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links from authority sites related in my industry, I received a message from google saying that the manual spam penalty was revoked.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 Just because your manual penalty has been revoked doesn't mean you're not still suffering from an algorithmic one.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
-
SEO value of a 'Most Popular Stories' widget?
Hi there, I work for a theater and live performances publishing site. We write 15-20 quality articles per day on the New York City and national theater community. We show a "Most Read" stories widget on all of our pages, but click rates for these are really low - 1% of readers click to read a story from this. As such we're considering replacing this with higher-value content. My question, however, is this: Is there any SEO value in keeping this widget? I want to make sure we're taking this aspect into consideration. Thank you!
Link Building | | TheaterMania1 -
External Backlinks - Should I remove/disavow external blog posts done by SEO company?
Last year my company hired an SEO company to build backlinks for targeted achor text keywords. It turns out that they wrote average to below average blog posts that had content related to my business, but that were placed on odd websites, not related to my business. They did this for about one year before I fired them. Should I try to get each of those blog posts removed and then disavow them? If the external links back to my site are nofollow then it is my understanding that I don't really need to worry about them...is that accurate? Is it too risky to keep any external backlinked content alive when it is on a site that is unrelated to my business?
Link Building | | ajgrossman0 -
Victim of negative SEO, but will this be believed if the client has not always been whiter than white?
A new client has come to me because they have found themselves in hot water with Google having received a manual spam action for unnatural inbound links. The sad case in this story is that I completely believe that the client has been a victim of an attack by a competitor. They finally made it onto page 1 in their competitive niche, and within a few days random links started appearing on spammy sites (often foreign language sites.) By the time the message came from Google about 2 weeks later several thousand of these links had been built. The first stage was to get the client to be very honest with me about anything he personally had done that might be considered manipulative. Unfortunately following some bad advice several months ago the client purchased one site-wide link (already in the process of removing it.) The same company that gave him this advice also built just under 100 links to his website (over the course of a couple of days) in early December. So - we know the client hasn't been whiter than white, and we are going to undo anything that he had responsibility for asap. We are also working to ensure that he is earning really high quality links in the right way (already have some great press coverage in the pipeline and are working on unique content.) My question is - given some past mistakes made by the client - is there any way that we credibly get across the fact that this recent huge volume of spam is absolutely nothing to do with him in a reconsideration request? Of course we can start work on removing these links and can disavow anything we can't remove - but my expectation is that should this be successful the same competitor is going to continue throwing spam links at my client. I appreciate that previous actions by the client would in themselves have been worthy of a manual spam action - but it seems far too much of a coincidence given the timing if this penalty was unrelated to the recent attack. I'd really appreciate any insights from the Moz community and will look forward to sharing our eventual success story as a YouMoz post! Tom
Link Building | | TomVolpe0 -
Backlinks from archived content? SEO penalty?
I'm curious, if I go to webmasters and suggest a change to an article in their archives (convincing them that the new link offers more value to their readers), how would Google look at that? It seems to me that if a two-year-old article all of a sudden gets a new link, it might look fishy, and might even bring penalties with it. Thoughts?
Link Building | | JABacchetta0 -
When leaving guest posts on blogs, are blog profiles such as Disqus relevant for SEO?
In other words, instead of the comment linking back to the money site it is being linked back to a blog profile which contains a link to the money site. Is this still as effective?
Link Building | | msmdz0 -
Will this Blog Tool hurt our SEO
Hi, We have come across this tool that we are considering using for some of our blog posts. We will still continue posting our own post blogs weekly, we will just use this if we come across anything interesting. Our concern is it will produce duplicate content from other sites. We are very new to blogging. https://home.passle.net/ Will this hurt our SEO? Will it improve it? Or will it make no difference? All thoughts welcomed please. Thanks Andrew
Link Building | | Studio330 -
Do I need to use rel canonical in a blog?
I work at an ecommerce site and we are in the process setting up a blog. Do I need to use rel canonical what talking about a certain category? If I sell widgets and write a blog about widgets should I use that tag? Or is there something else I should do?
Link Building | | EcommerceSite0 -
Are backlinks from sites like diigo useful for SEO?
I read an SEO article that recommended getting backlinks from social bookmarking sites like diggo.com. Does anyone have any thoughts on the usefulness of these types of links?
Link Building | | casper4340