.UK A Lifeline For Penalty Hit Brands

[Murray]

I was just thinking & this is something I had never considered before.

A lot of sites are hit with google algorithms and penalties and have a tough time ever recovering.

"Start again with a new domain" sometimes is the best advice, "I can't, the domain is our brand name" is the reply.

So for all those co.uk stuck in a hole, you can now conveniently start again with a clean slate on .uk and keep your brand.. nice.

 

[ratboy]

Just speaking about that with a fellow domainer.

Very good point isn't it!

 

[Blossom]

And how many of them will just get a penalty on the new name within six months

It's good for black hats though.

 

[Murray]

And how many of them will just get a penalty on the new name within six months

It's good for black hats though.

Well you would hope people would learn their lesson.

I saw you were offering links in another thread as part of a spam service.. lets hope they steer clear of that type of thing

 

[Edwin]

Or they can use the new domain to get 2 bites of the SERPS, or one for their regular site and one for mobile...

Or one as their actual site and the other as their Adwords lander...

 

[Blossom]

Well you would hope people would learn their lesson.

I saw you were offering links in another thread as part of a spam service.. lets hope they steer clear of that type of thing

Personally, my view is that if you're a brand you need to make the effort to have a penalty removed. The most likely situation is that you would want to redirect people from your old site to your new one anyway, and just saying 'Moved to [newdomain.uk]' on your old site isn't the most professional approach and looks a bit suspect without a link or redirect. Even without counting the other areas of loss.

I think you need to be more careful about how you word things. I love the way you've tried to shoehorn your comment into a discussion about something completely different though. And as you don't have all the facts (particularly whose links I was passing on, why, and in what context), I'd recommend not jumping to conclusions publicly.

 

[Blossom]

Or they can use the new domain to get 2 bites of the SERPS,

Quicker and cheaper to fill out with social media profiles, they're much easier to rank for branded terms. In competitive money keyword terms, most of the time the time and money to develop & rank a site is not worth doing twice; you're better off investing in the main one.

or one for their regular site and one for mobile...

Current best practice as advised by Google is responsive design with the same content displayed for mobile + desktop. Ideally you want 1 site (even if not exactly the same content is displayed).

 

[murph]

I was thinking exactly this.

 

[Murray]

I think you need to be more careful about how you word things. I love the way you've tried to shoehorn your comment into a discussion about something completely different though. And as you don't have all the facts (particularly whose links I was passing on, why, and in what context), I'd recommend not jumping to conclusions publicly.

If people don't want to get their new domain penalised then buying links is something they should definitely avoid, we can agree on that surely.

So (for me) rolling your eyes at people making mistakes whilst actively helping them make the mistakes (by promoting buying links) seemed inconsistent.

 

[Retired_Member38]

Or they can use the new domain to get 2 bites of the SERPS, or one for their regular site and one for mobile...

Or one as their actual site and the other as their Adwords lander...

I think for pretty much everyone, 2 sites is going to be a bad idea. You're going to end up splitting link equity/social media shares/brand searches etc etc across multiple sites. I would think its far better to push all of that to a single site, and use CSS to serve up a mobile version if needed.

Likewise with Adwords... any quality signals google derives from that would be best served pointing them at your main site.

imo the only people who could perhaps justify multiple sites would be someone like Wonga - they attract loads of negative publicity, so having a 2nd site can help push some of that down the page.

 

[baldidiot]

The most likely situation is that you would want to redirect people from your old site to your new one anyway, and just saying 'Moved to [newdomain.uk]' on your old site isn't the most professional approach and looks a bit suspect without a link or redirect.

You can redirect users whilst leaving the penalty behind - for starters you could just de-index the penalised site and then block the SE bots from seeing the redirects with htaccess.

Plenty of other ways of going about it, but that's probably the easiest.