Time for a new domain post-Penguin?
-
Hi there,
Quick overview of a client who came to us after having the vast majority of their link value slashed by Penguin.
- Client only has a limited 'recovery budget'
- Client had been outsourcing SEO to a foreign company
- The website was 'keyword stuffed' when we arrived
- Links were of poor quality, the company clearly majoring on quantity rather than quality.
- Client was ranking #4 or #3 for a keyword which was bringing in sales.
- Post penguin, dropped to page 5 and then out of the top 100 for that keyword, losing 70% of sales.
The client, under our supervision has
- Rewritten spammy content so they work for human beings (so it now reads well)
- Gone through the website and is removing old/duplicate and low-quality content
- De-emphasised other pages for the target keyword so that only one page majors on it.
- After doing the above has submitted a reconsideration request (about 2 weeks ago, so I know there's time).
We are focussing on ensuring her content is written well and on building decent links to the site (i.e. to put some good-uns where the bad ones were).
We're into month 2 of the 'clean-up exercise' and the site is still only ranking #90 for the keyword.
Given the client's budgetary limitation, could it be more beneficial to consider a new brand identity and domain name to start afresh (without a 301 redirect) or should we just continue along the track we are doing with this client?
Thanks!
-
Hey Russ,
Thanks for your reply. I will do my best to answer your questions 'back at me'!
1. I was aware that the reconsideration request may have no impact and as the client doesn't recall receiving a penalty notice, I just got it done to ensure we were covering all basis. And for a couple of minutes used, I thought it would be worth checking.
2. I agree we need to do some link removal. One question on the back of that, and ensuring we do what is needed within the client's limited budget is, if the links/websites are no longer listed in Google (which from the partial data we have from the old company, many are not), does removing them hold any value as the links won't be passing signals of any kind if the site's not in the SERPs any more, right?
3. My only concern with this one is the risk of duplicated content. The client has already re-written the home page and is in the process of re-writing the others because of the previous company's spammy SEO approach. To get them to write another version is going to be too much for them. I'm definitely considering getting them on a fresh domain but don't want to inadvertently cause them more problems!
Thanks for the article, that came out during a time of illness so I completely missed it. Thanks!
-
Hi Martin,
First off, thanks for the great information you provided in your question - saves a lot of time when there is stuff to work with
1. The reconsideration request should have little to no impact if Penguin was the culprit. Penguin is algorithmic and does not require a recon request. Did the client get an unnatural links notice?
2. If it was Penguin, you will need to do some link removals to clean things up. There is a great SEOMoz post on a case study regarding link removals and Penguin here. There are also both services and tools that assist with bad backlink removals.
3. Determining whether to start anew is always difficult. My gut instinct is normally to start a parallel site (maybe the .org version of your existing domain). Go ahead and start working on that site while you clean up the other one. Eventually, you should be able to get out of Penguin's grasp, but there is no reason to put your entire web business on hold until that happens. Of course, you can supplement your traffic with increased adwords budget, or using local and products to your advantage.
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
-
Evolution of rankings over the course of time
Hello, Has anyone got experience on how rankings behave to climb all the way to the top once your do a redirect and change the design and content of your page entirely ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
What has a better chance of ranking alongside my main site for my company name, a subdomain or new domain?
Hi Moz, Do search engines really treat subdomains as separate domains in this regard? Or are we more likely to get more real estate on the first page with a new domain? Our goal is to have our main site and this new subdomain or domain ranking in positions 1 and 2 for our company name. This is going to be a careers site/portal. Thanks for reading!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DA20130 -
NEw domain extensions, are they worth it seo wise?
Hello I am curious if all of these new extensions for domains are worth it? So say you are a home builder and you bought homebuilder.construction - where as construction is a new extension, does this help seo? Or is it all just a big sales gimmick? Thank you for your thoughts
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Berner1 -
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 -
301 many smaller domains to a new, large domain
Hi all, I have a question regarding permanently redirecting many small websites into one, large new one. During the past 9 years I have created many small websites, all focusing on hotel reservations in one specific city. This has served me beautifully in the past, but I have come to the conclusion that it is no longer a sustainable model and therefore I am in the process of creating one large, worldwide hotel reservations website. To not loose any benefit of my hard work the past 9 years, I want to permanently redirect the smaller websites to the correct section of my new website. I know that if it is only a few websites, that this strategy is perfectly acceptable, but since I am talking about 50 to 100 websites, I am not so sure and would like to have your input. Here is what I would like to do: (the domain names are not mine, just an example) Old website: londonhotels.com 301 to newdomain.com/london/ Old website: berlinhotels.com 301 to newdomain.com/berlin/ Old website: amsterdamhotels.com 301 to newdomain.com/amsterdam/ Etc., etc. My plan is to do this for 50 to 100 websites and would like to have your thoughts on if this is an acceptable strategy or not. Just to be clear, I am talking about redirecting only my websites that are in good standing, i.e. none of the websites I am thinking about 301'ing have been penalized. Thanks for your thoughts on this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tfbpa0 -
New domain or wait - Anchor Text Penalty
Hi We are confident we have an anchor text penalty and have removed nearly all offending links about 3 months ago, and since have only engaged on 100% natural linking with good content and simply asking people to share our site. However we have made no progress all in terms on position for our main keyword - we now thinking of starting a fresh on a new domain as Google doesn't seem to be able to forgive us... Any ideas please?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jj34340 -
Domain authority enhancement
Dear all, what is the best way to increase your domain authority in a couple of weeks? Thanks for your reply! Best regards, Ben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HMK-NL0 -
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.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brads070