Website can't break into Google Top100 for main keywords, considering 301 Redirect to a new domain
-
A little background on our case.
Our website, ex: http://ourwebsite.com was officially live in December 2015 but it wasn't On-Site optimized and we haven't done any Off-site SEO to it.
In April we decided to do a small redesign and we did it an online development server. Unfortunately, the developers didn't disallow crawlers and the website got indexed while we were developing it on the development server. The development version that got indexed in Google was http://dev.web.com/ourwebsite
We learned that it got indexed when we migrated the new redesigned website to the initial domain. When we did the migration we decided to add www and now it looks like: http://www.ourwebsite.com
Meanwhile, we deleted the development version from the development server and submitted "Remove outdated content" from the development server's Search Console. This was back in early May.
It took about 15-20 days for the development version to get de-indexed and around 30 days for the original website (http://www.ourwebsite.com) to get indexed.
Since then we have started our SEO campaign with Press Releases, Outreach to bloggers for Guest and Sponsored Posts etc.
The website currently has 55 Backlinks from 44 Referring domains (ahrefs: UR25, DR37) moz DA:6 PA:1 with various anchor text.
We are tracking our main keywords and our brand keyword in the SERPs and for our brand keyword we are position #10 in Google, but for the rest of the main (money) keywords we are not in the Top 100 results in Google.
It is very frustrating to see no movement in the rankings for the past couple of months and our bosses are demanding rankings and traffic.
We are currently exploring the option of using another similar domain of ours and doing a complete 301 Redirect from the original http://www.ourwebsite.com to http://www.ournewebsite.com
Does this sound like a good option to you?
If we do the 301 Redirect, will the link-juice be passed from the backlinks that we already have from the referring domains to the new domain? Or because the site seems "stuck," would it not pass any power to the new domain?
Also, please share any other suggestions that we might use to at least break into the Top 100 results in Google?
Thanks.
-
Hi
I totally agree with Logan, the site is relstively new and its require more work along with good and strong stradgy. I don't see any point of being hit by Google with penalty.
You may also want to consider to check title and tags of your site. have a details technical audit along with on page audit as well.
It will start picking up. Any more question happy to help. -
Hi Daniel,
SEO requires a great deal of patience. Your site is only 8 months old, and depending on your industry, it could take much longer than that to achieve good organic visibility. I would not recommend moving to a new domain, that won't solve your problem, it will only confuse the search engines more. You've had a lot of ups and downs it sounds like, so hold tight. I just migrated a site from HTTP to HTTPS and it took 3 months for Google to completely drop the old HTTP URLs out of the index. These things take time.
It sounds like your site could benefit from some on-site optimization. Build out a keyword map (pairing each KW with a specific URL), you don't want to have too many topics on one page, and you don't want to have too many pages for one topic (one piece of content = one URL).
-
Hi Daniel,
I am trying to think with you here, not to give you a solution (sorry for that).
It sounds like your website was hit by Panda, the manual review (or automated) was initiated by creating the new dev site and allowing Google to index it, then deleting the website that Google has preferred to rank higher than your original website. Too many extreme changes that were not planned correctly.
Like with many Panda penalties, Google rarely tells you anything, nor tells you that your website is affected even. I have seen so many companies going down the route of creating a website on a new domain.
However, I'm wondering, if you 301 redirect your old website (which obviously is having big problems ranking-wise) wouldn't you be transferring the reputation alongside the equity? Wouldn't your website have the same bad ranking?
Also, if you are suffering with the current ranking, why would you want to transfer such equity to a freshly created website, with good usability and ticking many more boxes than the previous one on Google search result pages?
If I was you, and creating a website on a new domain, i would simply start from scratch. And make sure that the website is big on usability and unique high quality content. Then I would make sure that there are high quality, high authority websites linking to relevant pages on your new website.
I hope this helps you in anyway.
Best,
Issa
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 some domains and sub-domains have same DA, but some others don't?
Hi I noticed for some blog providers in my country, which provide a sub-domian address for their blogs. the sub-domain authority is exactly as the main domain. Whereas, for some other blog providers every subdomain has its different and lower authority. for example "ffff.blog.ir" and "blog.ir" both have domain authority of 60. It noteworthy to mention that the "ffff.blog.ir" does not even exist! This is while mihanblog.com and hfilm.mihanblog.com has diffrent page authority.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rayatarh5451230 -
Domain Name redirection to new Domain Name - VS - Transfering Domaine Name from account 1 to account 2
Hi there! Thanks for your time 😉 I have a new cutsomer that bought his domain name via WIX and your know... WIX sucks huge time for SEO. Basically, we want to do SEO outside of WIX. But I am not sure HOW I should proceed. I think I have 2 options: OPTION 1- We transfer the domain name from WIX to a new hoster. But we will lose 7 days during that, lose prospects while the website is in maintenance and we might lose the little bit of ranking we have on the way. BUT! ONCE Everything is done with the transfer, we will be able to operate our SEO campaing with a Domain Name that as 15 domain authority, links, little bit a ranking, etc. OPTION 2- I just buy a new domain name. I build the new Website on it and then use the SEO juice from the old domain name with redirect to push the new domain name. Like this, I won't lose any opportunities. BUT I will have to restart the SEO as new... Any tips or ideas for me? Maybe there is an OPTION 3 that I don't know about.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gab-SEO1 -
Moved brand's shop to a new domain. will our organic traffic recuperate?
