New Website - Un-natural link warning with 2 weeks of going live
-
I have a customer who has a website, 8 years old. The business has changed, and he has launched a new website (and sub-business_ to handle a particular service. As such the main website will no longer be handling the new service. For purpose of example;
The service in question had it's own are set aside on his website, so what we have done is to 301 that part of the site (a single URL) to the homepage of his new website.
Old Business Site
Service 1
Services 2 (301 to new site)
Service 3New Business Site
This worked well, and within a week his new site was gaining traffic for the service keyword.
However, we have now had a un-natural link wartning in webmaster tools.
The old page on the old site had minimal links to it (around 400). It had a page authority of 42, and 142 linking domains.
The new website has been live a few weeks now, and has had 3 links to it, all genuine.
He was on page one for the new business name, and is now page 6.
Has anyone else ever seen this happen, and how should we deal with it. We could of course remove the 301 redirect and put in a recon-request, but the 301 seems like thje right thing to have done, and is genuine.
Any advice greatly appreciated.
-
John,
That wouldn't quite work in this situation.
The OLD website is still very much an active functioning site.... its is just one service which has been split into another company. So for example... we only want to redirect;
www.oldwebsite.com/servicename
to the NEW website.
I could of course just edit the old page and say ...."click here to go to the new site"..... but it does wind me up somewhat that the ideal solution, and proper way to do it is a 301.... but if we do it they get put under penalty.
The official Google line about doing what we want to do is a 301 redirect..
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/how-to-move-your-content-to-new.html
To quote them "It’s important to redirect all users and bots that visit your old content location to the new content location using 301 redirects."
I wonder if a cross-domain canonical would be worth doing?
-
Awesome to hear, David! The power of our collective minds
What I'd recommend is this:
- Redirect all the pages on your site to the homepage;
- Put up a splash page saying that the site has moved with a nofollowed link to the new site;
- Do something to make the customers smile - discount code, video of a puppy, something like that.
-
A special thanks to John for his advice on this issue.
To update you.... I submitted a site-map of the OLD website to Google via WMT. Hoping this would encourage a re-crawl and that Google would see the 301 was no longer in place. I then put in another recon request.
Thankfully the penalty has now been removed and I just had email confirmation this morning.
My quandary now is how we redirect from the old site to the new one.
To my mind a 301 redirect is the right way to do it.... but obviously we can't do this again. A 302 would serve the purpose of redirecting users to the new site (which is what we want to do), but obviously a 302 is not the right way to do it.
Any advice or ideas on how we should take people from the old site to the new one?
-
Thanks John, I have just emailed.
-
Gotcha. Would you mind DMing me the URL so I can have a look? Also, a list of any URLs that might be redirected into the site.
-
Yes their traffic dropped by around 90%. Its a brand new website and it ranked very quickly after launch when we put the 301 in place.
After peanty they went from position 4/5 for the main keyword to currently position 99. It is site-wide so affecting everything. The brand name they rank outside the top 50.
-
David -
I'm assuming you saw a traffic drop when you received the unnatural links warning? And is it a partial match or a sitewide penalty?
I'm not convinced that you always need to worry about a warning. If you see a traffic drop, then definitely. Otherwise, why not go do good SEO and create useful stuff that will rank instead of spending all this time worrying about a message that didn't affect you adversely?
-
To update this thread again;
After removing the 301 redirect, we put in a reconsideration request. To my amazement it was declined as they felt the site still had too many un-natural links.
Within webmaster tools the site is showing just 57 links.
The domain is only a few months old, and I'm not sure what else I can do as we haven't actually built any links and the 301 redirect is gone.
-
Just to update this thread. I have removed the 301, and I am going to leave it a week before putting a recon in.
-
Hi David
Without looking at the backlink profile of either domain I can't be certain, but it very much looks like that 301 redirect has brought about the penalty.
It doesn't matter if there are 30 bad links or 30000, if a Google quality reviewer believes the backlinks are poor quality, you run the risk of being penalised. I wonder whether you are seeing all of the links at the moment - it might be worth using the Link Detox tool for a more comprehensive backlink audit than Open Site Explorer can offer. This may reveal more poor quality links.
But it sounds like you're pretty confident that the 301 redirect has caused the penalty. Rightly or wrongly, I'm afraid it's not up to us to judge what links are "bad", it's Googles. So while you and I may think the old backlinks are OK, Google may take a different view. I would also rule out any chance the penalty may have become because of an influx of new links (via the 301) - having set up a number of new websites and redirected old domains (with hundreds of thousands of links) I've never seen this trigger a penalty by itself.
I'd put your theory to the test and remove the 301 and send a reconsideration request detailing you have done so. From what I can tell, that would remove the penalty. Run a deeper audit of your backlinks to see if yet-to-be-revealed bad links are present. And if you really want some authority links from other websites to pass through to the new domain, contact them manually and ask them to update their URLs.
