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Background Information A website that we inherited was severely penalized and after the penalty was revoked the site still never resurfaced in rankings or traffic.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
-
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 -
Need references to a company that can transition our 1000 page website from Http to Https without breaking our SEO backlinks and site structure
Hi Ya'll I'm looking for a company or independent who can transition our website from http to https. I want to make sure they know what they're doing with a Wordpress website. More importantly, i want to make sure they don't break any seo juice from external sources while internally nothing gets broken. Anyone have any good recommendations? You can reply back or DM me. Best, Shawn
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Shawn1240 -
How to Submit My new Website in All Search Engines
Hello Everyone, Can Any body help to suggest Good software, or Any other to easily Submit my website , to All Search Engines ? ? Any expert Can help please, Thanx in Advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | falguniinnovative0 -
Site was moved, but still exists on the old server and is being outranked for it's own name
Recently, a client went through a split with a business partner, they both had websites on the same domain, but within their own sub directories. There is a main landing page, which links to both sites, the landing page sits on the root. Ie. example.com is a landing page with links to example.com/partner1, and example.com/partner2 Parter 2 will be my client for this example. After the split, partner 2 downloaded his website, and put it up on his own server, but no longer has any kind of access to the old servers ftp, and partner 1 is refusing to cooperate in any way to have the site removed from the old server. They did add a 301 redirect for the home page on the old server for partner 2, so, example.com/partner2/index.html is 301'ing to the new site on the new server, HOWEVER, every other page is still live on that old server, and is outranking the new site in every instance. The home page is also being outranked, even with the 301 redirect in place. What are some steps I can take to rectify this? The clients main concern is that this old website, containing the old partners name, is outranking him for his own name, and the name of his practice. So far, here's what i've been thinking: Since the site has poor on-page optimization, i'll start be cleaning all of that up. I'll then optimize the home page to better depict the clients name and practice through proper usage of heading tags, titles, alt, etc, as well as the meta title and description. The only other thing I can think of would be to start building some backlinks? Any help/suggestions would be greatly appreciated! Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RCDesign740 -
How important is the optional <priority>tag in an XML sitemap of your website? Can this help search engines understand the hierarchy of a website?</priority>
Can the <priority>tag be used to tell search engines the hierarchy of a site or should it be used to let search engines know which priority to we want pages to be indexed in?</priority>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mycity4kids0 -
Hit by Penguin, Can I move the content from the old site to a new domain and start again with the same content which is high quality
I need some advice please. My website got the unnatural links detected message and was hit by penguin.. hard. Can I move the content from the current domain to a new domain and start again or does the content need to be redone also. I will obviously turn of the old domain once its moved. The other option is to try and identify the bad links and change my anchor profile which is a hit and miss task in my opinion. Would it not be easier just to identify the good links pointing to the old domain and get those changed to point to the new domain with better anchors. thanks Warren
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | warren0071 -
Clone sites at new company
I just came in house to our company for SEO. We have one main site and 182 that are exact duplicates and almost exact clones of the main site. It's no surprise that half of these clones are deindexed already. The meta tags are just the domain name URL. I want to add unique text on the home page to each site, fix the meta tags and switch them up so they aren't clones. Other than a huge rewrite of the code for each site, I'm not sure what else to do to prevent the rest from getting deindexed. Is there any way to prevent the rest from getting deindexed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CFSSEO0 -
Are there new updates in Google Panda? Please help review my website...
My site have significantly went down in google ranking today. Is there a recent update with regards to google panda? Also, please help me review my website for possible errors so I may apply the necessary changes for my site to recover. Here is my url: http://www.homeescapade.com Thanks and God Bless
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Trigun0