Penalties forcing us to move to a new domain
-
My ecommerce company has been under an unnatural link penalty for some time now. Over 2 months, removing 13,000 back links and submitting two reconsideration requests we have still been denied. We think the best route to take is to start a new domain. Does anyone have advice, resources, articles or anything else that can help us with this transition?
Just a recap : we want to move our existing site to a new site and pass no negative "link juice". Thanks in advance.
-
Ryan,
Thank you for the great information. Was your last sentence cut off or was that the end?
We do not believe it will be possible to fix the penalty in time frame we have so we have decided to just go with a new domain.
We would like to try and maintain any customers that happen to stumble upon our old site but want to make sure we do not get penalized in any way. We were thinking of just putting up a generic single landing page stating that we have moved but are afraid to actually mention or link to the new site as we do not want the new one to be penalized. Is this something we should be afraid of or could we link to the new domain? Or should we keep our current pages in place and link to the new corresponding page?
Do you have a recommendation / procedure to shutdown the old site properly and remove from Google before the new site is launched? Is there a problem just making small changes to the site but pretty much making an exact copy of the old site?
Thanks,
Brad
-
Hi Brad.
Your situation is somewhat common. If you acquired a manual penalty for manipulative links, you are highly unlikely to resolve the issue on your own. In most cases, even SEOs fail to resolve the penalty. Google is quite firm on the steps required to resolve the penalty.
If you decide to pursue the penalty removal, you should understand it does not matter how many manipulative links you remove. On my first penalized site I removed 3.5 million links which represented 97% of the links to the site, and the Reconsideration Request was declined. Google only removed the penalty after I gathered a list of every link to the site using multiple sources, then evaluated every link according to Google Guidelines, then turned in a spreadsheet demonstrating all the communication between the linking site and my client's site.
What matters is how many manipulative links remain. The number should be zero, which is not reasonably possible in most cases, so you need to thoroughly document for each link the efforts taken to remove the link. You need to solidly demonstrate you have taken every reasonable action possible to remove all manipulative links. If you complete this task, Google will remove the manual penalty 100% of the time in my experience.
we want to move our existing site to a new site and pass no negative "link juice"
In that case, do not 301 redirect the old domain to the new one. You will need to make a clean break. You can still salvage some good links by asking webmasters to update their links to your new site. Some links such as Dmoz or the BBB may be under your control and you can make the change yourself.
Otherwise, the standard advice to starting a new site apply. Choose the best domain possible. You basically have three choices:
-
a branded domain (i.e. Nike, Google, Twitter)
-
a keyword domain (i.e. carinsurance.com, seotools.com, etc.)
-
a hybrid (i.e. SEOmoz.org, burgerking.com, etc)
Each option has value. You should also thoroughly evaluate your website architecture, especially your URLs. You will have a clean chance to incorporate all best practices.
If you choose to begin a new domain,
-
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
-
Phasing in new website - new content on www2
Hi Mozzers, I'm working on a large website redesign / redevelopment project. New sections of the website will be phased in over the next 12 months. The plan is to launch all new content on a subdomain (www2.domain.com) while the old site remains on www.domain.com. There will be no duplicate content across the www and www2 sites, as old content will be removed on www as it is replaced with new content on www2. 301 redirects will also be setup from old content on www to new content on www2. Once the new site on www2 is complete, everything will be moved to www, with a robust 301 redirect setup in place. Is this approach logical, and can you see any SEO implication for managing the migration in this way? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RWesley0 -
301 process, migration to new domain
Hi all! We have an old site wordpress based, with great ranking and PR 7, called www.europe-internship.com which is going to be migrated into our new Django site www.eurasmus.com (specifically eurasmus.com/en/europe-internships)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Eurasmus.com
The new one is a much more advanced version that we will keep developing. We have been migrating the information already but we are planning to apply the 301s in the next weeks to start passing the SEO value to our new site and traffic. We have all the url structures and everything checked and technically we are ready for it.
Therefore, we are almost ready. I have 2 questions: The new site includes more services, like accommodation, information...not only internships. Therefore, should we point the most relevant urls from our previous site to our home to share the value or just to the internships section? I am afraid that if the bounce rate goes higher from the 301 we could loose some value... 2)Should we point all the urls at the same time to the new site? Home, vacancies, blog pages, etc... or start gradually doing it to see how it goes till we make it to all the pages including the home? The old site still makes some money and I am not sure how quick will be to pass the SEO value, so in the way we may loose few thousand euros...We understand that, but we want to check what would be the best in your opinion. Let me know what you think and your opinion! Thank you in advance!0 -
New domain purchase 301 and 404 issues. Please help!
We recently purchased www.carwow.com and 301 redirected the site to www.carwow.co.uk (our main domain). The problem is that carwow.com had URLs indexed like www.carwow.com/a-b-c the 301 sends them to carwow.co.uk/a-b-c which obviously doesn't exist so is a 404! What should be done in this situation? Should it be ignored and not re-directed at all, or is there a way to delete/disavow these dead pages? An SEO has advised we redirect all pages to the homepage, but won't that mess up the link profile? Any advice would be great!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JamesPursey0 -
Best Practices for Moving a Sub-Domain to a Sub-Folder
One of my clients is moving their subdomain to a subfolder on their main domain. (ie. blog.example.com to example.com/blog) I just wanted to get everyone's thoughts on some best practices for things we should be doing/looking for when making this move.? ie WMT, .htaccess, 301s etc? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DarinPirkey0 -
Moving categories to new domain
Hello Mozzers , I'm trying to find best possible solution for this situation. So there is a website (e-commerce) and since it's grew up too much we are looking to move several categories on different domain. The reason for this is that we introduce completely different product group (example: we have products that are related to watches and everything related to watch industry but now we introduce leather products: wallets, bags etc). Do you think it is worth it to move new categories to new domain in order to better target this product group? In case of positive answer which is the best way to do it - 301 redirect or leave the products on this site and build a new site with slightly different product description and names? Regards, Nenad
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Uniline0 -
Recovering from an Automatic penalty
My website dropped from ~15 to 500 + for our main keywords in target markets (but are still doing okay in other countries and for other keywords) I cleaned my site up and contacted Google who told me no manual spam actions were taken on my site. The only thing I can think is that we suffered from an automatic penalty (the drop corresponded with a small panda update). If that is in fact what happened, how do we recover? Also feel free to contribute other ideas about what may have occurred.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0 -
Subdomain and domain authority
I have Domain A (main content site, lots of content), with a domain authority of 91, and Domain B (blog of the first site, lots of content), with a domain authority of 82. I'm merging the blog into the main domain. Would it be best to keep it as a subdomain, or under a directory?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | smorrison0 -
Domain with a Virus History
Hi, I have a domain that I am working on that has a past we did not know about. Doing a bit of research it appears that back in 2010 the domain had a link to a virus or had a virus on the domain – because of this certain anti virus sites are blocking the domain. Interestingly Google, Norton, Firefox say the domain is fine.... IE, Kaspersky and a few still block it. I am going through and manually searching and trying to get them to agree the site is safe BUT I am having a problem with mywot.com. They refuse to take down the “reviews” staying its a virus site. Anything I can do? Any suggestions? Any legal action we can take? Is there anything else I can do or should be doing to check else where? Thanks in advance Fresh Fire One
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnW-UK0