Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Cleaning up a Spammy Domain VS Starting Fresh with a New Domain
-
Hi- Can you give me your opinion please... if you look at murrayroofing.com and see the high SPAM score- and the fact that our domain has been put on some spammy sites over the years- Is it better and faster to place higher in google SERP if we create a fresh new domain? My theory is we will spin our wheels trying to get unlisted from alot of those spammy linking sites. And that it would be faster to see results using a fresh new domain rather than trying to clean up the current spammy doamin. Thanks in advance - You guys have been awesome!!
-
Disavowing has nothing to do with traffic.
Disavowing is all about spam signals from spammy links. That and only that.
-
Thanks again for all the advice- Truly appreciated-
What are your thoughts on "disavowing" with google- murrayroofing.com so when it sends traffic to the new murrayroofingllc.com google will hopefully ignore...? Can you see our account in MOZ. You can see the old domain is sending traffic since it is listed on the spammy sites.
-
You are always welcome.
If you got more questions, you can always hit me up on my Twitter @DigitalSpaceman
-
Thank you!!
-
Hard to say who and why is putting you on those websites.
The only way to truly get rid of those backlinks is to reach out to those websites' owners. You'd have to obviously find someone who speaks the language.
Now, what you can do though is this:
- Disavow all those crappy links - that'll get Google to lower the "spam score" of your website;
- Block all traffic by IPs, geolocation and/or hostnames/referrers (that'll prevent from actual unrelated traffic)
That should clean it up pretty good.
Of course, that requires full control and ownership of that domain and website code. If you can't get that - again, my suggestion is just to part ways. -
This is awesome info! Thank you. What are your thoughts on trying to get backlinks removed from sites in China where we have no way to contact them - none of the wording o the sites are in our language- and it seems like it would be impossible to get removed from some of them. Additional thoughts greatly appreciated. In analytics we see "more" traffic from china than the US-
I'm convinced a competitor may be listing us on these sites- Or one of these SEO guys that get really pissed when we turn them down. Could they be out putting our domain on listing sites?
-
Yeah, your suggestion makes sense.
Keep the old one while the new one is ranking up.
Now, here is perfect scenario for you - keep working on the new site, and get full ownership of the old one. Then through IP blocks, cloudflare, removing all spammy backlinks etc, get rid of all or most of the spammy traffic and signals. And then redirect.
-
Thank you again!
I should have been more clear- The old website gets traffic that does convert- If it loaded faster than 10 seconds I'm sure a lot more would convert- Super high bounce rate due to slooooow loading of that site. But we do get "valid leads" every week from it. But not a lot of leads- maybe 5 a week- but our jobs are large dollar jobs.
What is your thought on running both sites separately? We could go in and make sure they are not duplicate and assign different addresses and phone numbers to the old site- But this "seems" black hat- We would not be doing it to get both site to rank- but just so we don't lose the traffic- then in a year or so get rid of it. what are your thoughts?
-
"... maybe a lot of traffic will convert. "
WILL convert? so it's not converting now? If so, it's kind of optimistic that will change, no?
Since you don't own old domain, you can't really reliably do anything about it anyway.
At this point, I would say not to forward at all, start from scratch.
-
Thank you- Yes some of the traffic - maybe a lot of traffic will convert. The problem is old "printed" directories and other places where we can't update the domain. We get a lot of business from a printed catalog that won;t change for a year or more.
I will look at the suggestions you made about IP limitations. The other issue is we don't "own" the original domain so we have to ask the owner who is also our IT guy to change settings. This is another reason we bough the new domain.
Again thank you!
-
Couple ways you can go about it.
-
Is any of the traffic going to the old spammy domain any good? Does it convert? If not, then don't worry about redirecting, there wouldn't be any point, only spam signals
-
If there is some good traffic, then do IP limitations, hostnames limitations etc. That can be done in htaccess or on the server itself. There are other more elaborate ways to filter out spam traffic as well, but that depends on how you or your IT guy is familiar with it. One of the simplest solutions is to route all traffic through CloudFlare, it has quite nice spam filtering, and it's free.
Hope this helps.
-
-
Thank you- we're talking about murrayroofinllc.com in particular- we are not sure how to forward the old domain to the new- We "know how" we just don't know if we should- The reason we developed murrayroofingllc.com is because murray roofing.com had a high spam score and we got advice from this string to go for a new domain-
Now the concern is- if we forward all the traffic from murrayroofing.com to murrayroofingllc.com that the new domain murrayroofingllc.com will be negatively affected by the spammy traffic- Somehow murrayroofing.com got on some spam sites and we get a ton of spammy traffic from china- we don't want this traffis - and these sites there is "no way" to ask them to remove our website from their spam sites in china.
All thoughts are welcome here-
-
Ta Larry
Ok nothing much of substance, that said if ranking worth trying as it is an easier or usually faster route to page 1.
Had a look at the Murray Roofing site and has not been optimised for customer queries a roofing contractor would seek to rank for. As it seems you are keen to start afresh - can do both in parallel. No harm to either.
That said would suggest you also look at your google my business structure - your effectively a local play. Getting reviews and appearing in the local search pack for roofing contractors Omaha etc we would consider a client priority.
All the best go get them.
-
only for a few and we are in position 49 and 50 for them.
-
Hi
Is the current site ranking for any terms of value?
-
Hi there,
Yes, absolutely get new domain. If you look at DA - it's only 15 (not too bad in some cases). But if you look at backlink profile - you'll see that most of the links are from listing sites - homestead, yellowpages, ezlocal etc. You can replicate that profile after a day of work. And, as you said, spam score will only bring troubles.
