Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Should I redirect my Google Update Effected Domain to brand new Domain?
-
Hey Moz experts, I had a domain which was really doing better but after the Humming Bird update my traffic was decreased up to 90%. There are plenty of posts on my existing blog, Now what should I do? I mean should I redirect it to a brand new domain or Copy all the posts to a brand new domain and delete my existing domain? Note that the Old domain has PR1, DA 19 and PA 30.
-
Thank You for such a nice and descriptive answer, you're 100% right and I did not received any manual penalty from Google. I even tried to add up new content but it does not made any difference so I thought to transfer all the content to new domain. By the way you've got semrush premium account? and how much useful is that?
-
Imran,
I looked at semrush.com and it looks like you had a spike of traffic in August 2013 and then it quickly died back down. I also looked at your backlink profile and I see that the overwhelming majority of your links are from blog comments. It's okay to have some blog comments but you don't want that to dominate your backlinks. You also want to be sure that you're using your actual name for the anchor text of the link (and you are, so that's good). I also noticed that you have some links from other sites linking to you, like androidcentral.us. Since you also own that website, you're effectively creating your own little link network, which could become an issue, if it's not already.
The quality of the content is also lacking. There are a lot of grammatical issues and that may be because English isn't your first language. Your English isn't terrible, but Google wants high quality and unfortunately the level of English on your site won't be considered high quality.
What you should do is work on getting more high quality backlinks and diversifying your backlink profile. I checked a few of your pages on copyscape and they didn't turn up any duplicates found. Assuming this content is actually 100% unique and not just spun/rewritten from another source, you should also have someone fix up the grammatical issues. If the content is spun/rewritten from another source, start adding new content that is completely unique and original. You also need to remove the "Example Widget" text in your sidebar ASAP. That makes your site look incomplete.
If you haven't already done so, please check Google Webmaster Tools to make sure you didn't receive a manual penalty from Google.
-
And one thing more, almost 2 weeks ago, I also changed the permalink structure which encountered in so many 404s but then I manually edited all the links and made some redirection changes to my .htaccess file.
-
Hey Philip thanks for your response, My domain is ohguideme.com, over the recent months i have made so many changes to its look and almost have edited many posts and even deleted some of the poor posts that I thought were of poor quality but then there is still no improvement in rankings. I even paid a guy who was boasting that he will recover my site but nothing happened. Do you have any suggestions or tips? What should i do with it???
-
I have not heard of any websites receiving a penalty from Google due to the Hummingbird update. In my opinion, there is something else going on that affected your rankings. I would not recommend you delete your domain and redirect posts to another domain. That isn't solving the problem. That's just a way to try and avoid the issue. Like I said, a penalty can follow you to your new domain.
Are you referring to the androidrootcental.com website in your tagline? Or is this a problem with another website?
-
Well I still don't know why was my site hit by Humming Bird update and it was in Mid-August, My site content was original but I guess it was due to poor internal backlinks.. So what should I do now? Delete my existing domain and transfer all the posts??
-
Matt Cutts has said that a penalty CAN follow you to your new domain if you just simply recreate the site on a new domain exactly as it was on the penalized domain.
Do you know why you were penalized? Was it for duplicate content, poor site quality, spammy backlinks, or something else? When did your rankings drop? Mid-August?
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
-
Redirection of 100 domain to Main domain affects SEO?
