Best way to start a fresh site from a penalized one
-
Dear all,
I was dealing with a penalized domain (Penguin, Panda), hundred of spamy links (Disavoved with no success), tiny content resolved in part and so on ....
I think the best way is to start a new fresh domain but we want to use some of the well written content from the old (penalized site).
To do this task I will mark as NOINDEX the source (penalized) page and move this content to the new fresh domain.
Question: do you think this is a non-dangerous aprouch or do you know other strategy?
I'll appreciate your point of view
Thank you
-
Hi Claudio,
To the question of "is it dangerous to start with similar content to the old site", I would say that it's very hard to tell. Some sites in some niches all have very similar content (think or real estate aggregator sites in the same cities - it's not as if they have access to different properties on the same market - they generally list the same houses for sale and rent at any one time). However, Google is ver adept at processing text to understand it if has been recycled or "spun" from other content it has seen before. If the original content came from a severely penalised website, re-using it in this manner would definitely not be risk-free.
You would probably also want to take the old site offline completely as opposed to simply noindexing its pages if you were to do this.
Google understands very "similar" content due to content spinning having been such a popular way to create content in previous years. If you can re-work your existing content to be of a fairly different length (shorter or longer), take a different paragraph structure, and be placed on the new site that is very dissimilar to the old one in terms of structure, this may work out well. I cannot say that this is risk free however, for all the reasons Casey has brought up already.
-
Dear Casey,
The new domain is on a different C-class, the whois info is different and event locked as private, the WMT and GAnalitycs will be on a different account, the design will be different and even I have planed upload a few products (pages) to start, and also it will be blocked by robots.
But my question is "is dangerous start with similar content to the old site", (some pages has a great content well written)
At this time I was working for two years with the old site and the traffic is recovery too slow, so our time has finished this is why we want to start a new domain using some of the old pages (previously marked as NOINDEX on the old site
Thank you for your time and knowledge
-
Claudio, I've always been inclined to believe the following:
"If Google CAN know something about your site, assume they DO know something about your site."
So in your case, yes, there is always going to be a danger that Google will see you as the owner of both sites (the penalized domain and the new one) and eventually move any penalties from one site to the other. Now, you can certainly minimize this possibility by doing the following:
- Keeping the sites out of the same GW Tools account.
- Making sure the new domain has different WHOIS information.
- Keeping the sites off of the same C-Class Server
- Minimizing similarities between the two sites as much as possible (including NO 301 redirects and design options).
Regardless, even doing the above may not be enough. I will say though that although Negative SEO does exist, I find it "questionable" that it is the main reason you are having problems. Google advises specifically that it's enough to just "drop those kind of links into a disavow." Most likely though, you have MUCH larger issues impacting the domain, especially if it's been 2+ years.
Definitely consider a professional audit. I really want you to consider existing all other methods before trying this strategy.
-
Dear Mates,
To clarify, I was working two years trying to resolve it, for example the toxic links comes from spam blogs created by competitors, take a look at this samples there are 200 blogs containing exactly this page and our site is linked there:
My plan is to create a fresh new site NO-301 no redirections, but I want to use some of the well performing contents (more than 500 words, well written), using these steps:
1. Make on the old site the content as NOINDEX.
2. Wait 15 days.
3. upload this content to the new site.
Do you think it could be dangerous?
Thank you for your responses
-
Hi Claudio,
I would echo the guys above in saying that it sounds like you could do more to revoke the penalty on the original site. If you begin anew, I would definitely not 301 the old domain (not that it sounds like you were going to), but I'd also invest in completely new content, rather than duplicating the old content. Google's ability to track duplicate content is amazingly good, so even a noindex on the old content could still have G draw a connection between content it penalised in the past and the new site.
Moosa is absolutely correct that it is better (and unfortunately much harder) to remove bad links than it is to just disavow them. Google's spam team often appreciate genuine effort to remove links - disavowal appears to work best if you have been unsuccessful in your link removal and can prove that you got in touch with as many sites as possible (screenshots of emails unanswered or answered unfavourably, for instance).
The other very good thing about removing links is that they can never hurt you again in the future if Google one day decides to change the way it views previous disavowals... which we certainly can't count on it not doing.
-
Casey is right Panda and Penguin are different penalties and they should be resolved differently! Penguin has to do with links so if there is a penguin penalty then you must have some toxic link within your link profile.
My idea here is to collect all the links (GWT, Moz, Ahrefs, and Majestic SEO) and then either manually check each link or use Link Detox or Link Risk to kill all the links that are unhealthy. If the penalty is penguin you will receive a Google message to either remove more links (with some examples of the link) or it will give you a positive message that will say “The penalty has now been revoked”
Note: It is better to remove as many bad links as you can before disavow them.
In case of Panda, the problem is within your site and content so may be the content you think is high quality isn’t really high quality in the eye of Google and in this case you should considerer redoing your content.
All in all I believe the decision of going for a new domain is too early at this stage, my advice is to look in to the penalty details and deal with it.
Hope this helps!
-
To be blunt, moving from one penalized domain to another to escape a penalty is most likely a complete waste of time. It's been a known fact for years that penalties follow 301 redirects. But it was recently clarified by Google that "moving" your penalized site (and that includes content) to another domain to escape a penalty is also a foolish choice. Google now reserves the right to move a penalty to any new domain (something we've suspected for awhile, but now can confirm).
In your case, I'd strongly look at continuing to salvage the domain. If you weren't aware of the above, then I'm hesitant to believe that you've also done EVERYTHING you can to unwind your algorithmic penalty. Further, you reference both Penguin/Panda above and yet BOTH have clear different approaches to how they should be resolved. Maybe your "high-quality content" isn't really as high-quality as you think? Maybe you haven't disavowed all the toxic links/domains affecting your site? Have you tried to seek out a professional Google penalty site audit? I'm not convinced you've done all you can just based on your question.
