Deindexing & moving site penalised in google, but ranking in bing

One of my sites was hammered in a google update last year. Since then I've done some housekeeping on it, cleaned it up (both internally and externally) and it's been sitting in 'waiting mode' ever since - one sports article per week posted to it to keep it fresh, but otherwise not much else going on.

I was hoping that there would be some kind of refresh, but it's starting to look like it may be time to deindex and move it to a new domain (I have the exact same domain name on a different tld - eg: example.org and example.net - which would be the obvious choice).

Thing is, it's still ranking and getting traffic from bing and yahoo. It's only a trickle (couple of hundred UV/month compared to 5k from google pre penalty) but the traffic is converting pretty well as it is. There's also no guarantee of the migrated site picking the traffic back up from google.

So... any opinions on what to do with it? The options I'm mulling are:

- Leave it as it is, be happy with the yahoo/bing RMP's, and hope for a google refresh at some point
- Sod the bing/yahoo traffic/sign ups, deindex the site from all the SE's and then move it to the alternative domain
- Deindex the site in google, but not yahoo/bing and then create a clone on the alt tld which blocks yahoo and bing (ie: so two copies of the site would exist but only one copy would be visible to each SE). Although this smells a little blackhatty to me, which isn't my aim.

I am not advising anything but I had a site like that (google nowhere and ranking alright in bing). I did a reconsideration request to google even though google had never sent me a manual penalty warning. The site was not manually penalised but almost certainly had fallen foul of the algo changes re: penguin or panda. I had already done some work to make it less spammy. Anyway I filed a reconsideration request thinking 'why not they are giving me no traffic anyway' and maybe three months later it starts appearing in google again. Never heard anything from them and maybe it was just a coincidence . . .

Find out what the reason is for your penalty and do what is necessary to get rid of the penalty.

Have you had a message in WMT saying it has had a penalty or has traffic just dropped considerably?

Would depend on what % of my network wide signups were coming via this site. If it is only a few % then I'd take the gamble, 'few hundred' UVs vs 5k looks like a huge potential upside.

Just a thought, you could always recreate the site on a new domain by cherry picking your best content and having it rewritten. Get someone with some copy writing experience to help with the rewrites rather than a keyboard monkey and you might even improve the conversions. Guess that depends on size of the original site somewhat.

Thinking about it, I'd gamble!

Mark

Cheers all - appreciate the input!

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Originally Posted by justbookies

I am not advising anything but I had a site like that (google nowhere and ranking alright in bing). I did a reconsideration request to google even though google had never sent me a manual penalty warning. The site was not manually penalised but almost certainly had fallen foul of the algo changes re: penguin or panda. I had already done some work to make it less spammy. Anyway I filed a reconsideration request thinking 'why not they are giving me no traffic anyway' and maybe three months later it starts appearing in google again. Never heard anything from them and maybe it was just a coincidence . . .

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Interesting.. there's no manual action recorded in WMT but I guess it can't hurt to ask on the off chance.

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Originally Posted by Christiaan

Find out what the reason is for your penalty and do what is necessary to get rid of the penalty.

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Was link based going by the timing - thing is the site didn't even have that many, just too many with the same anchor. And the anchors weren't even premium, just written the same way (eg: a significant proportion were exaclty in the "MySite.com" format - completely dumb on my part!).

Pretty much all of the old links were removed a year ago or so though and nothing's budged since then, so it's not looking like the penalty will get lifted any time soon, at least without a refresh.

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Originally Posted by SportsBets4free

Have you had a message in WMT saying it has had a penalty or has traffic just dropped considerably?

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Traffic crashed to pretty much zero from google on the day a penguin update happened (and no manual action according to WMT). I'd bet dollars to doughnuts it's an algorithmic penalty.

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Originally Posted by Planet Mark

Would depend on what % of my network wide signups were coming via this site. If it is only a few % then I'd take the gamble, 'few hundred' UVs vs 5k looks like a huge potential upside.

Just a thought, you could always recreate the site on a new domain by cherry picking your best content and having it rewritten. Get someone with some copy writing experience to help with the rewrites rather than a keyboard monkey and you might even improve the conversions. Guess that depends on size of the original site somewhat.

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It's only a small percentage of sign ups, but even so I'm not going to turn my nose up at them. You are right though, in it's previous state it probably did 50x the number of sign ups, so looking at it that way it might be worth rolling the dice, eh!

Rewriting is an option, although I already have a couple of other very similar sites (that was pretty much the first thing I did when it got hit) and it would still leave me with the same dilemma as to what to do with this particular site...

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Originally Posted by baldidiot

Was link based going by the timing - thing is the site didn't even have that many, just too many with the same anchor. And the anchors weren't even premium, just written the same way (eg: a significant proportion were exaclty in the "MySite.com" format - completely dumb on my part!).

Pretty much all of the old links were removed a year ago or so though and nothing's budged since then, so it's not looking like the penalty will get lifted any time soon, at least without a refresh.

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Disavow those links if you still have the list. THEN file a reconsideration request.

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Originally Posted by -Shay-

Disavow those links if you still have the list. THEN file a reconsideration request.

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All been removed, my friend - backlink profile is now squeaky clean! ;)

Edit: Just to add more info... the links were removed a long time ago (last year) and haven't shown in WMT for ages. Site does have a small handful of backlinks, but all legitimate.

Please check your PM baldidiot, maybe I can help you.