Need seo advice! At a fork in the road!
-
Hi,
I m having a difficult time deciding what steps to take next, about my marketing strategy. I have 2 e-commerce sites for more than 7 years, one of them got a google link penalty back in september 2012 and lost 80% of organic traffic. I have worked on the bad links, got some of them removed and others disavowed. After 5 months of hard work and getting high quality links from authority sites related in my industry, I received a message from google saying that the manual spam penalty was revoked. This was in feb 26th. Since then I have got couple more high quality links and content to the site, but the organic traffic is still how it was prior to penalty revoked (at 20%). I still have no revenue from this site and i don't see what else I can do or how long I should work on it to see some improvement on traffic. My other site on the other hand is doing just fine but has some conversion issues. I m thinking of dropping all seo related activities for my first site and focus on the second one to see if we can have some increase on the organic traffic of that site. If I was to do a 301 redirect from my first site to the second one, what kind of effect will this have on the second site, would that be a negative or positive impact in terms of traffic? also thinking of moving the site from x-cart platform to magento. I appreciate any advice i can get here.
Thank you
Nick
-
Hi Nick,
I think I'd echo what Alan said. Just because your manual penalty has been revoked doesn't mean you're not still suffering from an algorithmic one. As such I'd probably be inclined not to 301 the whole site.
Assuming your second site is topically similar you might consider reaching out directly to those high quality sites that are linking to you and asking them if they'd be willing to link to your other site instead.
Similarly you might consider moving the link worthy content to your second site and (assuming all the links to your content are 'good') just 301 those pages.
I hope this helps,
Hannah
-
For the most part, I agree with Chris, but I would like to make a point on the 301.
Google may have said that the manual penalty has been lifted, but it does not mean that you are not still being penalized via the algorithm. doing a 301 may damage your second site.
I would 301 redirect only the good links, by looking at the referrer header.
As for 301s passing as much link juice as a link, I also seen the matt cuts video, but I don't read it the same way.
if you make a link to pageA, then redirect to pageB, you will lose link juice twice.
Matt was not very clear in the video, he did say that a 301 loses as much as a link does. A link and a 301 both a make a request to the server. I think the better way at looking at it is that every request loses link juice. Having a link to pageA then redirected to pageB is 2 requests, and 2 loses of link juice
-
hi thanks for your reply, so, since the penalty was revoked on the first site, it is ok to do 301?
301 will not transfer anything negative to the other site right ? last question, will the high quality links to the first site that i got in the pas few week pass any juice to the second site ?
thank you
-
Nick,
First off its a tough call to throw in the towel on a site, but the bottom line is if its not making you any money it probably needs the axe. Especially if you've got another site that has conversion issues. Those are things that you have way more control over. My vote is cut the first site and focus on the second. As for the 301 I would do it if the two sites were similar enough to seen plausible. According to Matt Cutts a 301 passes as much juice as a link. That's my two cents.
Chris
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
-
Need advice: How to replace a high-ranking pdf with a landing page -- without dropping much in rank?
Hi! We have a pdf of a white paper on our site that ranks #1 for a niche term. We are now exploring the idea of building a landing page for this paper with an overview (2-3 paragraphs) and a registration form for interested parties to fill out in order to access the paper. Do you think there'd be any hope of ensuring the new landing page would rank almost as well eventually (top 3)? I'm thinking a key consideration would be preserving the link juice from the existing links that are coming into the pdf, and that 301 redirecting the pdf URL to the new landing page URL could help with that. Am I right? Or would it be better to try to reach out to the linking sites and ask them to update their links (seems daunting). Any advice/opinions on this situation would be appreciated. (If folks think that there would be a significant risk of permanently dropping out of the top 5 by attempting this, we would likely choose to leave the pdf ungated as is.) Thanks!! -John
Link Building | | jomosi0 -
No Follow Link Advice for a Newbie
Hi Moz-ers! 2 part question I would love suggestions to: I'm fairly new to the SEO world and working towards targets of 4 'follow' and 6 'no_follow' links a month, in house. 1. Apart from Wikipedia and bloggers that issue 'no_follow' links, what are good 'no_follow' slink generation ideas? 2. I've read lots about the benefit of no_follow and follow links and the ongoing debate, how does this target/KPI stack up against others out there? And is it a well structured target? I know its a big question, but I'd love some feedback. Big Thanks!
Link Building | | FrancescaW0 -
Need assistance with website placement
Hi, If a website xyz.com is placed under the top right navigation of a blog abc.com which are closely relevant to each other, will it do any harm to the website in Google search?
Link Building | | promodirect
Now since the website is placed under right navigation, it is visible on every page of the blog, does it matter even though they are closely relevant? Note: The other external links that are on the blog are also relevant to each other. Thank You,
Faiz0 -
SEO Link building from zero in a practical world
Hi, I'm a web developer with good knowledge of SEO friendly web development etc. When it comes to link building Im not quite sure where to start. I have read heaps of articles about building links, but can you guys please tell me how to start building links from 'zero' in a practice world? Im not even sure whether I have anyone who can link to my website or my client's website either 🙂 Thanks heaps.
Link Building | | Uds0 -
SEO companies
So prior to joining SEOmoz I have tried a few seo companies and had somewhat decent results. All of these companies did things like: directory submissions
Link Building | | shiftins
social bookmarking
social profiles
blog comments
article syndication
press release and so forth. These things that they were doing worked and improved the rankings of my websites in the serps. After some time and research I figured out that all this stuff was easy to do and that I could do these things myself. After joining SEOmoz I come to find that these types of links are not considered high quality because they are easy to acquire. Some of you may even say that they are the basis of a spammy link profile. My question is why would you not want to do these things if they work and all of your competition is using these strategies, including big name brand companies?0 -
Does commenting on relevant articles positively impact our seo?
I have read conflicting perspectives on whether or not businesses should partake in relevant conversations on blogs' or articles' comments sections. Does anyone have insight on this?
Link Building | | mbelsito0 -
Where I need to jump? Web OR Social OR Local Directories
I am working on patio umbrellas keyword to achieve top 3 ranking in Google. I have achieved top 30 ranking with help of on page optimization and want to achieve top 3 ranking with help of link building. Today, I was checking SEO web directories on SEOmoz. Now, I can't make any changes on live website exclude content. So, I have only one option to deal with link building. There are 3 sections over there including Web Directories, Social Directories & Local Directories. So, which is best one to improve my ranking on Google? If anyone have additional inputs for link building so eager to know that. I want to achieve top 3 ranking with my keyword by next 2 months.
Link Building | | CommercePundit0 -
Ever Get disillusioned with SEO
Many times now we have pushed certain keywords for homepage listings but we have found the traffic levels to be very poor and many cases first page listings turn out to be vanity. The frustrating thing is that sometimes we have to tell some of our SEO customers that in order to get a good market share for there industry they will always have to do google adwords. What are your thoughts on this . Thanks
Link Building | | onlinemediadirect0