Penguin Recovery Problem - Weird

[veezer]

I had an old URL and the link profile of this URL wasn't good - I had been using article syndication and Penguin threw me to the wolves.

I decided to start over with a new URL and build a new natural link profile. I specifically did NOT do a  301 redirect to the new URL and did not make any request to Google to transfer domain as I didn't want old site being associated to the new one. To redirect our old users, I put a link on the old URL index page (nofollowed) that say that we have moved.

I was very surprised to find that in GWT all the links of the old URL have now been associated to the new URL....why is that?  I started over to have a clean natural profile and follow Google guidelines.Has anyone heard of this before?  All I can guess is that Google itself "decided" to do its own pseudo-301, since the site was the same, page for page.This has Major implications for anyone attempting a "clean start" to recover from Penguin.

[MarieHaynes]

I had this happen with a client I worked with.  The client's previous site had a severe Penguin issue so he decided to start over.  We did everything properly and did not do any redirects from the old site to the new.  But we were surprised when suddenly the WMT console for the new site was showing all of the links that went to the old site!

What happened?  It's complicated but it has to do with something that is described here by Dejan SEO: http://dejanseo.com.au/mind-blowing-hack/

Basically, when Google sees a duplicate of a page they will assign the page's links to that site.

What I don't know is whether those links are carrying any link juice and also any penalty with them.

What we did was go back into the WMT console for the old site and use the url removal tool to remove every single url from the index AND the cache for the old site.

It took about 2 weeks for the links to disappear from WMT for the new site.

[veezer]

Thanks Marie - I will try your suggestion.

I did a search using the regular operators to see if my old site was still indexed and Google returned a "we can't find it on this server-that's all we know" Sergent Shultz response, but knowing Google that does not necessarily mean pages are not still in their index.

[NakulGoyal]

Considering what's done is done and the point that your old domain is penalized, can you possibly do/try any of the following ?

1. Ignore the fact that those links are appearing in your backlink profile for the new domain. See whether this new website works/ranks.

2. If it doesn't (at all), can you possibly disavow those "article marketing" links for the old domain and do nothing at all for the new domain (since those links are not really linking to your new domain).

Coming back to point 1, what I'd like to ask is, other then seeing those links in GWT, are there any other red flags that you are seeing in terms of not ranking, any penalty messages, unnatural links warning on the new or was there any messages on the old domain when you got penalized ?

[MarieHaynes]

Those pages can still be in the cache.  That was my theory as to what was going on with the previous site.  When we used the url removal tool (not the disavow tool by the way) to remove them from the cache this seemed to solve the problem.

[EGOL]

**Basically, when Google sees a duplicate of a page they will assign the page's links to that site.  **

Oh.... do you think somebody could grab an article from your website, post it on theirs and kidnap your linkjuice?

[MarieHaynes]

I personally think it is just a WMT glitch.  When the link is shown in WMT it says, "Via this intermediate link..." and the intermediate link is the original page.

However, according again to Dejan SEO, if you copy a site's page and your site has a higher PageRank, you can actually outrank the original page.  Here is the article on how they did this (with permission) for Rand Fishkin's blog and other pages:

http://dejanseo.com.au/hijacked/

That makes me think that it's possible that link juice is granted to the more authoritative of the two sites.  And I think that sometimes Google gets it wrong as to who is the more authoritative.

While I still think that these links would not cause Penguin to affect a site, I wouldn't chance it!

[EGOL]

Thanks for your thoughts, Marie.

** And I think that sometimes Google gets it wrong as to who is the more authoritative.**

I am confident that they are very often wrong.

[veezer]

Nakul -

Re: "other then seeing those links in GWT, are there any other red flags that you are seeing in terms of not ranking, any penalty messages, unnatural links warning on the new?"

No - no red flags.  My "new" site has only been live for about a week and is already reached page 2 or 3 of google serp for my main keywords.

But since I know those backlinks cause my old site to go from #2-3 of page 1 to past page 20, I freaked when I saw them following me.

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or was there any messages on the old domain when you got penalized ?

No - I crashed on April 24 and never recovered, even though I removed all the pages that had been syndicated and asked Google for reconsideration, they said there was no manual penalty.