Negative SEO penalty, new domain?
-
One of my clients has just been hit with a Penguin 3.0 penalty. They have been subject to a negative link building attack for the last 5 months and despite my best effort it appears I haven't disavowed enough, someone was building a lot of links to them and all really low quality spam and a lot of forum profiles. They still rank for their brand, the site is in the index but the only rankings I can see are in Google Local.
My advice to them for the quickest way back into Google is to get a new domain and relaunch on this new domain. The challenge is, the domain they want to buy used to be used as a domain in the 'erotic video distrubution' industry. It currently has 17 backlinks from 9 domain and the anchor text is mostly brand related but I can see that 70 links have already been deleted.
I would consider this to be too high risk but would be interested to see if everyone agrees with me, it would be an awesome domain name if the history wasn't there!!
-
It's tough to speak in generalities, but in almost all of the cases where I suspect negative SEO was in play, there was an inherent weakness or problems in the link profile to begin with. If you add those problems to a domain with a questionable history, your risk is going to be fairly high. If you were a new site in a completely different industry with no history (or a good history), then the history of that domain might not matter. In your case, though, I'm hearing some alarm bells.
Also keep in mind that unless you're going to start over cold-turkey, and not 301-redirect any of the old site, you'll carry any link-related problems with you. So, re-launching on a new domain is definitely a big decision and will probably take months of work to rebuild momentum. Granted, waiting for the next Penguin refresh could take months, too, so I understand your dilemma.
If you're going to take this step, though, I'd put the time and money into a domain with a clean history. You can't afford to do this twice.
-
Here is what I would do if I will have the similar situation. Instead of saying good bye to the old domain just because someone is negatively attacking the website, I would try and get all of their links using tools like Ahrefs and Majestic SEO and disavow in Google disavow file and at the same time try to get highest quality link back to the website so that Google can have a clear idea of what is going on with the website.
Even in that case if the website hit the penalty or the penalty did not wave I probably will go for a new domain. In case of a new domain my advice will be to again create a link disavow file and include all links in the file and let Google know that you are buying this expired domain which have the following history but you are disavowing all the links so the history does not bite.
Obviously there is always a risk but I probably will take that risk if the domain name is that good.
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
-
SEO issues with masking blog domain?
We have a client who would like to move their Wordpress blog into a different server from their main site's server for security reasons. However, the blog is almost 10 years old with good traffic and rankings and we'd rather not have them change the domain. The developer has come back with a URL "masking" rule in .htaccess that will display the contents of the blog placed in the new server under a subdomain but still show the blog's original URL. If we block the new subdomain from indexing to avoid duplicate content - are there any SEO implications for doing this? Will Google see it as a deceptive practice and tank the blog's rankings? Any advice is greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | roundabout0 -
Consolidating two different domains to point at same site, duplicate content penalty?
I have two websites that are extremely similar and want to consolidate them into one website by pointing both domain names at one website. is this going to cause any duplicate content penalties by having two different domain names pointing at the same site? Both domains get traffic so i don't want to just discontinue one of the domains.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ron100 -
Move to new domain with new design and url
I have an e-commerce website that is template based and I have absolutely no control over it. Each product have quite good ranking in google. However, we are creating new website using asp.net mvc and host in azure. It has totally new design. Since I have no control over my old website, I cannot force the server to redirect each product page to my new website product page. This is what I have done so far. I told my old website provider to point my domain (ex. domainA.com) to new nameserver at dyndns I created a new zone and add a http redirect service to new domain (http://www.domainB.com) with 301 redirect I'm pretty sure that this is not enough since there is a difference in url like this Old: www.domainA.com/product/70/my-product-name New: www.domainB.com/product/1/my-new-product-name New route config: {product}/{id}/{name} As you can see, the structure is similar but the product id and name is different. Do I need to catch the incoming id and name from old website and 301 redirect it again to the correct one? If so, this will cause double 301 redirect and would this be a SEO problem? Thank you in advance for your answer.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | as142208080 -
Working to Start an Shopping Idea Site - Which Totally Based On Scraping product from Ecom. How Quickly I should Add products and categories in this new domain.
How Quickly I should Add products and categories in this new domain. We are going to start its promotional by google adwords and facebook. I worrying about 10000's of product pages. kindly guide me.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | innovatebizz0 -
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 long does a new domain need to get a specific level of trust?
We are a small start-up in germany in the Sports and health sector. We currently are building a network of people in that sector and give each person a seperate wordpress blog. The idea is to create a big network of experts. My question is: How long is the period for google to trust a completely new URL? We set up each project and create content on the page. Each week the owner of the site puts up an expert article that contain keywords. And we set certain links from other blogs, etc. Also, do you think it is more important for a site to get say, 20 backlinks from anywhere. Or 5 backlinks from very trusted blogs, etc.?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wellbo0 -
Penalty for using expired domain?
I was wondering if anyone has any experience using dropped/expired domains with old "clean" backlinks for new sites. Is there be a penalty for doing this (with good intent)? Worth a reconsideration request?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EdgySEO0 -
Best approach to launch a new site with new urls - same domain
www.sierratradingpost.com We have a high volume e-commerce website with over 15K items, an average of 150K visits per day and 12.6 pages per visit. We are launching a new website this spring which is currently on a beta sub domain and we are looking for the best strategy that preserves our current search rankings while throttling traffic (possibly 25% per week) to measure results. The new site will be soft launched as we plan to slowly migrate traffic to it via a load balancer. This way we can monitor performance of the new site while still having the old site as a backup. Only when we are fully comfortable with the new site will we submit the 301 redirects and migrate everyone over to the new site. We will have a month or so of running both sites. Except for the homepage the URL structure for the new site is different than the old site. What is our best strategy so we don’t lose ranking on the old site and start earning ranking on the new site, while avoiding duplicate content and cloaking issues? Here is what we got back from a Google post which may highlight our concerns better: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=62d0a16c4702a17d&hl=en&fid=62d0a16c4702a17d00049b67b51500a6 Thank You, sincerely, Stephan Woo Cude SEO Specialist [email protected]
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | STPseo0