Site Recovery

[SimonW]

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Worked with someone to build them a lovely site.

Did some minor SEO work on site as part of building it - nothing fancy, and it was ranking okay for a competitive area. Certainly it would often be in the top half of the front page for a selection of product searches.

Client went off and was busy doing Google PPC, which for competitive areas is a reasonable way to make a living.

At one point I noticed their natural listing results got suddenly worse - I assumed this was due to duplicate content in a price comparison site. As the price comparison site would rank one or two place above them using our client's copy and images. Annoying, but not dreadful, and I suggested they check it out (which they haven't).

Last I noticed their rankings got dramatically worse. Seems they employed some "SEO people", who clearly felt links on unrelated sites, in other part of the globe, in other languages, in small print at the start and end of web pages is the way to get page rank.

Now they are wondering if I can fix it.

Starting where they were when I stopped it would be easy. Starting where they had an issue with the price comparison site would have been relatively easy (could try asking them not to duplicate our content for one thing). But I know nowt about trying to recover a site. Indeed seems to me it might be cheaper to dump the current domain and simply rename the company., as they have few genuine good links in.

Anyone done this successfully? Anyone recommend anyone who does this sort of thing.

[BrianTopmark]

I've experienced this...

Rather than "dump" the current domain, you can register another domain and park it on top of said website.

www.websiteB.com would then display the same content as www.websiteA.com

You can either put a 301 Redirect on WebsiteA (Permanent Redirect with HTTP 301) in the .htaccess file or use some meta redirection.

www.websiteB.com AND www.websiteA.com would then both go to www.websiteB.com

Simply start promoting www.websiteB.com(it doesn't have any nasty inbound links) and forget about www.websiteA.com. You still get the traffic for the legitimate links already built for www.websiteA.com but www.websiteB.com will not be punished.

That way; you get the best of both worlds.

Google cannot punish a website just because you parked a domain on top of another one. if you could then everyone would be creating lots of "nasty" URLs and then 301 redirecting them ontop of a competitor website to harm their ranking!

If you need any help setting this up, just give me a shout.

Cheers

Bob

p.s. just found this: http://www.affiliates4u.com/forums/s...redirects.html

p.p.s doing the above p.s. seems to have screwed up my post :-)

[accelerator]

You might find something relevant on Matt Cutts blog.

Rgds

[Schebesta]

I've experienced this...

Rather than "dump" the current domain, you can register another domain and park it on top of said website.

www.websiteB.com would then display the same content as www.websiteA.com

You can either put a 301 Redirect on WebsiteA (Permanent Redirect with HTTP 301) in the .htaccess file or use some meta redirection.

www.websiteB.com AND www.websiteA.com would then both go to www.websiteB.com

Simply start promoting www.websiteB.com(it doesn't have any nasty inbound links) and forget about www.websiteA.com. You still get the traffic for the legitimate links already built for www.websiteA.com but www.websiteB.com will not be punished.

That way; you get the best of both worlds.

Google cannot punish a website just because you parked a domain on top of another one. if you could then everyone would be creating lots of "nasty" URLs and then 301 redirecting them ontop of a competitor website to harm their ranking!

If you need any help setting this up, just give me a shout.

Cheers

Bob

p.s. just found this: http://www.affiliates4u.com/forums/s...redirects.html

p.p.s doing the above p.s. seems to have screwed up my post :-)

The 301 of the old domain will carry the old bad links over to the new domain with the above suggestion.

Potential solution (Note: My cousin is having this problem)
Build more links to the site but make them quality to outweigh the dodgies. I had a client with a mix mash of all quality type of links and they have been performing well. The not so great links and the good links are just part of a normal backlink profile to google, spammers always pickup your site and just push links to your site on a dogdy domain for content. If you built up some quality links now to outweigh the dodgy ones this should clean the site up. My cousin is having a similar problem with his site although we are working hard to get him out of the issue. He bought one of those traffic exchange packages although it just got him a whole lot of links from nasty sites and killed his backlink profile. So he is doing article submissions with quality content to rebuild his profile and shutting down the dodgy service. The traffic exchange traffic was so nasty and just bounced straight away.

I suggest pausing the aff program to slow the comparison sites ranking above you when you get your profile back up and running. While you have the ranking problem you will have to live off their sales and PPC.

Hope that helps?

[PhineasTBarnum]

Does Google really punish you for having bad inbound links? or does it only punish you when you have bad outbound links?

If it did, surely people would be creating bad links to their competition?

[SimonW]

Does Google really punish you for having bad inbound links? or does it only punish you when you have bad outbound links?

If it did, surely people would be creating bad links to their competition?

I wondered that. Presumably neither duplicate content, nor inbound links, should be affecting their page rank (if Google are right and nothing anyone else can do can harm your page rank). There were other changes to the site with time, some or all of which might explain the issues seen. All I know for sure is Google dislike them more now than they did originally, I'm assuming links in, as the pages themselves haven't changed that much.

The "redirect" thing is something I'll consider. I've done same recently as a couple of club sites were under my personal domain and their own domain, and are now permanent redirects from my personal domain to their domain, which has got the copy (of one of them) under my domain out of Google already.

[Brendon]

>> Does Google really punish you for having bad inbound links?

Yes

>> or does it only punish you when you have bad outbound links?

That's worse though

>> if Google are right and nothing anyone else can do can harm your page rank

Actually, Google have publically conceded that it *is* possible for others to affect your ranking - see this Forbes article, to which I am one of the major contributors, I might add.

Mostly, sites end up in trouble becasue of something they do to themselves, rather than as a result of malicious outside action. That doesn't make the ban / penalty any less painful though