Starting over after a Penguin Penalty

[mrodriguez1440]

Hi,

Has anyone tried starting a new domain after being hit with a Penguin penalty? I'm considering the approach outlined here: https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2384644/can-you-safely-redirect-users-from-a-penguin-hit-site-to-a-new-domain.

In a nutshell, de-index the OLD site completely via Google's Removal Tool, and then relaunch old content under new domain.

This seems to have merit, unless Google keeps a hidden cache of content (or uses other sources like Wayback Machine). My concern is doing the above listed approach, but Google still passes the old links to the new domain.

We have great content, but too much spam (despite me removing a lot of the links + disavow).

Any feedback based on experience would be appreciated.

Thanks.

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey

This is tough and the article you link to covers many of the reasons why. Sure, there are penguin recoveries, but for every one of them I would venture there are ten sites still suffering. Many of these sites no longer have any (or many at least) dodgy links and it seems that algorithmic penalty is just lingering around. Will they see resolution when the algorithm updates and refreshes? At this point who knows? I don't think just because site A recovered you can make an assumption that site B will do the same.

In our experience we have seen sites really clean everything up and bounce back. We have seen sites clean everything up and not see resolution around the key pages / search terms all these years later. We have at least three folks we have worked with who don't want to change domain and who are waiting for the this somewhat overdue real time Penguin update.

It does not always seem very fair however we must accept that what is what is and look at solutions around that.

A new domain

We have seen some good results here. Sites that just could not recover using a new domain and bouncing back. We have seen this work with the same content when the other site is left up as a holding page (we have now moved). I don't think it hurts to just generally consider doing a refresh and renovation if you are going to move to a new site so you get all the on site signals 100% dialled in.

Your old site remains indexed. I would let all pages bar the homepage 404 to kill as many non homepage inbound links as possible but just have a good 404 page in place to let the user know what to do. I would likely disavow all the bad links to the old site as well so they are technically not considered.

Your new site will then exist on it's own merit so focus on getting any good links updated and just do good work on that site to make it as good as it can be. If you see keywords that are were previously 50+ jump into the 20s or so then you know you are on the right track.

My advice would be:

• clean up and disavow all links bad links to old site
• 404 all pages bar the homepage for the old site with a helpful 404 page
• add a nice little (unfollowed if you want) link to the new site
• freshen up the content and site so it is not an exact copy
• get any good links that you can updated to point at the new site
• track the old domain for a few terms to see if it does recover over time (so you can consider what to do with it then)

Experiment and report back

Ultimately you have to experiment. Keep that old site indexed. Freshen up the new one. Disavow and clean up the old links + keep an eye on the old one as it may well recover and give you more options (after careful analysis).

Much like the article you quote there is no hard and fast answer here. You have to make the best calls possible and review the results and keep tweaking.

Hope that helps!

Marcus

[mrodriguez1440]

This helps a lot. Thank you. I'll update the results to help shed light on this.

Thanks again for your time.

[Marcus_Miller]

Pleasure. Keep me posted.