Best way to start a fresh site from a penalized one

[SharewarePros]

Dear all,

I was dealing with a penalized domain (Penguin, Panda), hundred of spamy links (Disavoved with no success), tiny content resolved in part and so on ....

I think the best way is to start a new fresh domain but we want to use some of the well written content from the old (penalized site).

To do this task I will mark as NOINDEX the source (penalized) page and move this content to the new fresh domain.

Question: do you think this is a non-dangerous aprouch or do you know other strategy?

I'll appreciate your point of view

Thank you

[mediawyse]

To be blunt, moving from one penalized domain to another to escape a penalty is most likely a complete waste of time. It's been a known fact for years that penalties follow 301 redirects. But it was recently clarified by Google that "moving" your penalized site (and that includes content) to another domain to escape a penalty is also a foolish choice. Google now reserves the right to move a penalty to any new domain (something we've suspected for awhile, but now can confirm).

In your case, I'd strongly look at continuing to salvage the domain. If you weren't aware of the above, then I'm hesitant to believe that you've also done EVERYTHING you can to unwind your algorithmic penalty. Further, you reference both Penguin/Panda above and yet BOTH have clear different approaches to how they should be resolved. Maybe your "high-quality content" isn't really as high-quality as you think? Maybe you haven't disavowed all the toxic links/domains affecting your site? Have you tried to seek out a professional Google penalty site audit? I'm not convinced you've done all you can just based on your question.

No judgments, but personally, no, I don't believe this is a "non-dangerous approach."

[MoosaHemani]

Casey is right Panda and Penguin are different penalties and they should be resolved differently! Penguin has to do with links so if there is a penguin penalty then you must have some toxic link within your link profile.

My idea here is to collect all the links (GWT, Moz, Ahrefs, and Majestic SEO) and then either manually check each link or use Link Detox or Link Risk to kill all the links that are unhealthy. If the penalty is penguin you will receive a Google message to either remove more links (with some examples of the link) or it will give you a positive message that will say “The penalty has now been revoked”

Note: It is better to remove as many bad links as you can before disavow them.

In case of Panda, the problem is within your site and content so may be the content you think is high quality isn’t really high quality in the eye of Google and in this case you should considerer redoing your content.

All in all I believe the decision of going for a new domain is too early at this stage, my advice is to look in to the penalty details and deal with it.

Hope this helps!

[JaneCopland]

Hi Claudio,

I would echo the guys above in saying that it sounds like you could do more to revoke the penalty on the original site. If you begin anew, I would definitely not 301 the old domain (not that it sounds like you were going to), but I'd also invest in completely new content, rather than duplicating the old content. Google's ability to track duplicate content is amazingly good, so even a noindex on the old content could still have G draw a connection between content it penalised in the past and the new site.

Moosa is absolutely correct that it is better (and unfortunately much harder) to remove bad links than it is to just disavow them. Google's spam team often appreciate genuine effort to remove links - disavowal appears to work best if you have been unsuccessful in your link removal and can prove that you got in touch with as many sites as possible (screenshots of emails unanswered or answered unfavourably, for instance).

The other very good thing about removing links is that they can never hurt you again in the future if Google one day decides to change the way it views previous disavowals... which we certainly can't count on it not doing.

[SharewarePros]

Dear Mates,

To clarify, I was working two years trying to resolve it, for example the toxic links comes from spam blogs created by competitors, take a look at this samples there are 200 blogs containing exactly this page and our site is linked there:

http://tinyurl.com/k3codnt

http://tinyurl.com/mvksl2w

http://tinyurl.com/mgmg772

My plan is to create a fresh new site NO-301 no redirections, but I want to use some of the well performing contents (more than 500 words, well written), using these steps:

1. Make on the old site the content as NOINDEX.

2. Wait 15 days.

3. upload this content to the new site.

Do you think it could be dangerous?

Thank you for your responses

[mediawyse]

Claudio, I've always been inclined to believe the following:

"If Google CAN know something about your site, assume they DO know something about your site."

So in your case, yes, there is always going to be a danger that Google will see you as the owner of both sites (the penalized domain and the new one) and eventually move any penalties from one site to the other. Now, you can certainly minimize this possibility by doing the following:

• Keeping the sites out of the same GW Tools account.
• Making sure the new domain has different WHOIS information.
• Keeping the sites off of the same C-Class Server
• Minimizing similarities between the two sites as much as possible (including NO 301 redirects and design options).

Regardless, even doing the above may not be enough. I will say though that although Negative SEO does exist, I find it "questionable" that it is the main reason you are having problems. Google advises specifically that it's enough to just "drop those kind of links into a disavow." Most likely though, you have MUCH larger issues impacting the domain, especially if it's been 2+ years.

Definitely consider a professional audit. I really want you to consider existing all other methods before trying this strategy.

[SharewarePros]

Dear Casey,

The new domain is on a different C-class, the whois info is different and event locked as private, the WMT and GAnalitycs will be on a different account, the design will be different and even I have planed upload a few products (pages) to start, and also it will be blocked by robots.

But my question is "is dangerous start with similar content to the old site", (some pages has a great content well written)

At this time I was working for two years with the old site and the traffic is recovery too slow, so our time has finished this is why we want to start a new domain using some of the old pages (previously marked as NOINDEX on the old site

Thank you for your time and knowledge

[JaneCopland]

Hi Claudio,

To the question of "is it dangerous to start with similar content to the old site", I would say that it's very hard to tell. Some sites in some niches all have very similar content (think or real estate aggregator sites in the same cities - it's not as if they have access to different properties on the same market - they generally list the same houses for sale and rent at any one time). However, Google is ver adept at processing text to understand it if has been recycled or "spun" from other content it has seen before. If the original content came from a severely penalised website, re-using it in this manner would definitely not be risk-free.

You would probably also want to take the old site offline completely as opposed to simply noindexing its pages if you were to do this.

Google understands very "similar" content due to content spinning having been such a popular way to create content in previous years. If you can re-work your existing content to be of a fairly different length (shorter or longer), take a different paragraph structure, and be placed on the new site that is very dissimilar to the old one in terms of structure, this may work out well. I cannot say that this is risk free however, for all the reasons Casey has brought up already.