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
-
How can I identify links that point to a specific landing page with a specific anchor text on my own website?
I am trying to identify buttons and links that point to a specific landing page on our website that have a certain word in the anchor text and I would like to know the referring page URL too. Does anybody have an idea on how to do this? We have above a hundred landing pages and I would rather not go through them one by one 😄 Thanks for the help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 10to8-Moz0 -
New websites issues- Duplicate urls and many title tags. Is it fine for SEO?
Hey everyone, I have found few code issues with our new website and wanted to see how bad those problems are and if I have missed anything. If someone can take a look at this and help me it would mean the world. Thank you. all! We hired an agency to design a new site for us and it's almost ready, but the other day I found some problems that made me wonder if this new site might not be as good as I thought and I wanted to ask you to take a look at the code and possibly help me understand if from SEO prospective it is sound. But I really want someone who understands SEO and web design to look at our code and point out what might be wrong there. Here is a link to the actual site which is on a new server: http://209.50.54.42/ What I found few days ago that made me wonder something might not be right. Problem 1. Each page has 3 title tags, I guess whatever template they are using it automatically creates 3 title tags. When you do " View Page Source" For example on this url: http://209.50.54.42/washington-dc-transportation when you view the code, the lines Lines 16,19 and 20 have the title tag which in my opinion is wrong and there should only be one. Could this hurt our SEO? Problem 2. Infinite duplicate urls found All following pages have INFINITE NUMBER OF DUPLICATE URLS. EXAMPLE: http://209.50.54.42/privacy-policy/8, http://209.50.54.42/privacy-policy/1048, http://209.50.54.42/privacy-policy/7, http://209.50.54.42/privacy-policy/1, http://209.50.54.42/privacy-policy you can add any type of number to this url and it will show the same page. I really think this 2nd problem is huge as it will create duplicate content. There should be only 1 url per page, and if I add any number to the end should give a 404 error. I have managed to find these 2 issues but I am not sure what else could be wrong with the code. Would you be able to look into this? And possible tell us what else is incorrect? I really like the design and we worked really hard on this for almost 5 moths but I want to make sure that when we launch the new site it does not tank our rankings and only helps us in a positive way. Thanks in advance, Davit
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Davit19850 -
Something happened within the last 2 weeks on our WordPress-hosted site that created "duplicates" by counting www.company.com/example and company.com/example (without the 'www.') as separate pages. Any idea what could have happened, and how to fix it?
Our website is running through WordPress. We've been running Moz for over a month now. Only recently, within the past 2 weeks, have we been alerted to over 100 duplicate pages. It appears something happened that created a duplicate of every single page on our site; "www.company.com/example" and "company.com/example." Again, according to our MOZ, this is a recent issue. I'm almost certain that prior to a couple of weeks ago, there existed both forms of the URL that directed to the same page without be counting as a duplicate. Thanks for you help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wzimmer0 -
Website Indexing Issues - Search Bots will only crawl Homepage of Website, Help!
Hello Moz World, I am stuck on a problem, and wanted to get some insight. When I attempt to use Screaming Spider or SEO Powersuite, the software is only crawling the homepage of my website. I have 17 pages associated with the main domain i.e. example.com/home, example.com/sevices, etc. I've done a bit of investigating, and I have found that my client's website does not have Robot.txt file or a site map. However, under Google Search Console, all of my client's website pages have been indexed. My questions, Why is my software not crawling all of the pages associated with the website? If I integrate a Robot.txt file & sitemap will that resolve the issue? Thanks ahead of time for all of the great responses. B/R Will H.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarketingChimp100 -
ECommerce website with link to manufactures site for ordering - Should these links be follow or no follow?
Dear Mozzers, I have a couple of questions regarding link juice and whether I should have do follow or no follow links ? We have an affiliate eCommerce website and on our product pages we have a "Order online " button which will go our subdomain on the manufactures site in order for the user to complete the online ordering process So it's - www.ourcompany.co.uk - "Order Online Button" - www.manufactuer.ourcompany.co.uk Should this " Order online Button" be a Follow or No Follow link ? I ask this as currently from looking at Majestic seo , these "order online " buttons on my product pages seems to be Follow links so am I losing potential link juice by sending it externally ? Am I correct in assuming by changing it to be no follows, I would increase the link juice going elsewhere internally? thanks Pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Redesigned Website
Hi, I have redesigned my website in html whereas it was in .asp earlier. I have resubmitted my google sitemap but it still showing me old site pages in search except home page. My question is how i can immediately change my web presence. How i can get the benefit of my .asp page ranks? In addition my website still alive with .asp. What should be the strategy, should i remove this websites or have to redirect all pages to new. If i make 301 redirection then will it cause any issue in SEO, ranking etc ? Thx
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 1akal0 -
2-websites focused on different markets but similar content
Hi all! I have a client who wants to branch out to another market (currently in Northern California and wants to open an office in Southern California), what would happen if we put up a second website that has similar content, but is exclusively for Southern California, with a different office address, and all the content geared towards Southern California market? There would be NO linking between the sites. Would that generate a penalty? Thanks! BB
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BBuck0 -
Help needed for a 53 Page Internal Website Structure & Internal Linking
Hey all... I'm designing the structure for a website that has 53 pages. Can you take a look at the attached diagram and see if the website structure is ok? On the attached diagram I have numbered the pages from 1 to 53, with 1 being the most important home page - 2,3,4,5, being the next 4 important pages - 6,7,8... 15,16,17 being the 3rd set of important pages, and 18,19,20..... 51,52,53 being the last set of pages which are the easiest to rank. I have two questions: Is the website structure for this correct? I have made sure that all pages on the website are reachable. Considering the home page, and page number 2,3,4,5 are the most important pages - I am linking out to these pages from the the last set of pages (18,29,20...51,52,53). There are 36 pages in the last set - and out of this 36, from 24 of them I am linking back to home page and page number 2,3,4,5. The remaining 8 pages of the 36 will link back to pages 6,7,8...15,16,17. In total the most importnat page will have the following number of internal incoming links: Home Page : 25 Pages 2,3,4,5 : 25 Pages 6,7,8...15,16,17 : 4 Pages 18,19,20...51,52,53 : 1 Is this ok considering home page, and pages 2,3,4,5 are the most important? Or do you think I should divide and give more internal links to the other pages also? If you can share any inputs or suggestions to how I can improve this it will greatly help me. Also if you know any references for good guides to internal linking of websites greater that 50 pages please share them in the answers. Thank you all! Regards, P.S - The URL for the image is at http://imgur.com/XqaK4
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | arjun.rajkumar810