UPS bought a domain that was blacklisted and now we cant rank in Google

[nm1977]

1. We have the site Holidayshuahin.com

Apparently Holidayshuahin.com is on a blacklist of barracuda we think this happens when somonelse owned this domain. What does this mean for our Google rankings today?

We did not optimise the site for SEO but i think it should still show up somewhere in top 100 as there are not that many pages in the niche. holidays hua hin

What should we do change domain name?

2. We have 346 links from Holtidayshuahin.com to our own site Dreamestatehuahinc.om that we do not spend time to optimize on.

Dreamestatehuahin.com Is not ranking as good as we expected could this have any thing to about these backlinks from our blacklisted holidayshuahin.com site?

Also when so many links, should i make them no follow link, what would be best for the link profile of dreamestatehuahin.com in context of links from holidayhuahin.com

Look forward for your answers thank you

[RyanPurkey]

Hi Tamir. Even though Google is a registrar itself and could see the change in ownership on the domain name, if there are a lot of spammy backlinks associated with Holidayshuahin.com, it'd be best to disavow them as part of your new ownership.  You'll also want to register the site in GWT, Bing, etc to display new ownership, and make sure any of the old content is changed.

As far as links to and from your sites go, you'll want to make sure it's done in a reasonable manner. There's an older WBF on that here: http://moz.com/blog/interlinking-your-sites-whiteboard-friday along with a Matt Cutt's example outlined by Barry Scwartz here: http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-linking-20-domains-together-likely-a-cross-linking-scheme-167089.  Those should give you enough guidance to right the ship.  Cheers!

[MarieHaynes]

Is there a manual penalty on the domain?  To tell, go to webmaster tools --> Search Traffic --> Manual Actions.  If you see a penalty there then you can file for reconsideration and tell Google that you are new owners.  In most cases they'll remove it.

But, if you do have unnatural links pointing to the site then you'll need to clean those up.  If you're affected by the Penguin algorithm (which is similar to a manual penalty, but completely machine run) then the only way out is to clean up the bad links and wait for a Penguin refresh.

Regarding the links between the two sites, if you've got that many of them then it may not be a bad idea to nofollow them, but no one can say for sure.  If the links are there for SEO purposes (i.e. keyword anchored) then they should definitely be nofollowed.

This sounds like a complicated case though so there may be other issues as well.

[taryn_s]

Hey Tamir,

You have a couple of solid answers below from Ryan and Marie - I'd definitely follow their advice. I quickly ran your site through Open Site Explorer to look at all external links to your site (you can see the results here) and it looks like this is where your problem lies. You have lots of links from a small number of domains with very keyword rich anchor text. For example, every page on the http://www.dreamestatehuahin.com/ site has a link to your site with 'Holiday Rentals' as the anchor text. Google is likely to see this as pretty spammy activity, especially as you have virtually no links with URL or branded anchor text.

I'd recommend cleaning up your back link profile (either adding nofollow attributes to your links or changing the anchor text if possible).

[nm1977]

Thanks all 3 of you for the useful answers. I have checked in webmaster tool and there are no manual penalty on Holidayshuahin.com

This is what I think I got from your answers.

A: Holidayshuahin.com , disavow all old links to our domain. etc i found there where 55 links form and old greece website about stones kentro-petras.gr

B: Holidayshuahin.com, All the links from our own site (dreamestate) should be no follow and anchor text should be branded like holidayshuahin.com

Dreamestatehuahin.com (our main page rankings are very important)

Therefore when holidayshuahin.com in hit by a penalty would it be a good idea NOTto link from the menu of dreamestatehuahin.com ? (308 links)

Or would it be okay just to do nofollow and branded link from menu.

We have 2 other site Labuahuhin.com and  Huahin24news.com where we have many link links from banners to dreamestatehuahin.com.

I not see a function in the wordpress theme where I can make the banners nofollowwould it be alright if I just use the anchor tag: dreamestatehuahin.com or do you recommend me find somone who know how to do these links nofollow.

[nm1977]

Thanks Brandan!

I change the link as recommended to nofollow and anchor text to holidayshuahin.com

But what do you think about the 308 links i send from Dreamestaethuahin.com menu to Holidayshuahin.com if HOLIDAYSHUAHIN somehow recieved a penelty than it might be best not to link at all from menu.

Instead i could link from menu to a page on Dreamestatehuahin.com that will be the only page pointing out to Holidayshuahin.com