Migrating Domain Penalization

[PrintEZ]

This post is deleted!

[EGOL]

Your old site might have been suffering from a penalty or from filtering.  It could have been penguin, panda, unnatural links, or any of a wide wide variety of reasons.

When you redirected, the new site got indexed and then when the algo processed your data they rediscovered the problems and applied whatever penalty or filtering that you were suffering from.

There could also be something wrong with the way the site was migrated or if you changed the design or code or content, that could be the problem.

There are many things that need to be checked to provide a good answer.

If this is a really important site, the best route to take is to have a person who is really experienced at solving the problems of penalized/filtered/etc. websites.  They need to take a deep dive into the site and check the many things that could be causing problems.  I would be really careful making changes based on kibitzing in forums by people who have given the site a five-minute look.

[BandLeader]

Morris,

Did the migration to a new domain cause your ranks to drop, or did they inflate for a short period and then go back to where they were before? Sometimes we do see a temporary bump when switching domains and 301 redirecting, but then when Google finishes indexing and finds all the 301s, etc., thing eventually settle back to previous levels. You seemed to say "we got this huge drop again", which seems to indicate that you had a huge drop before, right?

It seems to me the problem might be your site. Looking at your products, it seems like perhaps you are pulling in a feed of products from the manufacturer, and using the manufacturer's descriptions. If I search Google for "Tweety shines in colorful accents with black and white designs on these checks" (one of your personal check descriptions), I get 2710 results. Google may be seeing your site as a thin affiliate if all of your products are similarly duplicate. You may need to do the hard work of writing unique descriptions for each of your products, or find another way to get user-generated content on the product pages so Google doesn't penalize you for not having unique content.

[EGOL]

After taking a quick look at this site I believe that it suffers from the duplicate content thin affiliate signpost for other domains panda penalty.

Duplicate content:  Same text appears on many domains

Thin affiliate:  Lots of pages with little to no content created for the sole intent of sending you to an affiliate site.

Signpost:  Lots of the links on this site go to other domains.  LOTS!   I clicked around and went from one domain to another often with redirects taking you to a domain other than what was in the code.  I thought I was on printez.com... how did I get here?

Panda:  low value content, lots of empty descriptions

I also saw quite a few pages that load a blank screen...

If this was my site we would rebuild, rewrite and focus the business model on products that we stock and supply.

[PrintEZ]

Thanks so much for your response.We are currently working on unique contents for the site. New descriptions and titles for each and every product, so it looks unique to the search engines.As far as affiliate pages, each and every link has a rel="nofollow" , for Google not to follow the links to our affiliate sites.Please do let me know if the above is enough or if you suggest we do more or do things differently to get us out of the penalty.Thanks,

[EGOL]

As far as affiliate pages, each and every link has a rel="nofollow" , for Google not to follow the links to our affiliate sites.

It is not the affiliate link or the nofollow that is the problem.  The problem is that google wants to see affiliate pages that have significant value to the visitor.  Not just a "buy this product".

If this was my site I would either discontinue pages that have thin content and an affiliate link or I would improve those pages until they were substantive, informative and of great interest to visitors.

[PrintEZ]

If we change descriptions for each and every product, using 20-30 unique informative words per product, would you consider this substantive, informative and of great interest to visitor?

[EGOL]

** using 20-30 unique informative words per product, would you consider this substantive, informative and of great interest to visitor?**

In my opinion, 20 to 30 words is insignificant.  I try to have a few hundreds words for a product description.