How to avoid Google penalties being inherited when moving on with a new domain?
-
Looking for SEOs who have experience with resetting projects by migrating on to a new domain to shed either a manual or algorithmic penalty.
My questions are:
- For algorithmic penalties, what is the best migration strategy to avoid inheriting any kind of baggage? 301, 302, establish no connection between the two sites?
- For manual penalties, what is the best migration strategy to avoid inheriting any kind of baggage? 301, 302, establish no connection between the two sites?
Any other input on these kind of reset projects is appreciated.
-
Spanish,
I think you really need to consider what you are doing and why you are doing it. First, a manual penalty means you are on Googles radar and you are outside their terms of service in some way. If your decision is to get a new domain then what you should do is put the old one in the trash and forget it ever happened. You are starting from square one if you are smart IMO. Why? because if it is a penalty around linking and you redirect to a new domain, you are going to carry that wait to the next site. That doesn't mean that the penalty will show up on your new domain at point just because of the old, but there is no real value in the links so why risk it? There are just too many reasons not to try and save the old and move it to the new with redirects. BUT, is there a reason you would not simply address the penalty? Maybe it is cost as cleanup is expensive; if so, you weigh cost of cleanup versus cost of rebuild to all new site with new domain.
Second, an "algorithmic penalty" is something we say from time to time, but if you are using that as a line of thinking - "the algorithm has in some way penalized us" - you are then setting yourself up for further pain down the road IMO. With a site failing to rank because you have bad links, poor content, ads everywhere, I suggest you not look at it as a penalty. Look at is as: "What must we do in order to grow our site in value to our customer and in ranking against our competitors?" If you believe you have a "penalty" of sorts you are really saying things are not as good as they could be. Why not change things? If it is linking, disavow bad domains and links and move on. If it is Panda in your thinking, what can you do to change the content, etc.?
Often, when this type of question arises there have been a series of missteps by a site owner trying to shortcut really building a web property. If there were true short cuts without risk, I can tell you I would have found them or learned of them from people on various forums like Moz. I simply do not know of any.
Clean things up and move on or start over and move on. I think that is the only choice you face. I wish it were easier for all of us.
Best -
What is your domain authority, age and indexed page number?
If you've come to the point where you've tried every possible e.g. cleared all crawl errors, disavowed and removed 7/10 links on the spam score link scale in OSE. Remove pages that Google may perceive as invaluable. Then and only then would I go to a completely new domain.
I wouldn't use any content from the previous site either as your original site would most likely be given credit for the original source since it's in Google's index already.
As you can tell it would be a last resort for me to move domains unless I had very few indexed pages / valuable inbound links and a low domain authority I could easily build up again.
-
Thanks Cian,
It is an algorithmic penalty (likley primarily Panda). Significant recovery work has happened since over a year ago but we are not seeing any recoveries despite the recent Panda refreshes.
What I hear you saying is try to avoid any cross connections (including GA id etc) and start fresh and maybe repoint some valuable links?
-
Are you moving domains just because you've been hit with an algorithmic or manual action?
I'd personally try and solve the penalties before I'd make the decision to move to a new domain. If you don't want to solve the penalisation issues on your current site and move directly to a new one I'd try and distance myself from the old domain and establish no connection between the two sites.
If you feel your old domain has a high authority and you desperately want to keep the value you have built up then it's quite simple. You need to solve those penalisation issues. Work with the Google Manual action team to disavow spammy or illegitimate links. Focus on only keeping unique and engaging content on your site and adhere to Google Panda's solution criteria - duplicate content, titles, descriptions etc. Use Screaming Frog or Moz Pro to detect these issues.
Focus on helping the user while not breaking Google terms and conditions and you'll be fine.
One last note. A client of mine was hit with a manual action and I believe algorithmic penalisation. His site was able to recover in three months with a lot of work. The back and forth between Google's Manual Action team was the most time consuming.
