Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thank you for your response.

Although starting from scratch kind of hurts, here I think is not a good option. The site is very well known in its niche, with over 100K customers and 20K regulars, so we are trying to keep the same name (also trademarked, DBA, LLC, etc).

Building a new image for the site and new content isn't the problem, however, I wonder how far Google may take their "penalty-flow" if we start a new Website just using the same name, going from domain.net to domain.com (content and design will be different), but a 301/302 or javascript redirect will be placed in domain.net after all pages are deindexed and there are no traces of the new site.

I must add this is an algorithmic penalty, not a manual. There are no manual actions applied.

Hey!

I am working on a Penguin hit Website. Still ranking for all brand keywords and blog articles are still being returned in Google SERPs, but the website is showing up for only 3 or 4 money keywords. It is clearly a penguin hit as it was ranked 1st page for all money keywords before latest update (3.0). We already did a link cleanup and disavowed all bad backlinks. Still, the recovery process could take over 2 years from previous experience, and in 2 years, the site will suffer a slow death.

Solution: We own the .com version of the domain, currently being served on the .net. We bought the .com version about 6 years ago, it is clean and NOT redirected to the .net (actual site).

We were thinking about moving the whole Website to the .com version to start over. However, we need to make sure Google doesn't connect the 2 sites (no pagerank flow). Of course Google will notice is the same content, but there won't be any pagerank flowing from the old site to the new one.

For this, we thought about the following steps:

1. Block Googlebot (and only googlebot) for  the .net version via robots.txt.
2. Wait until Google removes all URLs from the index.
3. Move content to the .com version.
4. Set a 301 redirect from .net to .com (without EVER removing the block on googlebot).

Thoughts? Has anyone went over this before? Other ideas?

Thanks!

You're welcome.

Then do what the big giants do. Redirect each domain to the appropriate page in your main domain: product-domain.com 301 redirects to domain.com/product-page

It doesn't really matter that much if you use the alt text, and title well to describe the image. However, I always recommend (and do it myself) renaming the image to match the title, in your case something like orange-campervan-cornwall-uk.jpg.

Always use dashed to separate words, not underscores

If those indexed by Google are showing up as the extra-domain.com instead of the primary domain.com and showing the description of the primary domain.com then you are risking your site to a backdoor penalty, which will cause a lot of harm.

My best advise: 301 redirect all those domains to the corresponding page of your primary domain.

Example:

• extra-domain.com 301 redirects to domain.com
• extra-domain.com/page1 301 redirects to domain.com/page1

Hope that helps!

PS: What was the idea behind purchasing 70+ domains? are those product domains? such as for example apple does (itunes.com redirects to apple's itunes page)?

Hi James,

Each field is actually intended for something different:

• Title: should be what is the image. In this case: orange campervan
• Caption: Is what shows up under the image describing it to users visiting the page. In this case: orange campervan in cornwall, UK blah blah.
• Alt Text: Should be an image description that appears when the browser can't (for some reason) display the image. In this case can be either "orange campervan", "Image of orange campervan" or whatever you think describes best the image when somebody can't see it.
• Description: Is just that, a short, brief description of the image contents.

Hope that helps.

Glad to hear!

Didn't expect that my step one could resolve the issue lol (just kidding)

Where are you seeing those links as indexed by Google? In Google WMT? OSE?

There are a few solutions you may try.

1. Try asking for a crawl manually: https://moz.com/researchtools/crawl-test
2. Remove the campaign and create a new one, if you have open slots, just create a new one instead of removing the current one to avoid data loss.
3. If you are still getting old data, then you should contact Moz's support at help@moz.com

Hope that helps!

Is terms of SEO, the server location does not carry any value. However, if you site loads really fast to France visitors, it just makes sense to rank your site higher to French visitors (yet again, confirming that server geolocation does not give you any SEO benefit).

