301 Redirect domain with penalty
-
Wondering if I could get a few views on this please...
I have added an affiliate store to a domain I own, however I forgot to noindex the product pages which were duplicate content of the merchants. Despite a good deal of backlink building the site will not do much in the engines at all, doesn't even come up on the first few pages for it's own name!
This suggests to me that I have a duplicate content penalty. Try as I may I cannot get it removed so am thinking of cloning the domain to a new domain, however, I do not want to lose the links I collected so I am planning on 301ing them.
While I will not get all the link power moved over, I should at least get credit for some of them which will kick start the new domain.
Can anyone forsee any potential issues with doing this? Is there a danger of 301ing a site with a penalty that the penalty would be carried over? I know there is no penalty on the links, no WMT warnings etc, it is the content causing the issue.
Thanks,
Carl
-
It sounds like you are mostly concerned about the Panda algorithm. A site with lots of duplicate content and nothing else of value other than the duplicate content could definitely be affected by Panda. While it is true that redirecting a Penguin hit site to another will pass on the algorithmic issues to the new site, redirecting a Panda hit site really should not. With that being said, it doesn't make sense to do a redirect. If the issue was that you had page after page of non-original content then noindexing that content should do the trick. The next time Google refreshes Panda (which is usually monthly) then you should be in the good books as far as Panda is concerned. Putting the same content on a new domain, and noindexing the duplication wouldn't really work any better IMO.
However, you have to have good, useful content there in order to rank. If all you've got is affiliate content that adds no unique value, then you're in trouble.
There are things other than Panda that can affect rankings though too. You may want to look at your analytics data and sort it by Google organic traffic to see if you can pinpoint the day of your decline. Then, compare that to known Panda/Penguin dates.
As mentioned by others, if you have been building links then you should look at the Penguin algorithm as well.
-
As Michael said, a 301 will carry the penalty to the new domain, if it didn't everyone would do it without actually fixing the issues.
Instead, take another approach, try to fix the issue. If it is an algorithmic penalty, once you fix everything you think could be causing the "penalty" (as you are not 100% sure), noindex the entire store or the pages using a meta tag or the robots.txt.
Are those pages within the same subdomain? domain.com/penalized-pages or is it a subdomain? penalized-pages.domain.com
-
Are you sure that it's a duplicate content issue? There's some useful insight here:
If you've been "link building" are you sure that it isn't a Penguin issue.
Alternatively, if the content is duplicate is may not be a penalty as such, might just be the case that Google is not indexing/returning the pages as it does not see any value to them?
Seen plenty of websites hit by Penguin (algorithm) with no warning or notice in WMT (manual ?).
Would agree with Michael that a 301 will almost certainly carry forward any penalty/bad reputation issues.
Chris.
-
Michael. thanks for the reply.
I'm 99% sure it is a duplicate content penalty. A couple of years back, through an old company, I used to run affiliate review sites which would get lots of datafeeds and build auto stores from them. These were very profitable until google clamped down on dup content, after that the sites wouldn't rank for anything.
The current site seems to be along the same lines, all seems ok for the links but it seems to have a minus x place penalty on it. I have no indexed all the affiliate pages on the new site (an oversight when making it) so, in time, I would expect the penalty to be removed, however cannot be sure if this will be weeks, months or never
-
If you 301 a toxic domain then the toxicity will pass on to the new domain.
The first thing to do is determine if there is an algorithmic penalty applied to the domain, which could relate to either content or the link profile.
-
Oops not sure how I ended up with a pound sign in the title
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
-
Google is still indexing the old domain a year after 301 redirects are put in place
Hi there, You might have experienced this before but for me this is the first. A client of mine moved from domain A (www.domainA.com) to domain B (www.domainB.com). 301 redirects are all in place for over a year. But the old domain is still showing in Google when you search for "site:domainA.com" The HTTP Header check shows this result for the URL https://www.domainA.com/company/cookie-policy.aspx HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently =>
Technical SEO | | iQi
Cache-Control => private
Content-Length => 174
Content-Type => text/html; charset=utf-8
Location => https://www.domain_B_.com/legal/cookie-policy
Server => Microsoft-IIS/10.0
X-AspNetMvc-Version => 5.2
X-AspNet-Version => 4.0.30319
X-Powered-By => ASP.NET
Date => Fri, 15 Mar 2019 12:01:33 GMT
Connection => close Does the redirect look wrong? The change of address request was made on Google Console when the website was moved over a year ago. Edit: Checked the domainA.com on bing and it seems that its not indexed, and replaced with domainB.com, which is the right. Just Google is indexing the old domain! Please let me know your thoughts on why this is happening. Best,0 -
301 Redirect keep html files on server?
Hello just one quick question which came up in the discussion here: http://moz.com/community/q/take-a-good-amount-of-existing-landing-pages-offline-because-of-low-traffic-cannibalism-and-thin-content When I do 301 redirects where I put together content from 2 pages, should I keep the page/html which redirects on the server? Or should I delete? Or does it make no difference at all?
