Cleaning up a Spammy Domain VS Starting Fresh with a New Domain

[DmitriiK]

Couple ways you can go about it.

1. Is any of the traffic going to the old spammy domain any good? Does it convert? If not, then don't worry about redirecting,  there wouldn't be any point, only spam signals

2. If there is some good traffic, then do IP limitations, hostnames limitations etc. That can be done in htaccess or on the server itself. There are other more elaborate ways to filter out spam traffic as well, but that depends on how you or your IT guy is familiar with it. One of the simplest solutions is to route all traffic through CloudFlare, it has quite nice spam filtering, and it's free.

Hope this helps.

[murraycustomhomescom]

Thank you-  Yes some of the traffic - maybe a lot of traffic will convert.  The problem is old "printed" directories and other places where we can't update the domain. We get a lot of business from a printed catalog that won;t change for a year or more.

I will look at the suggestions you made about IP limitations. The other issue is we don't "own" the original domain so we have to ask the owner who is also our IT guy to change settings.  This is another reason we bough the new domain.

Again thank you!

[DmitriiK]

"... maybe a lot of traffic will convert. "

WILL convert? so it's not converting now? If so, it's kind of optimistic that will change, no?

Since you don't own old domain, you can't really reliably do anything about it anyway.

At this point, I would say not to forward at all, start from scratch.

[murraycustomhomescom]

Thank you again!

I should  have been more clear-  The old website gets traffic that does convert-   If it loaded faster than 10 seconds I'm sure a lot more would convert- Super high bounce rate due to slooooow loading of that site.  But we do get "valid leads" every week from it.  But not a lot of leads- maybe 5 a week-  but our jobs are large dollar jobs.

What is your thought on running both sites separately?  We could go in and make sure they are not duplicate and assign different addresses and phone numbers to the old site-  But this "seems" black hat- We would not be doing it to get both site to rank- but just so we don't lose the traffic- then in a year or so get rid of it.  what are your thoughts?

[DmitriiK]

Yeah, your suggestion makes sense.

Keep the old one while the new one is ranking up.

Now, here is perfect scenario for you - keep working on the new site, and get full ownership of the old one. Then through IP blocks, cloudflare, removing all spammy backlinks etc, get rid of all or most of the spammy traffic and signals. And then redirect.

[murraycustomhomescom]

This is awesome info!  Thank you.  What are your thoughts on trying to get backlinks removed from sites in China where we have no way to contact them - none of the wording o the sites are in our language-  and it seems like it would be impossible to get removed from some of them.  Additional thoughts greatly appreciated.  In analytics we see "more" traffic from china than the US-

I'm convinced a competitor may be listing us on these sites-  Or one of these SEO guys that get really pissed when we turn them down.  Could they be out putting our domain on listing sites?

[DmitriiK]

Hard to say who and why is putting you on those websites.

The only way to truly get rid of those backlinks is to reach out to those websites' owners. You'd have to obviously find someone who speaks the language.

Now, what you can do though is this:

1. Disavow all those crappy links - that'll get Google to lower the "spam score" of your website;
2. Block all traffic by IPs, geolocation and/or hostnames/referrers (that'll prevent from actual unrelated traffic)

That should clean it up pretty good.
Of course, that requires full control and ownership of that domain and website code. If you can't get that - again, my suggestion is just to part ways.

[murraycustomhomescom]

Thank you!! 

[DmitriiK]

You are always welcome.

If you got more questions, you can always hit me up on my Twitter @DigitalSpaceman

[murraycustomhomescom]

Thanks again for all the advice-  Truly appreciated-

What are your thoughts on "disavowing" with google- murrayroofing.com  so when it sends traffic to the new murrayroofingllc.com google will hopefully ignore...?   Can you see our account in MOZ.  You can see the old domain is sending traffic since it is listed on the spammy sites.

[DmitriiK]

Disavowing has nothing to do with traffic.

Disavowing is all about spam signals from spammy links. That and only that.