As for your question, what you are trying t achieve isn't an easy task and there are entire companies dedicated to just that, DNS based on geolocation (Anycast DNS, Geo-aware DNS), which is what almost all CDNs do, serve the content of a Website from the closest server to a person connecting to a Website. My recommendation? try to get the fastest server you can in the area you mostly want to target (Europe? then get a server that works fast in europe) and then use some CDN service like maxcdn, or cloudflare to serve static, cacheable content from different locations and speed up site loading as much as possible.

That being said, Google offers some tools to help you target specific Countries, Languages regardless of the server location under Google's Webamster Tools.

Hope that helps!

The way to solve this is actually using both Canonical and hreflang tags in all the pages that have duplicates. I remember answering a similar question that I am sure you will find it useful here: http://moz.com/community/q/custom-hreflang-tags-in-wp-using-with-yoast

According to Google's saying on 301 redirect link dilution, you should lose some of the weight carried by those links.

However, as Google just revealed that HTTPS sites get a slight, minimal in fact, chance to do better in search results, HUNDREDS of sites are moving to SSL. Of all the pages that I've been tracking and reading, there was no change at all in rankings by switching to HTTPS, anyway is too soon to assume conclusions, the statement was released last week, so all those sites I am reading about are just "too new" in HTTPS to take conclusions.

My guts tell me that these 301 should act the same way as any other 301 does (diluting some of the link weight), or it could be yet another way to cheat Google, but will see what happens.

I myself moved my site over the weekend to HTTPS with 301, haven't see any change, but I guess what I can loose in the 301 redirects can be gained by using SSL?

Hey,

It depends on the penalty, if any.

If you have no manual actions under the Webmaster Tools, that's a hint. However, it could be an algorithmic penalty.

If the penalty, again, if any, applies to the whole site, then changing the site's contents while making sure your entire site (backlinks too) is in compliance with Google's quality guidelines, then the penalty should be revoked.

If the issue is actually only the fact that Google can't access the site, then check why, fix that ASAP and you should be ranking again in no time (check using the fetch as Googlebot to make sure that is/isn't it first).

To sum up, you should run an extensive analysis on links, content, server responses errors and find the cause of the "penalty", then work on fixing it to start ranking. Once you do, you can continue with the other SEO/design tasks.

As I said before, opening a thread in Google's Webmaster Help forums could be of much help.

All the best!

That totally depends on the template you are using. If the template does not have that as an option, then you can code your own author snippet to show in each post.

If you are unfamiliar with Wordpress coding, I would suggest you hire an experienced designer/coder to achieve what you are looking for. Freelancer.com is a good and cheap source of coders.

Hope that helps.

Hi Noah,

I suggest you stop by Stackoverflow (http://stackoverflow.com/), where development questions can be better responded.

Hmm... my best guess is that if the content remains the same, that means that you have the same contents on boo.com and foo.com, then just simply do a page by page redirection, that will carry as many value as possible to the new pages.

However, you if you do not have the same pages available on both domains, then there are a couple of things you can do:

• Not the exact same content on the new domain: redirect to what you think is the best match.
• No similar content on the new domain:
                                                         - Option 1: Redirect to a page (sort of a landing page) showing similar pages that the user might be interested in.
                                                         - Option 2: Redirect to a landing page or homepage.

Hope that helps!

Holy... this IS weird.

Checked the robots.txt and there's nothing blocking the indexing, robots meta tags are present with INDEX.

You clearly need urgent access to Webmaster tools, seems like a penalty for pure spam or something like that, as there's no 1 single page indexed, while there are other sites linking to it.

What I would do? Before doing any further onsite SEO, get that resolved. Go to Webmaster tools and check any manual action, message, etc. Try the fetch as googlebot. Then go to Google's Webmaster forums and ask, usually someone from Google jumps in.

Care sharing the real domain?

How did he notice the links?

I guess Google needs to confirm that you own both sites when you do the URL change. When you ask for a change of address, as you edited the DNS records, the old Website no longer exists and cannot be verified.

Can you keep both Websites alive at the same time? I mean, leave the site up at rethinkisrael.org and also at www.fromthegrapevine.com, both at the same time (that shouldn't be too hard) and then try the Change of Address again. Once completed, you can remove or 301 the old rethinkisrael.org

Hope that helps.