Hi guys, An email software vendor managed by a different area of my company redirected 100 domains used for unsolicited email campaigns to my main domain. These domains are very likely to get blacklisted at some point. My SEO tool now is showing me all those domains as "linking" to my main site as do-follow links. The vendor states that this will not affect my main domain/website in any way. I'm highly concerned. I would appreciate your professional opinion about this. Thanks!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | anagentile0 -
Old brand name being suffixed on Google SERP listings
At the end of some of our listings in Google search results pages, our old brand name is being suffixed even though it is not in our title tags. For context, we re-branded several months ago, and at that time also migrated to a new domain name. Our title tags have our current brand name suffixed, like "Shop Example Category | Example©". In the Google search results, but not in Bing nor Yahoo, about half of our pages have titles whcih instead look like this: "Shop Example Category | Example© - oldBrandName". The "dash" and the old brand name are not in our title tags, but they are being appended, even when our title tags are fairly long. For example, even with titles at 54 characters (421 pixels), the suffix is being appended. BUT, not with our longer title tags. We are actually OK with the brand name being appended if our title tags are on the shorter side, but would prefer that our current brand name be appended instead of the older one. I realize we could increase the length of all our title tags, and perhaps we may go that route. But, does anyone know where Google would be getting the old brand name to append onto the URLs? We've checked and it is not in our page source (the old brand name is used in our page source in some areas of text and some url paths, but not in any kind of meta tag). Per Google's guidance (https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-do-not-put-organization-schema-markup-on-every-page/289981/) we only have schema for the "Organization" on our home page, and not on every page. So, assuming this advice is correct to not add schema to every page, how can we inform Google of our current brand name so that it stops appending our old brand name on pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoelevated0 -
Move to new domain using Canonical Tag
At the moment, I am moving from olddomain.com (niche site) to the newdomain.com (multi-niche site). Due to some reasons, I do not want to use 301 right now and planning to use the canonical pointing to the new domain instead. Would Google rank the new site instead of the old site? From what I have learnt, the canonical tag lets Google know that which is the main source of the contents. Thank you very much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | india-morocco0 -
Should I redirect a domain we control but which has been labeled 'toxic' or just shut it down?
Hi Mozzers: We recently launched a site for a client which involved bringing in and redirecting content which formerly had been hosted on different domains. One of these domains still existed and we have yet to bring over the content from it. It has also been flagged as a suspicious/toxic backlink source to our new domain. Would I be wise to redirect this old domain or should I just shut it down? None of the pages seem to have particular equity as link sources. Part of me is asking myself 'Why would we redirect a domain deemed toxic, why not just shut it down.' Thanks in advance, dave
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Daaveey0 -
Canonical Question: Root Domain Geo Redirects to SubFolder.
Howdy, Working on a larger eComm site that 302s you based on your location. With that in mind should I canonicalize the final page. domain.com => 302 => domain.com/us/, domain.com/fr/, etc... (Should these all have a canonical pointing to the root domain.com?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | blake.runyon0 -
What are the effects of having Multiple Redirects for pages under the same domain
Dear Mozers, First of all let me wish you all a Very Happy, Prosperous, Healthy, Joyous & Successful New Year ! I'm trying to analyze one of the website's Web Hosting UK Com Ltd. and during this process I've had this question running through my mind. This project has been live since the year 2003 and since then there have be changes made to the website (obviously). There have also been new pages been added, the same way some new pages have even been over-written with changes in the url structures too. Now, coming back to the question, if I've have a particular url structure in the past when the site was debuted and until date the structure has been changes thrice (for example) with a 301 redirect to every back dated structure, WOULD it impact the sites performance SEOwise ? And let's say that there's hundreds of such redirections under the same domain, don't you think that after a period of time we should remove the past pages/urls from the server ? That'd certainly increase the 404 (page not found) errors, but that can be taken care of. How sensible would it be to keep redirecting the bots from one url to the other when they only visit a site for a short stipulated time? To make it simple let me explain it with a real life scenario. Say if I was staying a place A then switched to a different location in another county say B and then to C and so on, and finally got settled at a place G. When I move from one place to another, I place a note of the next destination I'm moving to so that any courier/mail etc. can be delivered to my current whereabouts. In such a case there's a less chance that the courier would travel all the destinations to deliver the package. Similarly, when a bot visits a domain and it finds multiple redirects, don't you think that it'd loose the efficiency in crawling the site? Ofcourse, imo. the redirects are important, BUT it should be there (in htaccess) for only a period of say 3-6 months. Once the search engine bots know about the latest pages, the past pages/redirects should be removed. What are your opinions about this ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eukmark0 -
Does a dash in your domain name effect your ranking?
Does a dash in your domain name effect your ranking? or it dosen't really matter?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Radomski0 -
Buying an existing domain with higher ranks for redirecting
I've recently came across one of my competitors who's looking to sell their domain. Now they currently rank higher than my primary site for a few keywords we are targeting. Would it be wise to buy the domain and do a name server change over to my primary domain? Would it even help boost ranks for the keywords they rank higher for? Or will the link juice be minimal? Any thoughts would be great!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | upick-1623910