving link juice to the website. How long should you leave keywords like that on your site related to an old brand?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sdaily0 -
International website. Di I need a new website
i am looking to expand from the UK and open a location in the US. i curretly have a .co.uk domain. what would you recommend I do with th website, create a new one wth a .com domain?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Caffeine_Marketing0 -
New site failing to rank - could this be why?
I have a new client site that is not appearing anywhere in the top 100 for its main keywords. ASSUMING that this is not an issue with optimization or link quality, I am wondering whether it might be the following... The client's company has a parent company whose website has decent authority. This website links to the new (client) website. In addition, the 2 press releases we have done include links to both companies, since one was an outgrowth of the other. This is all 100% natural, so my inclination is that this is not causing the issue. But does anyone have any experience to suggest otherwise? That having website A linking to website B, and 50+ press release websites linking to both, could be causing the algorithm to throttle website Bs ability to rank? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zakkyg0 -
How stupid is it to launch a new URL structure when our traffic is climbing?
We decided to redesign our site to make it responsive as Google is ranking sites based on mobile friendliness. Along with this we have changed our URL structure, meta tags, page content, site navigation, internal interlinking. How stupid is it to launch this site right in the middle of record traffic? Our traffic is climbing 10,000 more visitors every day with the current site. Visitors have increased 34% over the last 30 days compared to the previous 30 days.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CFSSEO0 -
Do you get links from new websites?
There's a new industry specific website that looks decent. It's clean and nothing spammy. However, it's so new it's DA is under 10. Is it worth pursuing a link from a site like this? On one hand, there's nothing spammy and it is industry specific. On the other...it's just DA is so terrible (worse than any of our other links), I don't want it to hurt us. Any thoughts? Ruben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup1 -
Google penalty or what???
Hi, we have a blog site xxxxxxxxxxx.es, that yesterday dissapear from google ranks all of a sudden it only appears if you write xxxxxxxxx.es I have checked gogle webmaster tools and there are no manual actions, no messages. Also, we don't have much links pointing to this site. Webmaster tools show only 319 links. We don't understand what have happenned. Never see something similar. What do you think? Any help would be appreciated. How do you proceed in this cases? It doesn't seem to be a link problem. How do you know what kind of penalty do you have? Thank you. Update: Hi, the domain is www.crearcorreoelectronico.es I have check the majestic seo, ose, and wmt and get the links. We have some links that are not good, but are automatic ones, that some portals generate. Maybe is something related with the content. I don't know Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | teconsite1 -
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.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brads070