Axing an old penalized site

[Lenny2]

Here is a challenge for you guys and gals. We've got an old website that was in the original top 300 websites penalized by panda 1. Over the years since the site has slowly and painfully lost most of its google organic traffic. Today the core organic traffic comes from people searching the domain. Its very difficult to rank any actual pages from this site.

All in all the site is a money maker... even without goog organic... in 2014 I'm hoping to get back into the seo game. Not so that we build the most trafficked site... basically I just dont want to be working against google... want to get at least some benefit from the content we are creating.

So here are the ideas:

First:

301 redirect to a new domain. I fear losing conversions due to our 7 year history and already established brand awareness. I also fear transferring all the penalties over to the new domain.

second:

Just copy and paste content to a new domain. This is what I'm leaning toward. I fear duplicate content issues. However given that goog isn't indexing the pages anyway... maybe it wouldn't be a big deal.

Third:

Your ideas and commentary?

[Shepherd]

penalized by panda 1

Just copy and paste content to a new domain

Seems like you have more of a chance of transferring a panda penalty to the new site by using the old pandaized content than doing a 301.

In my opinion, since you say you have history and brand awareness with the old site I would keep it and keep working on it despite google. On the side I might create the new site to try and get it ranked in google, and by on the side I mean really on the side, try to do everything possible to make sure to sites are not related to each other, no links, different server, wmt, etc.

[turbocharged]

If the site is a money maker without Google traffic, why don't you just build another site just for Google? We've done this for many clients that have great Bing/Yahoo traffic that they did not want to lose. Regardless of what you do, I would not redirect or put the copied content on a new domain. Neither would be very beneficial IMO if your goal is solely to get Google traffic.

[JD_Toims]

I fear losing conversions due to our 7 year history and already established brand awareness. I also fear transferring all the penalties over to the new domain.

Good thoughts! I would feel the same way.

Third:

This is what I would go with and I'd start by going through the site with a very fine-toothed comb, including the HTML coding.

One of the "craziest, are you kidding me?" things I've found with a site hit by Panda [it was a site I initially built from scratch and later sold, then came back to] was some of the "legacy coding" [if it ain't broke, don't fix it] pages that *always* ranked well were the issue.

The TL;DR is: there were places where lists of "things" were coded with <p>intro <br>phrase 1 <br>phrase 2 <br>phrase 3, etc; rather than <p>intro</p><ul><li>phrase 1 </li><li>phrase 2 </li>phrase 3</li></ul> -- Within two weeks of changing the coding from "looks right to visitors using <br>" to more semantic HTML [hey, SE algo, this is a topical list of things], the site went from one page only [the home page] indexed to well back on the way to the whole 12,000+ page site being indexed. Keep in mind, the visual presentation did not change significantly in any way, only the HTML did.

---

I don't "push" correct HTML coding for no reason, or even for my benefit. I do it because I have experience with how ugly the downside can be when what should be [and looks like] a list to a visitor, looks like or could be interpreted as "keyword stuffing" to an algorithm -- Been there, done that; It's ugly and the issues can be very difficult to find, because in the case I'm referring to the issue was in the HTML, not the text or presentation of the text to visitors.

[Lenny2]

Well this some pretty good feedback. Thank you.

What I'm gathering is:

It's too risky to copy 'n' paste old content to the new site... try not to associate the sites at all.

Here is some more feedback:

We were definitely hit by the original panda... since then we've cleaned it all up... Content is more relevant, better etc. Having said that, there have been numerous other updates and the site has continued to fall since the original Panda AXE. My logic is that we were originally hit by panda and then hit by penguin... So I was thinking I'd launch out the new content on a new site... and get rid of the association of any bad links/history etc. Figuring that Google actually likes the content but hesitate to rank it due to some penalty that the site is on.

What I don't want to do is re-write thousands of pages of content... What do you guys think?

One way to test, I guess, would be to put the new site up on a random domain... see what the reaction is by google... if it's good, 301 redirect the content to the new branded domain.

anybody else have any experience with dealing with old good content and moving it over to a new domain?

[n0tSEO]

But how are you faring on social media and other search engines? If your site gets good traffic from non-Google sources, I would keep it intact if I were you, and create a second brand new site just for Google that has no links to the previous.

I have had a good experience with old content on a new domain in the past, but Google has changed a lot over the last two years, so I'm not sure this method still works.