Technical SEO | | _Heiko_0 -
Htaccess code to 301 redirect a folder change
Hi, I need some help to redirect all my site as there was a folder change. eg, the old structure was www.mysite.com/stuff-1/bags.html and I need it to go to the same structure without the "-1" eg: /stuff/bags.html
Technical SEO | | Paul_MC
The "bags.html" will be lots of different products, so this would be a wildcard? What would the htaccess code need to be? Thanks0 -
If I switch my domain name, will I keep link juice from redirect?
I am moving one of my sites wellington-florida-homes.com to a new domain (wellingtonfloridahomes.com). Most of our link-juice is coming from another domain we purchased (theshockleyteam.com) that is redirected to our primary site. If I simply redirect theshockleyteam.com to our new domain (wellingtonfloridahomes.com) I will still have the link juice passing through, right? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | RickyShockley0 -
How do I fix a 301 Redirect Loop?
Saturday I waas doing some correcting of some duplicate titles, including nofollowing tags, etc. (my main problem was duplicate titles due to tags and categories being indexed). Now this morning I see that one of my pages refuses to load, citing a 301 redirect loop. http://www.incredibleinfant.com/feeding/switching-baby-formula/ Originally, the page was posted under the wrong category. http://www.incredibleinfant.com/uncategorized/switching-baby-formula I resaved it under the correct category (feeding) and now it won't load. Can someone help me figure out how to correct this mess? Thanks so much Heather
Technical SEO | | Gotmoxie0 -
To 301 redirect or not to 301 redirect? duplicate content problem www.domain.com and www.domain.com/en/
Hello, If your website is getting flagged for duplicate content from your main domain www.domain.com and your multilingual english domain www.domain.com/en/ is it wise to 301 redirect the english multilingual website to the main site? Please advise. We've recently installed the joomish component to one of our joomla websites in an effort to streamline a spanish translation of the website. The translation was a success and the new spanish webpages were indexed but unfortunately one of the web developers enabled the english part of the component and some english webpages were also indexed under the multilingual english domain www.domain.com/en/ and that flagged us for duplicate content. I added a 301 redirect to redirect all visitors from the www.domain/en/ webpages to the main www.domain.com/ webpages. But is that the proper way of handling this problem? Please advise.
Technical SEO | | Chris-CA0 -
Redirecting an Old Domain
One of my clients has a newish e-commerce website that was just redesigned. Part of this new marketing push is shutting down an old yahoo store. The problem is that this old store's domain has a 10 year old link in DMoz and is there fore in about 200 other directories. Is pointing that old domain at the new website going to be enough to keep all of that link juice flowing?
Technical SEO | | Simple_Machines0 -
I think I'm stuck in a 301 redirect loop
Hi all, I'm trying to correct some of my duplicate content errors. The site is built on Miva Merchant and the storefront page, /SFNT.html, needs to be permanently redirected to www.mydomain.com This is what my .htaccess file looks like: #RedirectPermanent /index.html http://dev.mydomain.com/mm5/merchant.mvc? RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^dev.mydomain.com$ [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*) http://dev.emydomain.com/$1 [L,R=301] DirectoryIndex index.html index.htm index.php /mm5/merchant.mvc redirect 301 /SFNT.html http://dev.mydomain.com/ RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} Screen=SFNT&Store_Code=MYSTORECODE [NC] When I use this code and navigate to http://dev.mydomain.com/SFNT.html the URL gets rewritten as http://dev.mydomain.com/?Screen=SFNT So I believe this is what's called a "redirect loop".... Can anyone provide any insight? I'm not a developer, but have been tasked with cleaning up the problems on the website and can use any input anyone is willing to offer. Thanks, jr
Technical SEO | | Technical_Contact0