Hello, We are a healthcare company with a strong domain authority and several thousand pages of service related content at brand.com. We've been operating an ancillary ecommerce store that sells related 3rd party products at brand.com/shop for a little over a year. We recently invested in a platform upgrade and moved our site to a new domain, brandshop.com. We implemented page-level 301 redirects including all category pages, product detail pages, canonical and non-canonical URLs, etc.. which the understanding that there would not be any loss in page rank. What we're seeing over the last 2 months is an initial dive in organic traffic, followed by a ramp-up period of if impressions (but not position) in the following weeks, another drop and we've steady at this low for the last 2 weeks. Another area that might have hurt us, the 301 redirects were implemented correctly immediately post launch (on a wednesday), but it was discovered on the following Monday that our .htaccess file had reverted to an old version without the redirect rules. For 3-4 days, all traffic was being redirected from brand.com/shop/url to brandshop.com/badurl. Can we expect to recover our organic traffic giving the launch screw up with the .htaccess file, or is it more of an issue with us separating from the brand.com domain? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eugene_p
Eugene0 -
Buying a Google News website, against Google Terms?
We are looking at buying a business that has a number of websites Is it against buying a business that has a Google News website and continue to use the site? Once the business is sold, would google remove the site from its News?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters0 -
No Results for Google/Bing Keyword Search by Domain Name
My site is bestwebconsult [dot] com When I do a search for my exact domain name in Google and bing, it does not appear at all. I have submitted a sitemap to Webmaster Tools. It is a relatively new site completed with in the last month. Built with Joomla. This leads me to believe that something is misconfigured on the website. Please advise, thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | crave811 -
My website hasn't been cached for over a month. Can anyone tell me why?
I have been working on an eCommerce site www.fuchia.co.uk. I have asked an earlier question about how to get it working and ranking and I took on board what people said (such as optimising product pages etc...) and I think i'm getting there. The problem I have now is that Google hasn't indexed my site in over a month and the homepage cache is 404'ing when I check it on Google. At the moment there is a problem with the site being live for both WWW and non-WWW versions, i have told google in Webmaster what preferred domain to use and will also be getting developers to do 301 to the preferred domain. Would this be the problem stopping Google properly indexing me? also I'm only having around 30 pages of 137 indexed from the last crawl. Can anyone tell me or suggest why my site hasn't been indexed in such a long time? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOAndy0 -
Redirecting Existing Domains to My Main Site
Hi I have a main property related website featuring different countries around the world. I also have many different seperate country websites 20+. All keyword rich domains with a good 9 years+ domain age and PR3's with decent links and moz rankings and unique content. Many of the sites are very low Alexa rank now and receive little traffic. I don't have the time now to spend on each of the individual domains and am wanting to consolidate them and their PR juice to the corresponding country page of my main website. My question is - is it possible - will google see this as me trying to manipulate them and is my main site likely to suffer from any penalties or downgrading? Thanks for your input.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | freecall0 -
When you buy a domain or website, does that trigger a fresh look by Google?
I recently purchased a domain and the corresponding website. For as far as I could tell, in the 12 months prior to my purchase, the site was well optimized within Google and had over 40 search terms on page 1 of Google in a really competitive space (lending-related). When I made the purchase, the domain was transferred from seller's GoDaddy account and into my GoDaddy account and I placed privacy protection on the domain. We did not move the hosting of the site--I took over his hosting account. And I did not make any significant changes to the website. About 1 week later, the site was totally removed from Google's index and I received notice in Google Webmaster Tools that the site may violate Google's quality guidelines. I filed reconsideration request telling Google that I was the new owner and that if there were any violations, they were caused by old owner. One week later, I got note back from Google saying they had received my reconsideration request and if they think issues are cured, then they will reindex the site. That was over a week ago and so seemingly they are not putting it back. My question is this: Does Google somehow automatically know when domains change hands and does this cause them to manually review sites? The site in question was aggressively optimized but I don't understand what would have caused Google to take action on the site when they did. In other words, if they were going to take action, why wouldn't they have done it in the prior 12 months or does the domain transfer put the site into some queue that makes them review it? BTW, the site in question has a SEOMoz domain authority grade of 85 and still is showing up as PR 5 Thanks very much for your time and consideration
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | whodatyat0