"Starting Over" With A New Domain & 301 Redirect
-
Hello, SEO Gurus.
A client of mine appears to have been hit on a non-manual/algorithm penalty. The penalty appears to be Penguin-like, and the client never received any message (not that that means it wasn't manual).
Prior to my working with her, she engaged in all kinds of SEO fornication: spammy links on link farms, shoddy article marketing, blog comment spam -- you name it. There are simply too many tens of thousands of these links to have removed. I've done some disavowal, but again, so much of the link work is spam.
She is about to launch a new site, and I am tempted to simply encourage her to buy a new domain and start over. She competes in a niche B2B sector, so it is not terribly competitive, and with solid content and link earning, I think she'd be ok.
Here's my question:
If we were to 301 the old website to the new one, would the flow of page rank outperform any penalty associated with the site? (The old domain only has a PR of 2).
Anyone like my idea of starting over, rather than trying to "recover?"
I thank you all in advance for your time and attention. I don't take it for granted.
-
RCN
There is no "penalty transfer" per se. It is just that those links will have no value, but you can still get people there. You could use 302's if there is some concern but don't really need to. Remember, you are redirecting a page and that is purposeful. You could also disallow the links to the 301'd pages if you want to be over careful. Again though, I would do the 301's and move on.
Best,
Robert
-
Hi Robert,
This was an answer you gave to a question I asked a while back, and I really appreciate it. I think we might go in the direction of starting over, since I am confident that we can out-content and out-SEO our competitors in the client's niche. Just a question about the 301 redirect: will the penalty associated with the original domain transfer to the new one if we do a 301 redirect? I'm not interested in transferring the page rank, but I would want people who arrive via direct traffic to the old site be able to be redirected to the new site. However, if a 301 is going to transfer the penalty, then I'm not sure how you get return direct users from the old site to the new one. Any thoughts on this?
Thanks again.
-
LOL, Cyrus. Yeah -- it just seemed like the right term. The client is a "bad person" -- she just put link building in the hands of people who used all of the methods that are now taboo.
And thanks to everyone's comments thus far -- it's all great feedback. Here's the other thing: if we were to start with a new domain and not 301 from the old domain, we'd miss a lot of direct traffic. The old domain goes way back, and a LOT of people hit it directly.
It also worth noting that the penalty the client has is not site-wide. It's keyword-specific In fact, the site is actually up for the year on non-brand organic search traffic -- it's just other keyword terms and not the bread and butter ones that used to rank high. Now I'm thinking that maybe we just work around the penalized keywords.
-
Another way of saying it, when you 301 a domain, you redirect all the links that came with it. If those links resulted in algorithmic filters that resulted in loss of rankings and/or traffic, then there is a very good chance to visit those ills on the new domain.
"SEO fornication" - I like this phrase (although I hear they're trying to discourage this behavior at conferences.
-
Here is the short experiment I did.
(A) I took a new domain and added it to Google Webmaster Tools. Google Webmaster Tools showed no backlinks.
(B) Next, I took old domain with couple of thousands of links and 301-redirected it to the new one.
(C) Couple of weeks later the links to the old domain started to show in Google Webmaster Tools for the new domain.
Conclusion: 301 redirect essentially transfers the links from one domain to another. If the old domain triggered a link based penalty, next Penguin refresh will penalise the new domain as all the links are essentially transferred via the redirect.
Do not use 301 to get out of penalty. Period.
-
As to whether to change or not to change to new domain, you seem to be answering your own question:
Prior to my working with her, she engaged in all kinds of SEO fornication: spammy links on link farms, shoddy article marketing, blog comment spam -- you name it. There are simply too many tens of thousands of these links to have removed. I've done some disavowal, but again, so much of the link work is spam.
As to the 301, you are not moving page rank, but link juice. If, your intent is to mitigate the penalty via the 301, it will not do that. The "penalty" is the penalty. So if the algorithm is giving no value to a link with a PA of 50, by having the 301, you are not going to get that value. It will be the same as it was on the original site.
Now, if you want to just clean up and move down the road, a clean site and domain could be the way to go. You can do 301's, but anything that would happen to one will come to the other (someone will say: 301's lose X% of the juice so I will say it is usually not even 10% in my experience). But, if you are a PR of 2 in a non-competitive niche that is B2B, you may want to consider just going cold turkey if there are a lot of pages and hassles.
