Duplicate content when changing a site's URL due to algorithm penalty

[Masoko-T]

Greetings

A client was hit by penguin 2.1, my guess is that this was due to linkbuilding using directories. Google webmaster tools has detected about 117 links to the site and they are all from directories. Furthermore, the anchor texts are a bit too "perfect" to be natural,  so I guess this two factors have earned the client's site an algorithm penalty (no manual penalty warning has been received in GWT).

I have started to clean some of the backlinks, on Oct the 11th. Some of the webmasters I asked complied with my request to eliminate backlinks, some didn´t, I disavowed the links from the later.

I saw some improvements on mid october for the most important KW (see graph) but ever since then the rankings have been falling steadily.

I'm thinking about giving up on the domain name and just migrating the site to a new URL. So FINALLY MY QUESTION IS: if I migrate this 6-page site to a new URL, should I change the content completely ? I mean, if I just copy  paste the content of the curent site into a new URL I will incur in dpolicate content, correct?.

Is there some of the content I can copy ? or should I just start from scratch?

Cheers

hRggeNE

[Sarbs]

You should be ok just to replicate it, but by all means use the opportunity to refresh the content, 6 pages shouldn’t take too long. If you want to be extra safe then you can of course just rewrite from scratch. The Penalty will be at the domain level so you should be ok to redirect the existing pages to the New URLs, this will signal to Search engines that the pages have been moved and not to count the redirected pages as unique content, avoiding Dupe content issues. You can also use a cross domain Canonical tag.

If you don’t want to do any redirects to totally severe your links to the old domain profile then remove the original pages from Google’s index in your webmaster tools account and ensure you return 410 status codes to individuals that request the page. If you do still want the users to redirect however 302 the page to the new location as this won’t pass link equity.

Hope this proves useful.

[Aggie]

If you're moving a site, Google's recommendations are to move the content and redirect. However, it sounds like you're looking for a fresh start.

Are you sure it's the links?  Are you also concerned about EMD penalty or just hoping for a fresh start?

[Masoko-T]

Hi Tuzzel

Thanks for your reply. Are you sure there are no duplicate content risks?, I thought that, since google had already indexed the original content, finding the same content in a different (newer) site will cause the later to be considered "duplicate".

I hadn't thought about the 302 redirects, that's not a bad idea :).

[TheeDigital]

Masoko-T,

If you're sure that the penalty is from link building, you should have no problem. As mentioned above a refresh of the content, might be a good idea though.

[evolvingSEO]

You can safely move to a new domain, move the content over (upgrade it a little) and there should be no duplicate content issues. The duplicate content issues were designed for things like just scraping content from news feeds and posting them on your own site, and not having any unique or original. Or selling products as a reseller and not doing anything to the manufacturers text etc.

If you move the site to a new domain - I would just 410 the pages on the old site and not do any redirects. You were probably only ranking for a short period of time because of the unnatural back links. If you redirect them you will pass the negative link values over to the new site (those that were not fixed or disavowed anyway) and there is probably not much for good link metrics to warrant a redirect. You will lose any traffic from people who are trying to visit the old site, so maybe you can put up a message on the old site's homepage that it has moved to a new domain, but not link to it.

[evolvingSEO]

As long as you 410 (delete) the old pages, they are no longer indexed and will not cause a duplicate content issue.

[Masoko-T]

Thanks everyone for answering my question!!!

[dohertyjf]

Hey Masoko -

In the past, I've had luck with 410ing the previous site and putting a link from it saying that we've moved. This way, you keep any direct traffic by referring them, but you also don't redirect your pages via 301.

Penalties pass through redirects. You don't want to keep both sites and duplicate content. I'd kill off the old site (it's only 6 pages, so that's pretty easy) and take the chance to, as has been said, refresh the content. Also, think about adding more pages to the site so you can rank for more longtail terms.

Good luck.