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
-
25% of expired domains came with a Google manual penalty
25% of expired domains purchased came with a Google manual penalty, even when Moz spam score was 0 . Read the whole case study here: http://www.authoritywriters.com/2017/10/google-manual-penalty-on-expired-domains.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bluishclouds0 -
Should I start new domain and redirect site?
I recently my rankings for http://www.top-10-dating-reviews.com (some adult content) drop off a cliff. Google tells me there's no manual penalty therefore it might be algorithmic. I don't know why my rankings went but I think it could be that I added A LOT of category pages pulling the same content from posts and this could have caused both duplicate content issues and too many on page links causing an algo penalty. Ive deleted the categories and therefore fixed duplicate content issue (perhaps you guys could check out the site and see that you agree with me) but rankings have not improved even thougo most of the pages have been recrawled. I read somewhere its extremely hard to recover from such a penalty so should I move my site to a and domain and redirect all urls? I can't think of another solution. Any help appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
Odd Results Moving Subdomain Content onto Main Domain
Hi forum! On Thursday night (12/6/12) we moved a page (and all the linking product pages) from our subdomain, mailing-list.consumerbase.com, to our main domain, www.consumerbase.com/mailing-lists.html Shockingly, today I search for "mailing lists" (our #1 target keyword) and we're on the first page! This page never has not ranked well for this keyword in the past. The problem is, the link displaying on Google is our old mailing-list.consumerbase.com subdomain URL. Did moving this content from the new subdomain to our old, well-established domain cause it to appear better in search? Or, since the URL is on the subdomain, did Google just finally get around to indexing that page? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W0 -
Stupid Question?? Is [painter new york] the same keyword as [painter in new york]?
Hi, This may be a stupid question but... Google ignores short/common words like 'in', so if I optimize a page for 'painter in new york' will it rank just as well for 'painter new york'? In Google's keyword tool, exact match gives [painter new york] 140 searches per month but [painter in new york] gets < 10. However, it is much more difficult to write 'painter new york' naturally into body copy than it is 'painter in new york'. So what do I do? Thanks 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | StrayCat0 -
Moving to a new domain
We currently rank well in our niche on a long (and ambiguous) domain, but want to rebrand and have a shorter and more memorable domain. Keeping in mind we're already pointing good links at the new domain (301ing them to the old site), how long should we age the domain before switching the content and 301ing the old site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | errspy0 -
Domains merging
Hi everyone, The company I work for has two domains, one for the english version of the website and another one for the french version. Example: www.digitalmusic.com (in english) www.musiquedigitale.com (in french) (these are examples***) I would like to know if on SEO standpoint it would be better to only have one domain so all of the links link to the same domain. Would it increase the domain authority and our rankings ? We will then have: www.digitalmusic.com/fr/page1 for pages in french www.digitalmusic.com/en/page1 for pages in english with all the 301 redirects required... Thank you in advance for your answers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Maxxum0 -
Redirecting One Page of Content on Domain A to Domain B
Let's say I have a nice page of content on Domain A, which is a strong domain. That page has a nice number of links from other websites and ranks on the first page of the SERPs for some good keywords. However, I would like to move that single page of content to Domain B using a 301 redirect. Domain B is a slightly weaker domain, however, it has better assets to monetize the traffic that visits this page of content. I expect that the rankings might slip down a few places but I am hoping that I will at least keep some of the credit for the inbound links from other websites. Has anyone ever done this? Did it work as you expected? Did the content hold its rankings after being moved? Any advice or philosophical opinions on this? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EGOL2 -
How Many Results Does Google Show From The Same Domain?
Hi, From a few years ago I know 'double listings' were considered prime real estate. These days I can see triple listing, google places, PDFs all from the same domain. Im confused as the what the standard is now. I have been asked for some reverse SEOing to push down some bad press (keyword is the brand name) and am curious to know whether I still can get some high results by making a sub domain, optmising some more internal pages etc. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DigitalLeaf0