Start a new site to get out of Google penalties?

[TheDude]

Hey Moz,

I have several questions in regards to whether I should a start a new second site to save my online presence after a series of Google penalties.  The main questions being:

• Is this the best way to spend my time/resources?
• If I’m forced to jump my company over to the new site can Google see that and transfer the penalty?
• I plan on all new content (no link redirect, no dup content) so do I need to kill the original site? Are there any Pro’s/cons I am missing?

Summary of my situation:

Looking at analytics it appears I was hit with  both Penguin 2.0 and 2.1, each cutting my traffic in half, despite a link remediation campaign in the summer of 2013.  There was a manual penalty also imposed on the site in the fall of 2013, which was released in early 2014. With Penguin 3.0’s release at the end of 2014, the site saw a slight uptick in organic traffic, improving from essentially nothing to next to nothing.

Most of the site’s issues revolved around cheap $5 links from India in the 2006-09 time frame. This link building was abandoned, and replaced with nothing but “letting them happen naturally” from 2010 through the 2013 penalties.  Since 2013 we have done a small amount of quality articles on a monthly basis to promote the site, social media, and continuous link remediation. In addition the whole site has been redesigned, optimized for speed/mobile, secured, and completely rewritten.

Given all of this, the site has really only recovered to page 2 and 3 of the SERPs for our key words.  Even after a highly circulated piece appeared on an Authority site (97 DA) a few months ago there was zero movement.  It appears we have an anvil tied around our leg until Penguin 4.0.

With all of the above, and no sign of when the next penguin will be released, I ask, is it time to start investing in a new site?  With no movement in 2.5 years, it’s impossible to know where my current site stands, so I don’t know what else I can do to improve it.  I am considering slowly building a new site that is a high quality informational site.  My thought process is it will take a year for a new site to gain any traction with Google.  If by that time my main site has not recovered, I can jump to that new site, add a commercial component, and use it as a life boat for my company.  If I have recovered, then I have a future asset.

Thanks in advance!

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi,

You are in the same boat as countless others waiting upon the next release of Penguin.

My thoughts around this are that it is probably a huge piece of work for you, and one that means you are going to have to rewrite all of the content again - but more of a worry, is if Google catches on to what you are doing. In their eyes, they might see that the business has two sites while there is only a need for one, and with that might come many more issues.

You wouldn't really want to be releasing a site and then have to disallow all crawler access as that wont do anything for it.

If you were to invest in a new site, I would be advising you switch the old one off before the new one was open to being crawled.

However, Google have said that Penguin isn't far off now - but they have been saying that for a while.

-Andy

[TheDude]

Thanks for the response Andy! That makes perfect sense.

Does anyone else have any other opinions or info?