"Via this intermediate Link" how do I stop the madness?
-
Hi,
-1- I have an old site which had a manual spam action placed against it several years ago, this is the corporate site and unfortunately has its name placed on all business cards etc, therefore I am unable to get rid of this site entirely..
-2- I created a brand new site with a new domain name for which white hat SEO marketing has been done and very little of it... everything was doing well up until last week when I dropped from bottom of page one to top of page 11 for my keyword in question.
-3- I changed the old sites ( the one with the manual spam action ) to mimic the look of the FIRST PAGE of the new domain I am using, and I have the main menu items on this first page linked to the appropriate sections within the new domain site, i.e About US etc. On this page I'm the following:
<link rel="<a class="attribute-value">canonical</a>" href="[http://www.mynewsite.com](view-source:http://www.norsteelbuildings.ca/)" /> and am linking as such:<li><a href="http://www.mynewsite.com/about/" class="" rel="<a class="attribute-value">nofollow</a>">ABOUT USa>li>
using this approach I was hoping that I was doing the correct and not passing along any link juice good or bad however when I view the "Webmaster Tools->Links to your site" I find 1000+ links from my old site and then when I click on it I see all the spammy links that my old site got banned for pointing to my old site and accompanied by a header "Via this imtermediate Link>myoldSite.com". Can someone please sehd some light on what I should e doing or if even these link are effecting my new site, something is telling me there are but how do I resolve this issue.. Thanks in advance.. ``` -
History is showing us that canonical tags are very powerful, and do pass pagerank. Canonical tags and 301 redirects pass roughly the same authority, so even if your physical links are nofollow, those canonical tags are still being interpreted by bots as a link-like entity.
So, by cananocalizing your old domain to your new one, you effectively moved all those links to your new domain, just like they would have with a 301.
-
Hi,
if that's the case then what should I do as I don't want those spammy links to effect me, bringing down my new sites SEO position? do I just remove the canoncal and let the main page be seen as a duplicate content to the main page of my new site or slightly change the content of the old site that is linking to the newsite using "nofollow"
in addition should I be submitting a exclusion list of the spammy urls?
thanks,
-
If you're trying to transfer the good SEO juice, but leave the manual action on the old site, that might not be possible. Google has been cracking down on that, and if you try to move over the good stuff, the bad will follow.
It looks like you have two options:
-
You can 301 the old site, disavow all the bad links, and hope for the best. This way you aren't completely starting from scratch, but the amount of ranks you'll recover won't be clear until a few weeks after you do complete this strategy. Different sites have different results doing this. It depends on the penalty, how well you clean up the links, etc.
-
Start from scratch. New content, new domain, new everything, so there's no relation to the penalized site. This might be what you want to do if the manual action is severe. It'll take a bit more analysis than seeing one keyword drop to know the extent of the penalty you're experiencing.
-
-
Hi,
I don't care about transferring any of link juice over to the new site, whether good or bad, I just can't create yet another site using another newdomain name. I need to stay with the newsitedomain name that I am currently using. what would you recommend:
-1- removing the canonical name and also doing a disavow of the bad links from the old site?
-2- leave the canonical name and just do the disavow on the old site domain name
-3- something else?
thanks,
-
If your content is the same on the new site as the old then believe it or not, you don't even need a canonical tag for Google to recognize that this is the same site and apply your old links to your new site.
Here's more info on this: http://www.seroundtable.com/google-penalty-site-move-18163.html
There are two possible ways around this that I can see. The first would be to remove your new site from the web and then completely noindex your old site (blocking by robots.txt won't do it - I've tried.) You can then use the url removal tool to remove the old site completely from the index. It's important that the noindex tags are in place otherwise they may pop up again at some point. Once the old site is completely removed then you can add the new site. I've done this with another site and the "via this intermediate" links have not come back.