No judgments, but personally, no, I don't believe this is a "non-dangerous approach."
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
-
Mobile First Index: What Could Happen To Sites w Large Desktop but Small Mobile Sites?
I have a question about how Mobile First could affect websites with separate (and smaller) mobile vs desktop sites. Referencing this SE Roundtable article (seorountable dot com /google-mobile-first-index-22953.html), "If you have less content on your mobile version than on your desktop version - Google will probably see the less content mobile version. Google said they are indexing the mobile version first." But Google/ Gary Illyes are also on the record stating the switch to mobile-first should be minimally disruptive. Does "Mobile First" mean that they'll consider desktop URLs "second", or will they actually just completely discount the desktop site in lieu of the mobile one? In other words: will content on your desktop site that does not appear in mobile count in desktop searches? I can't find clear answer anywhere (see also: /jlh-marketing dot com/mobile-first-unanswered-questions/). Obviously the writing is on the wall (and has been for years) that responsive is the way to go moving forward - but just looking for any other viewpoints/feedback here since it can be really expensive for some people to upgrade. I'm basically torn between "okay we gotta upgrade to responsive now" and "well, this may not be as critical as it seems". Sigh... Thanks in advance for any feedback and thoughts. LOL - I selected "there may not be a right answer to this question" when submitting this to the Moz community. 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mirabile0 -
Not Adding Fresh Content Daily Did Got Me Penalized?
One of my website used to post like a 1000 words articles every 4-5 (say like 12 x 300 words articles each in a week) days in a week. The process went till 3 months. Then suddenly we stopped adding content to it for a flat 15 days due to unavailability of content writer. Suddenly a major drop took place. Now we have been adding the same amount of quality content but the ranking doesn't seem to be improving. Is it a penalty?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | welcomecure0 -
SEO question regarding rails app on www.site.com hosted on Heroku and www.site.com/blog at another host
Hi, I have a rails app hosted on Heroku (www.site.com) and would much prefer to set up a Wordpress blog using a different host pointing to www.site.com/blog, as opposed to using a gem within the actual app. Whats are peoples thoughts regarding there being any ranking implications for implementing the set up as noted in this post on Stackoverflow: "What I would do is serve your Wordpress blog along side your Rails app (so you've got a PHP and a Rails server running), and just have your /blog route point to a controller that redirects to your Wordpress app. Add something like this to your routes.rb: _`get '/blog', to:'blog#redirect'`_ and then have a redirect method in your BlogController that simply does this: _`classBlogController<applicationcontrollerdef redirect="" redirect_to="" "url_of_wordpress_blog"endend<="" code=""></applicationcontrollerdef>`_ _Now you can point at yourdomain.com/blog and it will take you to the Wordpress site._
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Anward0 -
Merging 4 websites into one for a new site release (301 question)
Hi guys and girls, I have a client that has 4 very outdated websites with about 50 pages on each. They are made up like: 1 brand group and 3 for each individual key service they offer, so let's call them: brand.com (A) brand-service-1.com (B) brand-service-2.com (C) brand-service-3.com (D) We've rebuilt the main site and aggregated all the content from the others (99% re-written). Am I correct in thinking the process for the new lauch would be: 1. Launch the new site on brand.com (A) and 301 all the old brand.com (A) pages to the related pages on the new site. 2. Redirect the other websites (B,C,D) on a domain level to the new site on the brand.com (A) domain. 3. Clean up the old URL's, sitemaps, errors in Google WMT Is this right? Anything I missed/better practices? I was also wondering if I should redirect B,C,D in stages, or use page level redirects.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shloy23-2945840 -
Best Way to Optimize 38 Local Directory Listing In Major Directories
Hi Folks, I am trying to figure out the best way to get our company's 38 U.S. locations in the major local directories. To start, I'd like to get us listed in the major ones: Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Yelp. I do have the resources myself here on staff to do everything manually. So, I don't necessarily need a service like Yext (but would also like any opinions on that offering if anyone can offer it). But, from what I know in the past, every time you try to claim a local listing within each platform, you have to confirm your existence there somehow - whether it be by a mailed postcard or some sort of automated call they give you. Considering that we want to manage all social and local platforms here at corporate, how can we do this? I am not physically at these locations, but I'm sure this is possible to manage everything through one account. The addresses will be local, but the phone numbers on each local profile will route to our customer service here at corporate because the local locations are mostly administrative. In other words, businesses is booked through corporate and carried out at local destinations. Thoughts/Comments?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CSawatzky
I want to do what's best for SEO and also dont' want to harm anything or our link equity. Thanks,
Pedram0 -
Google Freshness Update & Ecommerce Site Strategies
Just curious what other ecommerce SEO's are doing to battle fresh content. We've been having our clients work on internal blogs, adding articles one click away from landing pages, and implement product reviews when possible but I don't know that it's enough. Our bigger customers have landing pages (usually category pages) with very competitive keywords. So my main issue is what to do with fresh content on category pages.. I've toyed with the idea of having the landing page content re written every now and then. We used to use a blog parser to bring snippits of comments from the blog into landing pages but I believe that to be a problem with duplicate content. News snippits from other sites don't seem beneficial either. Anyone have any other ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iAnalyst.com0 -
Site: on Google
Hello, people. I have a quick question regarding search in Google. I use search operator [site:url] to see indexing stauts of my site. Today, I was checking indexing status and I found that Google shows different numbers of indexed pages depends on search setting. 1. At default setting (set as 10 search result shows) > I get about 150 pages indexed by Google. 2. I set 100 results shows per page and tried again. > I get about 52 pages indexed by Google. Of course I used same page URL. I really want to know which data is accurate. Please help people!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Artience0