Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks for the response Andy! That makes perfect sense.

Does anyone else have any other opinions or info?

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!

I didn't think so, but wanted to double check.

Regarding redirects, will I have to change old 301 redirects in our .htaccess file that are setup for individual pages from http to https? Or will the site wide redirect take care of this?

Thanks!

Another question just popped into my head!

Does the Google WMT "Change of Address" tool still not support https?

Thanks for the info!

Does anyone else have experience with the issues I raised above? I'd love to hear other peoples thoughts too.

I honestly can't remember, as I started the research months ago and the project had to be put on hold.

I do know that Moz recommends the following: "Make sure every element of your website uses HTTPS, including widgets, java script, CSS files, images and your content delivery network."

Will the redirect I posted above take care of this?

Hey Dmitrii,

Thanks for the response...you seem to be everywhere in the Q&A!

As far as I understand the redirect below would make it impossible for users to reach our http website, which means we wouldn't have to change our relative internal links, correct? Keep in mind, the rewrite below may look a bit different since our website uses a load balancer.

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP:X-Forwarded-Proto} !https

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.jwsuretybonds.com$1 [R=301,L]

Hey Moz!

I read Moz's guide on migrating websites from http to https, and it seems changing all relative internal links to absolute https is recommended (we currently use relative internal links). But is doing this absolutely necessary if we will already have a redirect in our .htaccess file forcing all http pages to https?

Changing all of our internal links to absolute https will be very time consuming, and I'd like to hear your thoughts as to whether it's absolutely recommended/necessary; and if so, why?

Thanks!

Thanks for clearing that up and all of the help!

Hey Dmitrii,

I was planning on using two rewrites.

One rewrite for replacing the underscores with hyphens.

And another rewrite for removing the file extensions.

Just so I fully understand, you recommend implementing the rewrite for replacing the underscores with hyphens in our .htaccess file. Then once the new URLs are indexed, change the webpage file names themselves by replacing the underscores with hyphens, make the newly named files live and remove this rewrite from our .htaccess. Is my understanding correct?

Again...thanks for all of your help!

Another question just popped into my head...

Once our new website directory structure and URL format has been rewritten, redirected and indexed by search engines, would it make sense to edit the actual webpage file names (replacing the underscores w/ hyphens) and then remove the URL rewrite that replaces the underscores with the hyphens? Or is this not recommended?

Thanks for the help Dmitrii!

Both the rewrite I posted above and yours for removing file extensions failed to work. However, it seems this one does the trick (taken from the Apache help forums).

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,}\s([^.]+).htm [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,}\s([^.]+).php [NC]
RewriteRule ^ %1 [R,L]

Hey Dmitrii,

This rewrite that I posted above...

RewriteRule ^old/(.*)$ /new/$1 [L,R=301]

...isn't intended to remove the file extensions. I'm using it to redirect the old directory structure to our new directory structure.

I was asking if using this rewrite when changing my directory structure will be all I need in regards to having all the necessary redirects in place to not negatively affect our SEO/SERP rankings. Any idea?

Also, would you recommend the rewrite you provided above over the one below when removing file extensions?

RewriteBase /
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.html -f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.html

Let me know if I'm being clear enough Thanks!

Thanks for the response Dmitrii!

Thanks for for confirming that I don't need to update the webpage file names.

Do you know if redirecting the old directories to the new ones (using the the rewrite below) is all I need to do regarding redirects? In other words, when redirecting directories using the rewrite below is there any need to redirect the old URL format (small_blue_widget.htm) to the new (small-blue-widget)? My understanding is no, all I need to do is redirect the directories; but please share your knowledge.Thanks in advance!

<code>RewriteRule ^old/(.*)$ /new/$1 [L,R=301]</code> 

Hey Moz!

I’m getting ready to implement URL rewrites on my website to improve site structure/URL readability. More specifically I want to:

• Improve our website structure by removing redundant directories.
• Replace underscores with dashes and remove file extensions for our URLs.

Please see my example below:

Old structure: http://www.widgets.com/widgets/commercial-widgets/small_blue_widget.htm

New structure: https://www.widgets.com/commercial-widgets/small-blue-widget

I've read several URL rewriting guides online, all of which seem to provide similar but overall different methods to do this. I'm looking for what's considered best practices to implement these rewrites. From what I understand, the most common method is to implement rewrites in our .htaccess file using mod_rewrite (which will find the old URLs and rewrite them according to the rewrites I implement).

One question I can't seem to find a definitive answer to is when I implement the rewrite to remove file extensions/replace underscores with dashes in our URLs, do the webpage file names need to be edited to the new format? From what I understand the webpage file names must remain the same for the rewrites in the .htaccess to work. However, our internal links (including canonical links) must be changed to the new URL format. Can anyone shed light on this?

Also, I'm aware that implementing URL rewriting improperly could negatively affect our SERP rankings. If I redirect our old website directory structure to our new structure using this rewrite, are my bases covered in regards to having the proper 301 redirects in place to not affect our rankings negatively?

Please offer any advice/reliable guides to handle this properly.

Thanks in advance!

I am looking for good (paid or open source) Q&A software for my website.

My industry is very confusing to most of our clients and is boring in general.  Therefore, we don't think we'll have an active community (so we don't want a full fledged forum), but more so just 1-off questions from potential clients for each product.

I'm trying to find a solution that...

• Can be indexed by Google (I want the longtail traffic!)
• Easy to post a question (simple login w/ possible FB, Google, Twitter sign-up)
• Feeds for most recent, popular, and featured questions

We run a custom HTML/PHP site, so I'd like to add it to product pages to allow people to easily post their questions.

I found some possible solutions like QHub, but nothing that I'm sold on yet.  Anyone have suggestions?

Thanks!  I figured as much, but I wanted to hear it from another guru rather than assuming on my own.

I appreciate it

Thanks!  I agree with everything you said.  We'll be sure to remove and disavow any negative links.

As you can see from the images I posted above, we are getting quite a bit of referral spam that we need to address.

Any idea if the referral spam can negatively impact Google measurement of user experience / dwell time?  I don't simply want to block it in analytics if it is poorly reflecting on our site.

Great links Patrick!

These are all things we're constantly working on.  The info on dwell time was of particular interest.   Thanks!

We might be wearing tin foil hats a bit, but the past actions of the competition have unfortunately led us down that path of thinking.

Is there any way for us to try to confirm whether click bots are being used to artificially boost the rankings of sites for a particular keyword?  I can't think of any way to detect that activity.

Here are what sites it appears to be coming from.

new