Hope this helps.
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
-
Why does my old brand name still show up on organic search but as my new brand name and domain?
Hello mozers! I have quite the conundrum. My client used to have the unfortunate brand name "Meetoo" - which by the way they had before the movement happened! So naturally, they rebranded to the name Vevox in March 2019 to avoid confusion to users. However, when you search for their old brand name "Meetoo" the first organic link that pops up is their domain www.vevox.com. Now, this wouldn't normally be a problem, however it is when any #MeToo news appears in the media and we get a sudden influx or wrong traffic. I've searched the HTML and content for the term "Meetoo" but can only find one trace of this name through a widget. Not enough to hold an organic spot. My only other thinking is that www.vevox.com is redirected from www.meetoo.com. So I'm assuming this is why Vevox appear under the search term "Meetoo". How can I remove the homepage www.vevox.com from appearing for the search term "meetoo"? Can anyone help? AvGGYBc
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Virginia-Girtz3 -
New Site (redesign) Launched Without 301 Redirects to New Pages - Too Late to Add Redirects?
We recently launched a redesign/redevelopment of a site but failed to put 301 redirects in place for the old URL's. It's been about 2 months. Is it too late to even bother worrying about it at this point? The site has seen a notable decrease in site traffic/visits, perhaps due to this issue. I assume that once the search engines get an error on a URL, it will remove it from displaying in search results after a period of time. I'm just not sure if they will try to re-crawl those old URLs at some point and if so, it may be worth it to have those 301 redirects in place. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BrandBuilder0 -
Is .ME domain is effective in SEO ?
I am always listening about TLD. com. org .net but what about the .me domain. Can this will be effective in SEO. Can i able to beat down my competitors, if i choose .me . I also have a .com or other TLD option but if i am making my name than .me is for me but i need your suggestion for the seo purpose. Is there really domain affective in term of SEO.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pnb5670 -
Domain Alias SEO
We have 5 domain alias of our existing sites
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | unibiz
All 5 domain alias are domain alias of our main site. It means, all domain alias will have exactly same site and contents
Like Main domain: www.mywebsite.com
DomainAlias: www.myproduct.com, www.myproduct2.com, www.myproduc3.com
And if anybody will open our site www.myproduct.com, it will open same website which I have in primary site what can i do to rank all website without any penalty....i s there any way? This is domain alias of in hosting industry Thanks0 -
Redirect old .net domain to new .com domain
I have a quick question that I think I know the answer to but I wanted to get some feedback to make sure or see if there's additional feedback. The long and short of it is that I'm working with a site that currently has a .net domain that they've been running for 6 years. They've recently bought a .com of the same name as well. So the question is: I think it's obviously preferable to keep the .net and just direct the .com to it. However, if they would prefer to have the .com domain, is 301'ing the .net to the .com going to lose a lot of the equity they've built up in the site over the past years? And are there any steps that would make such a move easier? Also, if you have any tips or insight just into a general transition of this nature it would be much appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BrandLabs0 -
Merging Domains... Sub-domains, Directories or Seperate Sites?
Hello! I am hoping you can help me decide the best path to take here... A little background: I'm moving to a new company that has three old domains (the oldest is 10 years old), which get a lot of traffic from their e-letters. Until recently they have not cared about SEO. So the websites have some structural, coding, URL and other issues. The sites are indexed, but have a problem getting crawled and/or indexed for new content - haven't delved into this yet but am certain I will be able to fix any of these issues. These three domains are PR4, PR4, PR5 and contain hundreds of unique articles. Here's the question... They want to move these three sites **to their main company site (PR4) and create sub domains for each one. ** I am wondering if this is a good idea or not. I have merged sites before (creating categories and/or directories) and the end result is that the ONE big site, is much for effective than TWO smaller, less authoritative sites. But the sub domain idea is something I am unsure about from an SEO perspective. Should we do this with sub domains? Or do you think we should keep the sites separate? How do Panda and Penguin play into this? Thanks in advance for the help! SD P.S. I'm not a huge advocate in using PR as a measurement tool, but since I can't reveal the actual domains, I figured I would list it as a reference point.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | essdee0 -
How long should a domain redirect take?
Hi, I know that this is a 'How long is a piece of string?' type question but at what point should the ranking value of site A pass over to site B following a domain 301 redirect? I have shifted a domain over to a new URL, same hosting server, same IP address. I haven't made any URL changes or any content changes other than to change the site logo to match the new domain name. Domain B is basically an exact clone of domain A. I have redirected Domain A to domain B using the following line at the top of the .htaccess file:- Redirect 301 / http://www.newdomain.com/ I have submitted a sitemap for the new domain via google webmaster tools. It looks like the original domain as been completely indexed by google following the redirect as all rankings have been dropped from the results and there are no results for a site:olddomain.com search. Surely the rankings should have switched over at this point? Any help would be much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdeLewis
Ade.0 -
Query deserves freshness
There was an seomoz article - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/does-query-deserves-diversity-algorithm-exist-at-google . I would like to point out the specific part of it - "So - because a lot of searchers express a preference for more diverse results than just those pages that ordinarily would "make the cut," Google provides an extra helping hand to pages they feel help to satisfy those searchers. This data could be gleaned from lower CTRs in the SERPs, greater numbers of query refinements, and even a high percentage of related searches performed subsequently" I don;t understand how data could be gleaned from lower CTRs, don't you think it should have been Higher CTRs ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoug_20050