Starting over after a Penguin Penalty
-
Hi,
Has anyone tried starting a new domain after being hit with a Penguin penalty? I'm considering the approach outlined here: https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2384644/can-you-safely-redirect-users-from-a-penguin-hit-site-to-a-new-domain.
In a nutshell, de-index the OLD site completely via Google's Removal Tool, and then relaunch old content under new domain.
This seems to have merit, unless Google keeps a hidden cache of content (or uses other sources like Wayback Machine). My concern is doing the above listed approach, but Google still passes the old links to the new domain.
We have great content, but too much spam (despite me removing a lot of the links + disavow).
Any feedback based on experience would be appreciated.
Thanks.
-
Pleasure. Keep me posted.
-
This helps a lot. Thank you. I'll update the results to help shed light on this.
Thanks again for your time.
-
Hey
This is tough and the article you link to covers many of the reasons why. Sure, there are penguin recoveries, but for every one of them I would venture there are ten sites still suffering. Many of these sites no longer have any (or many at least) dodgy links and it seems that algorithmic penalty is just lingering around. Will they see resolution when the algorithm updates and refreshes? At this point who knows? I don't think just because site A recovered you can make an assumption that site B will do the same.
In our experience we have seen sites really clean everything up and bounce back. We have seen sites clean everything up and not see resolution around the key pages / search terms all these years later. We have at least three folks we have worked with who don't want to change domain and who are waiting for the this somewhat overdue real time Penguin update.
It does not always seem very fair however we must accept that what is what is and look at solutions around that.
A new domain
We have seen some good results here. Sites that just could not recover using a new domain and bouncing back. We have seen this work with the same content when the other site is left up as a holding page (we have now moved). I don't think it hurts to just generally consider doing a refresh and renovation if you are going to move to a new site so you get all the on site signals 100% dialled in.
Your old site remains indexed. I would let all pages bar the homepage 404 to kill as many non homepage inbound links as possible but just have a good 404 page in place to let the user know what to do. I would likely disavow all the bad links to the old site as well so they are technically not considered.
Your new site will then exist on it's own merit so focus on getting any good links updated and just do good work on that site to make it as good as it can be. If you see keywords that are were previously 50+ jump into the 20s or so then you know you are on the right track.
My advice would be:
- clean up and disavow all links bad links to old site
- 404 all pages bar the homepage for the old site with a helpful 404 page
- add a nice little (unfollowed if you want) link to the new site
- freshen up the content and site so it is not an exact copy
- get any good links that you can updated to point at the new site
- track the old domain for a few terms to see if it does recover over time (so you can consider what to do with it then)
Experiment and report back
Ultimately you have to experiment. Keep that old site indexed. Freshen up the new one. Disavow and clean up the old links + keep an eye on the old one as it may well recover and give you more options (after careful analysis).
Much like the article you quote there is no hard and fast answer here. You have to make the best calls possible and review the results and keep tweaking.
Hope that helps!
Marcus
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 penalty was lifted when an SSL was added, only to come back. Have you seen this?
We took on a client who is under penalty (various reasons). The solution was a ground up new website with fresh content, domain, everything. This client has everything "right" in Google. Everything you would want a client to do, he's done. Great reviews, great offsite engagement, video, etc. Recently we updated his SSL and for about 1 week he came off penalty, only to come back on penalty (top three for every major term in a very competitive market back to around page three). Do you have any experience with this and if so, I'd love to hear your advice/rational of why this occurred and what it means?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mgordon0 -
How to know website is hit with panda or penguin?
My Website traffic and keywords dropped day by day. How can I know website is hit with panda or penguin. Website is - 24hourpassportandvisas. com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bondhoward0 -
SEO Experts: Where did you start?
Hi all! I'm beginning to travel down the road of becoming an SEO expert! I've attended the latest few webinars on Moz, and have started watching the White Board Fridays. However I'm wondering, for the current SEO Experts, how did you get to where you are today? I.e. What books did you read? Did you pay for classes or just learn everything from Moz? Where is a good place to get an SEO Expert Certification/Is it necessary? How long did it take you to become an expert? (Stuff like that) I suppose I'm looking to make a list for myself, organizing what I should learn first, and then create a timeline moving forward. Thanks for your help Mozzers! - Briana B.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JCWhelan13 -
Showing on page 25 for url keyword/ brand, is it a penalty?
