Same Branding, Same Followers, New Domain After Penalty... Your Opinion Please

[sbrault74]

I know I've asked a similar question in the past but I'm still trying to figure out what to do with my website.

I've got a website at thewebhostinghero.com that's been penalized by both Panda and Penguin. I cleaned up the link profile and submitted a reconsideration request but it was denied. I finally found a handful of additional bad links and I submitted a new disavow + reconsideration request a few days ago and I am still waiting.

That said, after submitting the initial disavow request, the traffic has completely gone and while I expected a drop in traffic, I also expected my penalty to be lifted but it was not the case.

Even though the penalty might be lifted this time, I think that making the website profitable again could be harder than creating a new website.

So here's my questioning:

The website's domain is thewebhostinghero.com but I also happen to own webhostinghero.com which I bought later for $5000 (yes you read that right).

The domain "webhostinghero.com" is completely clean as it's only redirecting to thewebhostinghero.com. I would like to use webhostinghero.com as a completely new website and not redirect any traffic from thewebhostinghero.com as to not pass any bad link juice.

Pros:

• Keeping the same branding image (which cost me $$$)
• Keeping the 17,000+ Facebook followers
• Keeping the same Google+ and Twitter accounts
• Keeping and monetizing a domain that cost me $5000
• webhostinghero.com is a better domain than thewebhostinghero.com

Cons:

• Will create confusion between the 2 websites
• Any danger of being flagged as duplicate or something?

Do you see any other potential issues with this? What's your opinion/advice?

• P.S. Sorry for my english...

[Mike.Goracke]

It sounds to me like you already have a pretty good plan in place.

I would maybe suggest redirecting all of the sub-pages of thewebhostinghero.com to the homepage of thewebhostinghero.com. And on the homepage write something like, "Our website has moved. Please visit webhostinghero.com for blah blah blah." I would leave this as plan text so that you are not passing bad link juice to your new domain.

I don't know how co-occurrence (webhostingher.com being listed in text on thewebhostinghero.com) would play any role in your rankings; however, doing this would hopefully help eliminate some of the confusion your old customers would have and redirecting all of your sub-pages to the homepage would help ensure that you wouldn't have any duplicate content issues on the new site.

Does that help/make sense?

Mike

[sbrault74]

I am not sure about redirecting all the subpages to the homepage of thewebhostinghero.com

The website still has about 300 visitors a day. It's for "money keywords" that it doesn't get any traffic. Redirecting all the traffic to the homepage would cause the website to fall quickly.

If I wanted to keep as much of the visitors from the old site as possible, what about displaying a message at the very top of every page stating that the new website is at webhostinghero.com (I'd use an image instead of text to avoid any issue). Or what about showing a popup to each visitor?

[Mike.Goracke]

Sorry. I was under the impression that you wanted to more or less shut down the penalized site. That is why I suggested the mass-redirection. It also would allow you to move all of your content from the penalized domain to the new domain and you wouldn't have to worry about rewriting completely new and unique content.

Solid idea about using an image. The only downside would be that users would not be able to copy and paste the URL into the address bar... but it would really be just removing "the"... so I would like to assume they could handle it

I would probably shy away from popups, because depending on a user's settings, they may be blocking popups or may disregard the popups if they think they are an advertisement.

Mike

[Immanuel]

I'm interested to see what you will do in regards to redirecting the visitors to the new address. We're going trough a similar process at the moment where we are replacing the current site which was hit with panda and penguin updates to a new branded domain although with a new design and new content. Would placing a message asking visitors to visit your new address with a no-follow link do the trick?

[Bondara]

Redirecting the old website would worry me, it wouldn't surprise me if you redirected the problem along with it.

I would do what you suggested, modal popup with something like 'Hey, we have built a bigger, better website just for you' then block the url pointing out in the robots.txt file.

But that's just me.

[Bondara]

No-Follow will stop PR passing through but the bot will still go through.

You need to block the bot from going through using your robots.txt file.

[sbrault74]

In theory, using a no-follow link would do the trick. However, looking at the list of backlinks from my GWT account, I also see lots of no-follow links, don't ask me why.

So in that regards, I would rather avoid any kind of hyperlink association between the two sites. I mean, if that fails, my $5000 domain name is screwed so I'm not taking any chances.

[sbrault74]

What about website structure? Would it be better to start off with a completely new layout and navigation to avoid duplicate content issues?

[sbrault74]

There's also some content that's highly valuable on the original website. Suppose I wanted to transfer this content to the new website, how about setting it to "noindex" on the original website and once it's out of G's index, I'd publish it to the new website.

Does that makes sense or would it get me another slap from Google?

[sbrault74]

How about redirecting visitors from the original site to the new one using Javascript?

[Mike.Goracke]

As far as structure is concerned, having the same layout and navigation will not get you into duplicate content troubles. Have the same content will.

[Mike.Goracke]

I guess I would suggest you don't.

Hidden text and links: "Hiding text or links in your content to manipulate Google’s search rankings can be seen as deceptive and is a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines."

[Bondara]

I would just rewrite the outbound url to look like sub folder so abc(dot)com/visit and then block the sub folder /visit in the robots.txt file.

I may even run a really good competition and try to suck the users up into a email list so when the time is right, expose the other site.

Its a tough one because you can't indicate the move to another url to Google so it's like starting again but at least you have a few lists and some traffic to the old site.

[Carson-Ward]

You have some great responses here. To summarize some of the advice and add a little new advice, this is what I would do:

• Display a text warning at the top of the site that the site has moved. I'd not worry about the text somehow contaminating the new domain.
• Keep the old site running, and try to get the penalties removed on the side.
• Noindex (or delete, if it's not important to the user) all the content that you want to keep but has few links, then move it to the new site.
• If the penalty is lifted, redirect the old site over to the new site's counterpart. Still, don't 301 redirect pages with low-quality content or spammy links. (You can just kill the pages that are "all bad" now.)

The only question left is what to do with the content you want to keep and has with clean external links. You could probably redirect and cut the internal links without too much risk, which is what I'd do. The completely safe thing to do would be to avoid linking altogether, leaving it out there to gather what traffic it can.

Good luck!