Hope this helps
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
-
Tumblr links
I have several Tumblr blogs. Created when Tumblr links were worth more, and now primarily for my amusement. But, I'd like to get whatever link juice I can out of them. I thought only the footer links were do follow, but when I check Moz it's showing all links as do follow. Any idea which is true?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | julie-getonthemap1 -
Website can't break into Google Top100 for main keywords, considering 301 Redirect to a new domain
A little background on our case. Our website, ex: http://ourwebsite.com was officially live in December 2015 but it wasn't On-Site optimized and we haven't done any Off-site SEO to it. In April we decided to do a small redesign and we did it an online development server. Unfortunately, the developers didn't disallow crawlers and the website got indexed while we were developing it on the development server. The development version that got indexed in Google was http://dev.web.com/ourwebsite We learned that it got indexed when we migrated the new redesigned website to the initial domain. When we did the migration we decided to add www and now it looks like: http://www.ourwebsite.com Meanwhile, we deleted the development version from the development server and submitted "Remove outdated content" from the development server's Search Console. This was back in early May. It took about 15-20 days for the development version to get de-indexed and around 30 days for the original website (http://www.ourwebsite.com) to get indexed. Since then we have started our SEO campaign with Press Releases, Outreach to bloggers for Guest and Sponsored Posts etc. The website currently has 55 Backlinks from 44 Referring domains (ahrefs: UR25, DR37) moz DA:6 PA:1 with various anchor text. We are tracking our main keywords and our brand keyword in the SERPs and for our brand keyword we are position #10 in Google, but for the rest of the main (money) keywords we are not in the Top 100 results in Google. It is very frustrating to see no movement in the rankings for the past couple of months and our bosses are demanding rankings and traffic. We are currently exploring the option of using another similar domain of ours and doing a complete 301 Redirect from the original http://www.ourwebsite.com to http://www.ournewebsite.com Does this sound like a good option to you? If we do the 301 Redirect, will the link-juice be passed from the backlinks that we already have from the referring domains to the new domain? Or because the site seems "stuck," would it not pass any power to the new domain? Also, please share any other suggestions that we might use to at least break into the Top 100 results in Google? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DanielGorsky0 -
Website Redesign, 301 Redirects, and Link Juice
I want to change my client’s ecommerce site to Shopify. The only problem is that Shopify doesn’t let you customize domains. I plan to: keep each page’s content exactly the same keep the same domain name 301 redirect all of the pages to their new url The ONLY thing that will change is each page’s url. Again, each page will have the exact same content. The only source of traffic to this site is via Google organic search and sales depend on the traffic. There are about 10 pages that have excellent link juice, 20 pages that have medium link juice, and the rest is small link juice. Many of our links that have significant link juice are on message boards written by people that like our product. I plan to change these urls and 301 redirect them to their new urls. I’ve read tons of pages online about this topic. Some people that say it won’t effect link juice at all, some say it will might effect link juice temporarily, and others are uncertain. Most answers tend to be “You should be good. You might lose some traffic temporarily. You might want to switch some of your urls to the new structure to see how it affects it first.” Here’s my question: 1) Has anyone ever done changed a url structure for an existing website with link juice? What were your results and do you have a definitive answer on the topic? 2) How much link juice (if any) will be lost if I keep all of the exact content the same but only change each page’s url? 3) If link juice is temporarily lost and then regained, how long will it be temporarily lost? 1 week? 1 month? 6 months? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kirbyf0 -
Need help for new website!
I want to a make new website. Can you please advise me what all things are involved which I should keep in mind before and during the website preparation. Like how to make pages, what to include in website, best way to create pages etc. Please provide me the link where I can study all the above information. I am planning to create global printing website.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlexanderWhite0 -
Why the sudden link drop?
A the end of November I am showing that our total links were 118k. Current links are 22k. We changed sites early November so that was about three weeks before. What would cause the drop of about 100k links? Or where should I start investigating?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
My site rank is not consistent. Once it at first page , then for the next week it is not found in top 100 position. Again two/ three weeks later it ranked automatically without any work. Why this is happening?
Here's the following are available in my site: robot.txt file is included sitemap available Natural link building going on. in a week total 100 links we are creating. 30 social bookmarks, 30 directory submission, 20 blog comments, 20 forum links All the blog and forum links are from relevant sources. Please help me ..
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | coldfireinc0 -
New Site: Use Aged Domain Name or Buy New Domain Name?
Hi,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | peterwhitewebdesign
I have the opportunity to build a new website and use a domain name that is older than 5 years or buy a new domain name. The aged domain name is a .net and includes a keyword.
The new domain would include the same keyword as well as the U.S. state abbreviation. Which one would you use and why? Thanks for your help!0 -
So what exactly does Google consider a "natural" link profile?
As part of my company's ongoing SEO effort we have been analyzing our link profile. A colleague of mine feels that we should be targeting at least 50% branded anchor text. He claims this is what search engines consider "natural" and we should not go past a threshold of 50% optimized anchor text to make sure we avoid any penalties or decrease in rankings. 50% brand term anchor text seems too high to me. I pointed out that most of our competitors who outrank us have a much greater percentage of optimized links. I've also read other industry experts state that somewhere in the range of 30% branded anchor text would be considered natural. What percent of branded vs. optimized anchor text do you feel looks "natural" and what do you base your opinion on?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DeannaTallman0