If you have pages on your old site that have good links and you want to 301 them to the new site you could keep them live, noindex the page and then do a redirect that goes through an intermediate page that's blocked by robots.txt. BUT, know that this passes all link juice to the page. If there are bad links then there's nothing you can do to just pass the good juice along. I haven't done this and it's complicated. There's more information on that here: http://www.hiswebmarketing.com/can-you-recover-from-penguin-by-301-redirecting-your-homepage/.
Ideally the best way to ensure that you are not causing Google to see a canonical is to create brand new pages with new content.
Moving a penalized site is tricky!
-
Awesome tip about transferring with the same content here. Completely noindexing the old site sounds like a good option. I'm going to have to keep this trick under my hat for a rainy day, thanks!
-
Hello,
Thank you for the detailed response.. The new site is completely different in all aspects then the old site. I have also just replaced the old site with ONE page and all pages from the old site being redirected to that ONE Page on the old site.
The oldsite's main page contains several buttons at the top, i.e. About us, Gallery etc, each one of these buttons is linked to the appropriate subdirectory of the new site: using a nofollow,
Can you recommend the best approach , I'm not even sure if this is the reason for the SEO drop, but if it isn't I'm sure it will be shortly so I figured I would address it..
I made a change on the new site several weeks back via iis where I just redirected all mynewsite.com traffic to www.mynewsite.com
I also just logged into GWT->Search Traffic->Manual Actions and am presented with the message "No manual webspam actions found." on both sites, which I find strange on the old site because back in 2012 when I contacted google they told me a manual penality had been invoked due to unnatural link patterns. Does this Manual Actions work?
-
If you've removed the canonical tag AND there are no duplicate pages on the new site from the old site then I'd think that the via this intermediate link messages should go within 2-3 weeks.
It sounds like a complicated situation though so I don't think we can give you a complete answer without having a deeper look at your site which is something that probably goes beyond the scope of a forum question.
Regarding your manual penalty most likely it has expired. More info here: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2345875/Did-Your-Manual-Penalty-Disappear-It-Probably-Expired
-
Hi,
thank you for the reply, I am probably not explaining my situation correctly..
I have one following:
-1- two completed different sites, oldsite.com, newsite..com
-2- I don't care about losing any of the link juice from the oldsite.com, I just don't want to risk any of the bad links from the oldsite.com transferring over to the newsite.com
-3- I have created a duplicate landing page for the oldsite.com which looks like the newsite.com landing page, and buttons that get clicked on the oldsite.com landing page point to the appropriate page within the newsite.com. I am using nofollow links. and I also have canonical set between the oldsite.com and newsite.com landing page.
-4- GWT is showing me lots of "via intermediate site: spammy links from oldsite.com on the newsites GWT.What can I do to reverse this? should I just start a massive disavow process from oldsite.com links or is there a way for me to better construct the transition from the user landing on oldsite.com and clicking on a navigation button which takes them to newsite.com
-
Seriously why complicate things? The problem was the old site and you know it thats the very reason why you created a new site. Just like MarieHaynes said "It sounds like a complicated situation though so I don't think we can give you a complete answer without having a deeper look at your site" maybe wait for few weeks and let google find your site again and if you have corrected your site, google will eventually correct its data too.
Best of luck.
-
Hi,
Thank you for your reply, I'm sorry for complicating things..
Is there a way to safely forward users from oldsite to newsite without passing juice from oldsite to newsite and getting rid of the "via intermediate site" warnings?
I've also added the page to the robots.txt file, hopefully doing this will accomplish what I want..
i.e.
User-Agent: *
Disallow: /index.html -
I think this is the right time to use "nofollow, noindex" what i will do is change the content of the page where your visitors visits the most and want to redirect to the new one. Change it contents and warn visitors that you will be redirected to a new site and then do a meta refresh (do not use domain forwarding as some hosting converts it to 301, do not use canonical as well) meta refresh it for 5 seconds or more enough for your users to read the content just not shorter than 5 seconds (just to be safe) do not place a link on the content (just to be safe again) just remember to use "nofollow, noindex" on all the pages of your old site and disallow on your robots.txt
hope this helps
-
I think that the main problem here is that no one knows for sure what kind of things can pass on a link related penalty. So, from what I know of your situation, here's what I'd say:
-Change your home page content on the new page so that it is significantly different from the old page. The reason for this is that Google seems to be able to recognize that the links that used to point to that exact content should now be pointing at the new page. If the new page changes then the "via this intermediate link" should really go.