Hi I have a site which shows on page 25 in G serps for the main brand keyword which is also the url its a .com and as far as I can see has no penalties and has unique content. The keyword itself has no competition and the site should be no1 in G for it. Our site domain is 11 years old.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MoneySite0 -
Trying to advise on what seems to be a duplicate content penalty
So a friend of a friend was referred to me a few weeks ago as his Google traffic fell off a cliff. I told him I'd take a look at it and see what I could find and here's the situation I encountered. I'm a bit stumped at this point, so I figured I'd toss this out to the Moz crowd and see if anyone sees something I'm missing. The site in question is www.finishlinewheels.com In Mid June looking at the site's webmaster tools impressions went from around 20,000 per day down to 1,000. Interestingly, some of their major historic keywords like "stock rims" had basically disappeared while some secondary keywords hadn't budged. The owner submitted a reconsideration request and was told he hadn't received a manual penalty. I figured it was the result of either an automated filter/penalty from bad links, the result of a horribly slow server or possibly a duplicate content issue. I ran the backlinks on OSE, Majestic and pulled the links from Webmaster Tools. While there aren't a lot of spectacular links there also doesn't seem to be anything that stands out as terribly dangerous. Lots of links from automotive forums and the like - low authority and such, but in the grand scheme of things their links seem relevant and reasonable. I checked the site's speed in analytics and WMT as well as some external tools and everything checked out as plenty fast enough. So that wasn't the issue either. I tossed the home page into copyscape and I found the site brandwheelsandtires.com - which had completely ripped the site - it was thousands of the same pages with every element copied, including the phone number and contact info. Furthering my suspicions was after looking at the Internet Archive the first appearance was mid-May, shortly before his site took the nose dive (still visible at http://web.archive.org/web/20130517041513/http://brandwheelsandtires.com) THIS, i figured was the problem. Particularly when I started doing exact match searches for text on the finishlinewheels.com home page like "welcome to finish line wheels" and it was nowhere to be found. I figured the site had to be sandboxed. I contacted the owner and asked if this was his and he said it wasn't. So I gave him the contact info and he contacted the site owner and told them it had to come down and the owner apparently complied because it was gone the next day. He also filed a DMCA complaint with Google and they responded after the site was gone and said they didn't see the site in question (seriously, the guys at Google don't know how to look at their own cache?). I then had the site owner send them a list of cached URLs for this site and since then Google has said nothing. I figure at this point it's just a matter of Google running it's course. I suggested he revise the home page content and build some new quality links but I'm still a little stumped as to how/why this happened. If it was seen as duplicate content, how did this site with no links and zero authority manage to knock out a site that ranked well for hundreds of terms that had been around for 7 years? I get that it doesn't have a ton of authority but this other site had none. I'm doing this pro bono at this point but I feel bad for this guy as he's losing a lot of money at the moment so any other eyeballs that see something that I don't would be very welcome. Thanks Mozzers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NetvantageMarketing2 -
Recent Penguin Update
Hi SEOMoz, Today www.carrentalbuddy.com.au was hit pretty big by the Penguin 2.0 update (I believe). We had some pretty strong rankings for multiple search terms and we believe we have done everything by the book for Google. We can't seem to figure out why our rankings have dropped so dramatically recently and was hoping that some SEOMoz's could take a quick look to help us fix this problem. Kindest Regards, Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kymodo0 -
How to move domain content w Penguin Penalty?
Hey guys, I've come to the conclusion the sheer amount of crap links a site of ours has is un repairable. We own a .net version with the same brand name so I'm planning to move our ecommerce store over with all its content. I can move the site in one swoop but I believe Google will see it as duplicate content if we don't allow the old site to de index first. I would simply take it down for a month but we still get some orders now and then. Anyone have any ideas? I was thinking of leaving an image up on each page that is no index no follow linked to the new site that explains the site is being moved, etc.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iAnalyst.com1 -
Google Penalty, Which one is hitting me?
Hello there SEOMOZ'ers, Just signed up for a Pro Account. Impressed with the trial. Just wondering is there any way to find out if you have fallen foul of a Google update, is there any way to know which you have fallen foul of or is the date it happens the only guide or pointer to what might have happened? My site was getting a reasonable amount of traffic for the last few years and was ranking well for my main search terms up till Feburary the 4th when the traffic fell by almost 50% ... and it has never really recovered. I thought it might be the Above the Fold Advertising penalty (or whatever it is called) because I had a lot of images linking elsewhere on my site, above the fold on my homepage, but I removed them about 4 weeks ago and the traffic still hasnt recovered. I've been using SEOMOZ to detect duplicate content and various other problems with my site since and fixing a good few of them each week. I have the main issues down from about 300 to about 20 which i think i have just fixed. I have also used Copyscape and found that some other websites had stolen some of my content, which i have since rewritten. I was ranking number 2 or 3 for my main keyword but dropped out of the top 100 in February, which is pretty frustrating at this stage. I don;t know if I have accidentally gone too far over optimising my site or what has happened. If anyone can give me some pointers I'd really appreciate it, if anyone can help me fix it I'll buy them a beer next time you are in Ireland! 🙂 Thanks, Shane
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shaneod0