Showing on page 25 for url keyword/ brand, is it a penalty?

[MoneySite]

Hi

I have a site which shows on page 25 in G serps for the main brand keyword which is also the url its a .com and as far as I can see has no penalties and has unique content. The keyword itself has no competition and the site should be no1 in G for it.  Our site domain is 11 years old.

[webmethod]

Hi,

You'll need to provide the site details if you need help in diagnosing a penalty.

As a starting point I would log into Google Webmaster Tools to see if a manual penalty has been applied, I would also look in Analytics to see if your organic traffic overall has dropped across other pages on your website.

An algorithmic penalty is harder to diagnose, but can usually be recognised by aligning traffic drops with dates of Google algorithm releases.

George

[MoneySite]

Hi George

Thanks for the response.

Although the domain is 11 years old has only recently gone live so we cannot judge analytics data.  There are no manual penalties that I can see in GWT however, we only acquired the domain in January 2014.

[webmethod]

Your site appears to be indexed OK, but your visibility is low. I checked that "money site" is a low competition keyword you should be ranking better for.

Taking a look at your backlink profile (opensiteexplorer.org), it appears that there are a ton of toxic links pointing to the domain. This is almost certainly going to affect your rankings through Google Penguin, unless someone's already gone through a stringent disavow process.

Before you launched a new site on this domain, was it vetted to see if your predecessors had done any link building badness?

George

[MoneySite]

Hi George

We have analysed all backlinks and disavowed a ton of toxic links that the previous owners created. We did evaluate the domain before the purchase however, we did not have access to the previous owners webmaster tools to see if a manual penalty was imposed at that time.

[webmethod]

Hi again,

The horse may have bolted on this particular issue, but here's what I would have done in your position:

If there's no existing traffic to the domain that you want to keep, and the .com isn't critical to the branding (it's not in your logo) then personally I would have put the site on a another domain that you own already (e.g. moneysite.net - assuming that is clean) and just killed the .com.

Having fought through a few Penguin penalties for existing brands, I can't imagine anything worse than launching a new site/brand that has someone else's dirty link laundry attached to it. There's still a chance you might get a manual penalty in future which will hang over like an axe.

It really depends on how much resource you have to start building real quality content that gets links and shares, and keep ontop of your disavows and potentially ongoing link removals.

It also depends on how critical organic traffic is to your business. If you have $50K a month to throw at PPC or affiliates then it may not matter.

George

[MoneySite]

Thanks George these are all very real risks however, we are starting to rank for some tough highly competitive keywords which puzzles me because if we had a penalty surely it would be sitewide rather than specific terms. Also I noticed than if you search our domain moneysite.com on google we have sitelinks, which I am not sure you would have if a penalty was imposed.

We could go with .net which we own however, could we 301 redirect .com to the .net or would that cause issues for the .net.

[webmethod]

Sites that have algorithmic or manual penalties can still have sitelinks. I have no idea if your site has a penalty or not, I'm just saying there's a real risk from looking at your backlink profile that you may have an algorithmic penalty now, or will get one (or manual penalty) in future. It depends on a number of factors, including the accuracy of your disavow.

If you're starting to rank well for competitive keywords, then that would be a case for staying put. Your visibility is yet to update in SearchMetrics, which is still low though obviously jumped when you launched the new site.

If you moved to the .net, you would have to give up on the .com, as redirects from it would pass the toxic link equity to your new domain. In a worst case scenario, if you stuck with the .com and build lots of quality content, got links and promoted the brand, then your bad link past caught up with you then it would be very difficult to cut free and move to a new domain.

That said, if you moved to .net now there's equally no guarantee that this is completely necessary (as you said you're starting to rank). You're clearly aware that It's a huge decision to make and not one that you would want to take lightly.

Since you're at the point where you're just setting up a new site and probably about to pump money into marketing it pays to be aware of the options. I don't have enough information to say which one you should take.

Hope that helps,

George

[MoneySite]

George

Thank you for your insight and you are right its a tough decision which needs to be made before we move forward.  I will research it a bit more over the weekend and make a decision on Monday.

All the best and have a great weeekend.

Karl