Use the new domain, add great new content, etc. Make sure your product pages are different and product images are different. Make sure you out SEO the others and you will likely see the PR get to two fairly quickly. In a non competitive area you can get a site to PA of 20 for a main page in about 3 to 6 months depending on content, etc. So, you are back at it and growing without the fear of complications.
Hope that helps,
Robert
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
-
Setting up 301 Redirects after acquisition?
Hello! The company that I work for has recently acquired two other companies. I was wondering what the best strategy would be as it relates to redirects / authority. Please help! Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Colin.Accela0 -
301 Redirection and apostrophes in URLs
Hi I am experiencing trouble getting any redirects with apostrophes in the URLs to 301 redirect in order to eliminate 404 errors. I have tried replacing the instance of the apostrophe in the source URL field to %27 and variations of this but to no avail. The site is a wordpress site (the old URLS are legacies from the old Business Catalyst site) and I am using the redirection plug in. I have gone into some detail with a helpful soul here http://wordpress.org/support/topic/how-to-deal-with-apostrophes-in-source-url but unfortunately to no result. If anyone has any idea how to solve this puzzle I would be grateful for the help. Example: http://www.tesselaars.com/blog/Inside_Flowers/post/Online_Marketing_for_Florists_Part_1%E2%80%93_A_Website_You_Won%27t_Regret/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Seamoose0 -
Sub Domain or New Domain?
Hi All, We have a client that has a business with three different services. 2 of these services compliment each other in a really obvious way, but the 3rd, while related is not such a obvious complimentary service. For this reason, service 3 kind of weakens the content of the website SEO wise for the two main services. Also, internally at the business it is run by an entirely different team so it feels culturally somewhat different. So, the client wants to pull all the content about service 3 and put it on a different website. Which would you chose as a domain for this new site: service3.existingdomain.co.uk or www.service3+brandname.co.uk
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NoisyLittleMonkey0 -
Aged domain and 301 redirect? (11 year old domain)
Hey everyone, I'm about to launch a new website for an accounting firm. They currently have a website, which has an 11 year old domain. They are doing very well locally for SEO, and i'm guessing it's because of the aged domain, as their website is very badly built, and contains almost no content. They would like to launch the new site with a simpler, easier to remember domain. If i launch the new site, point the aged domain using a 301 redirect, and do redirects for all of the old pages to the newer versions of them, is there a chance the company will lose their current SEO rankings? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RCDesign740 -
301 redirects and Blogger - moving blog
Is there any way to add 301 redirects to individual posts on a blogger-hosted blog? We're getting ready to finally move our blog off of Blogger and onto our own webserver. We're probably going to use BlogEngine.net to run it. right now the blog is located at blog.MySite.com. We're probably going to move it to MySite.com/Blog. We don't have any really popular posts and we only really get ~10 visits a day on about 70 posts. Just trying to figure out the best way to handle this without inadvertently shooting myself in the foot.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | _JP_0 -
Are there any negatives to channeling my links through a 301 redirect?
I'm channeling 1000's of links through another url with a 301 redirect. I've thought this through and can't see any downside to doing this, but I want to get your opinion. Can you see any downside to doing this? With regards to passing anchor text, PR, PA, etc? Since this is done with sites all the time when they change urls, I can't see Google being able to penalize me for this....can you? What do you think?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brian-M0 -
New Site: Use Aged Domain Name or Buy New Domain Name?
Hi,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | peterwhitewebdesign
I have the opportunity to build a new website and use a domain name that is older than 5 years or buy a new domain name. The aged domain name is a .net and includes a keyword.
The new domain would include the same keyword as well as the U.S. state abbreviation. Which one would you use and why? Thanks for your help!0 -
What will happen after I 301 this domain?
A while back I created a new website. Somehow my "scratch" copies of the site got indexed even though I didn't have links built to them. (In the future I will use noindex tags when I am playing around with designing). Now, I have three versions of the site online...let's call them TheRealSite.com and Practice1.com and Practice2.com. Practice1.com and Practice2.com now rank #1 for their main keyword. (It's a relatively uncompetitive niche). TheRealSite.com is somewhere lower than page 20 despite having an exact keyword match domain name. I'm assuming that Google considered it duplicate content as it is the exact same thing as Practice1 and 2. I had considered simply removing Practice1 and 2 from the server, but I was worried that if I did that, I would lose my #1 rankings if TheRealSite didn't recover. So, what I've done is 301 redirect Practice1 and Practice2 to TheRealSite. I'm guessing that over time TheRealSite will come back to #1 and then I can just remove the files from Practice1 and Practice2. Is this the best way to handle this situation?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarieHaynes1