How to avoid Google penalties being inherited when moving on with a new domain?
-
Looking for SEOs who have experience with resetting projects by migrating on to a new domain to shed either a manual or algorithmic penalty.
My questions are:
- For algorithmic penalties, what is the best migration strategy to avoid inheriting any kind of baggage? 301, 302, establish no connection between the two sites?
- For manual penalties, what is the best migration strategy to avoid inheriting any kind of baggage? 301, 302, establish no connection between the two sites?
Any other input on these kind of reset projects is appreciated.
-
Spanish,
I think you really need to consider what you are doing and why you are doing it. First, a manual penalty means you are on Googles radar and you are outside their terms of service in some way. If your decision is to get a new domain then what you should do is put the old one in the trash and forget it ever happened. You are starting from square one if you are smart IMO. Why? because if it is a penalty around linking and you redirect to a new domain, you are going to carry that wait to the next site. That doesn't mean that the penalty will show up on your new domain at point just because of the old, but there is no real value in the links so why risk it? There are just too many reasons not to try and save the old and move it to the new with redirects. BUT, is there a reason you would not simply address the penalty? Maybe it is cost as cleanup is expensive; if so, you weigh cost of cleanup versus cost of rebuild to all new site with new domain.
Second, an "algorithmic penalty" is something we say from time to time, but if you are using that as a line of thinking - "the algorithm has in some way penalized us" - you are then setting yourself up for further pain down the road IMO. With a site failing to rank because you have bad links, poor content, ads everywhere, I suggest you not look at it as a penalty. Look at is as: "What must we do in order to grow our site in value to our customer and in ranking against our competitors?" If you believe you have a "penalty" of sorts you are really saying things are not as good as they could be. Why not change things? If it is linking, disavow bad domains and links and move on. If it is Panda in your thinking, what can you do to change the content, etc.?
Often, when this type of question arises there have been a series of missteps by a site owner trying to shortcut really building a web property. If there were true short cuts without risk, I can tell you I would have found them or learned of them from people on various forums like Moz. I simply do not know of any.
Clean things up and move on or start over and move on. I think that is the only choice you face. I wish it were easier for all of us.
Best -
What is your domain authority, age and indexed page number?
If you've come to the point where you've tried every possible e.g. cleared all crawl errors, disavowed and removed 7/10 links on the spam score link scale in OSE. Remove pages that Google may perceive as invaluable. Then and only then would I go to a completely new domain.
I wouldn't use any content from the previous site either as your original site would most likely be given credit for the original source since it's in Google's index already.
As you can tell it would be a last resort for me to move domains unless I had very few indexed pages / valuable inbound links and a low domain authority I could easily build up again.
-
Thanks Cian,
It is an algorithmic penalty (likley primarily Panda). Significant recovery work has happened since over a year ago but we are not seeing any recoveries despite the recent Panda refreshes.
What I hear you saying is try to avoid any cross connections (including GA id etc) and start fresh and maybe repoint some valuable links?
-
Are you moving domains just because you've been hit with an algorithmic or manual action?
I'd personally try and solve the penalties before I'd make the decision to move to a new domain. If you don't want to solve the penalisation issues on your current site and move directly to a new one I'd try and distance myself from the old domain and establish no connection between the two sites.
If you feel your old domain has a high authority and you desperately want to keep the value you have built up then it's quite simple. You need to solve those penalisation issues. Work with the Google Manual action team to disavow spammy or illegitimate links. Focus on only keeping unique and engaging content on your site and adhere to Google Panda's solution criteria - duplicate content, titles, descriptions etc. Use Screaming Frog or Moz Pro to detect these issues.
Focus on helping the user while not breaking Google terms and conditions and you'll be fine.
One last note. A client of mine was hit with a manual action and I believe algorithmic penalisation. His site was able to recover in three months with a lot of work. The back and forth between Google's Manual Action team was the most time consuming.
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
-
Best way to move the content to a different domain without inviting any SERP penalty?
Hi all, We are in a bit of a fix right now. We have around 60-70 articles (Wordpress pages / posts) that we intend to move to another domain of ours. What's the best way to do so such that we do not invite any Google penalty. Here's a detailed information about our case:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | stj
Let's say, our site example.com has more 2000 articles. To help us better position our content for one of the sections on example.com, we have started another website, example2.com and want to move those 60-70 articles from example.com to example2.com. What is the best way to do it such that we are not penalised by Google? Is it (a) Move all the said content (60-70 articles) from example.com to example2.com and (b) do a permanent redirect (301) of each of the older article URLs to newer article URLs. What are the other options?0 -
When migrating website platforms but keeping the domain name how best do we add the new site to google webmaster tools? Best redirect practices?
We are moving from BigCommerce to Shopify but maintaining our domain name and need to make sure that all links redirect to their corresponding links. We understand the nature of 301s and are fine with that, but when it comes to adding the site to google webmaster tools, not losing link juice and the change of address tool we are kind of lost. Any advice would be most welcome. Thank you so much in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WNL0 -
Need to move highest content pages into a sub-domain and want to minimize the loss of traffic - details inside!
Hi All! So the company that I work for owns two very strong domains in the information security industry. There are two separate sections on each site that draws a ton of long tail SEO traffic. For our corporate site we have a vulnerability database where people search for vulnerabilities to research, and find out how to remediate. On our other website we have an exploit database where people can look up exploits in order to see how to patch an attackers attack path. We are going to move these into a super database under our corporate domain and I want to ensure that we maintain or minimize the traffic loss. The exploit database which is currently on our other domain yields about three quarters of the traffic to the domain. It is obviously OK if that traffic goes directly to this new subdomain. What are my options to keep our search traffic steady for this content? There are thousands and thousands of these vulnerabilities and exploits so it would not make sense to 301 redirect all of them. What are some other options and what would you do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PatBausemer0 -
How to link my websites with each other - to avoid google penalities and get some value
I have good high DA PA websites hosted on same IP, added in same google analytics and GWT account. So i think google knows that owner is the same. How should we link them with each other to get some value? Put nofollow? With what anchor (Money keyword or domain name)? But whats the point? We cannot make natural link building profile with our own website nofollow links, i assume they will not count. What can you suggest? Maybe it is better not to link at all?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bele0 -
Merging Domains... Sub-domains, Directories or Seperate Sites?
Hello! I am hoping you can help me decide the best path to take here... A little background: I'm moving to a new company that has three old domains (the oldest is 10 years old), which get a lot of traffic from their e-letters. Until recently they have not cared about SEO. So the websites have some structural, coding, URL and other issues. The sites are indexed, but have a problem getting crawled and/or indexed for new content - haven't delved into this yet but am certain I will be able to fix any of these issues. These three domains are PR4, PR4, PR5 and contain hundreds of unique articles. Here's the question... They want to move these three sites **to their main company site (PR4) and create sub domains for each one. ** I am wondering if this is a good idea or not. I have merged sites before (creating categories and/or directories) and the end result is that the ONE big site, is much for effective than TWO smaller, less authoritative sites. But the sub domain idea is something I am unsure about from an SEO perspective. Should we do this with sub domains? Or do you think we should keep the sites separate? How do Panda and Penguin play into this? Thanks in advance for the help! SD P.S. I'm not a huge advocate in using PR as a measurement tool, but since I can't reveal the actual domains, I figured I would list it as a reference point.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | essdee0 -
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 -
Moving a database from a sub folder to a new domain
Hi Mozzers, I have a very popular property database on a subfolder of my main website. It accounts for about 2 thirds of my overall traffic. I'm moving the database to a new server, so my choices are now a sub domain or completely new domain. If I move my database to a new domain, will my main site lose SEO because of how popular the database is? Cheers Matt
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Horizon0 -
7 years old domain sandboxed for 8 months, wait or make a domain change?
Hello folks The questions is, if a domain, 7 years old being sandboxed due to "notice of unnatural links to website" does it make sense to make a domain change (301 permanent redirect and make a "domain change" under google webmaster tools) to another, aged(!) domain name?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ferray
Website being sandboxed for over 8 months already and there is no chance to do anything with those "unnatural" links to website... Any suggestions?0