-Remove any canonical tags that point from the old site to the new
-Most likely having a nofollowed link saying "we've moved" and pointing at the new site would be safe. I can't say that 100% for sure though.
-I actually would not block the old site by robots.txt UNTIL you have noindexed the page and have seen that it is no longer in the Google results. So, add to the page and then use the url removal tool found in Webmaster Tools to ask Google to completely remove that page from the index and the cache. (You'll get a choice of just the index or index+cache - Choose the latter.) That should result in the page leaving the index within 24 hours. You'll know if it is in the index if you do a site:yoursite.com search and see "no results". Once that has happened, then you can add the robots.txt directive to disallow the home page (or really, all of the site).
The reason why you want to do it in this order is that if you add the robots.txt block right now then Google won't be able to recrawl the page to recognize that you've changed the canonical and the noindex status.
I did this for one other site and the "via this intermediate" link notices disappeared in about 2 weeks.
I would love if you could update this thread with what happens.
-
Thank you very much for the lengthy great explanation. I am doing what you have suggested and I will report back shortly..
Thank you..
-
Hi,
It appears as if the oldsite is no longer in google's index and that the has done wonders as far as that is concerned. However it now also appears as if my newsites main page is also no longer in googles index.. my newsites subpages are still in the index but its main page is no longer. I'm hoping that this might just be a temporary problem in googles index while they are doing a refresh or something... , I'm keeping my fingers crossed.
Any suggestions should I just wait it out and see if it comes back or is there something I should manually be doing to get my newsites main page back in googles index.
-
Hmmmm....that's odd that your homepage is out of the index. Some things to check:
-are you absolutely sure that the homepage is gone? If you do a site:search does the homepage exist anywhere?
-Check you haven't accidentally blocked your home page with robots.txt or accidentally noindexed it instead of the old site.
-Are you absolutely sure you haven't done a url removal for the new site by mistake?
You could also ask Google to fetch that page via webmaster tools and that may help it reappear quicker.
-
Hello,
Thank you for your reply,
-1- Yes it appears as if both sites main pages have disappeared from the google index, if I do a site:mynewsite the main page is nowhere to be found, however I'm able to see the other pages from the newsite there.
-2- I have checked and actually my newsite doesn't even contain a robots.txt and I have also verified the contents of my newsite main page tomain sure that it doesn't contain a
-3- Hi, no url removal of either site, I did however disavow some links a couple of weeks back, but I have once again looked through my disavow list that I uploaded and made sure that I hadn't disavowed anything from either of the main sites, which woun;t have but just wanted to double check.
-4- I have asked Google to fetch my newsites main page via webmaster tools,
Should I remove the from my oldsite main page and perhaps do a Google fetch on this page also, just incase something is carrying over?
thanks once again for all your time and great advice..
-
This is really odd. I can't see any real reason for Google to noindex your current site.
I wouldn't remove the tag from the old site. It doesn't make sense that this would affect your new site.
Would you be interested in sharing your url with me? This case really interests me and I'd love to help you sort it out. Feel free to contact me via my Moz profile. I'm currently at MozCon right now, so I might not be able to reply right away but I'd like to sort this out as it is an odd case.
-
Hi,
thank you so much for offering to look at the site, I tried to send you a private message via moz, and it doesn't work, it can't find you even thought I'm on your profile page and click on "Private Message this User".
-
0396
-
0236
-
16198
-
05828
-
02338
-
081.3k
-
091.5k
-
171.3k
