try for penalty recovery, or start over?

[ogletree]

I have a situation where a company has been on the web since the 90's and now has all kinds of penalties.

There are two sites. One is branded for the company name and covers all the services that company provides and the other is specific to one service that is the bulk of the companies business.

The 2nd site that is about one service does not attract any links because it is not the company main site. When people become customers or deal with the company in any way they will be going to the main site because that is what we print on things and the email address they use and what comes up with you type the company name in Google. The only links this site has are low quality directory submissions and other low quality type links. Also the site has a ton of low quality content.

The main site has some decent links but mostly hundreds of thousands of very low quality links. Even though there are so many links they are mostly on a few hundred domains. They created several WP themes several years ago with "created by keyword keyword" with links to some internal pages. We have tried to get them removed form the web but they seem to be quite entrenched and sites are still being created with these themes.

Both sites have very outdated busy designs with tons of low quality content and low quality links. Both sites do have some high quality content just not much.

Would it be a good idea to try and fix these sites or to just start over again and not do that stuff this time.

I was thinking of creating a new branded domain with only quality content and keeping the number of pages down to just what people tend to click on. There are certain pages we know are helpful and people do click on.

After that we 301 redirect the roots of both old domains to the new domain and redirect any content on the old site that corresponds to content on new site. Then redirect all other pages to root.

The main question is do we try to fix old situation or just start over because so much bad/out-dated SEO has been done in the past on both sites.

[aakk9999]

What was the reason for having the main service company is offering on a separate site?

They created several WP themes several years ago with "created by keyword keyword" with links to some internal pages.

Is this the main problem of the branded domain? If these links go to some internal pages, could you remove target URLs (respond with 410 gone) and place the content to new URLs on the main site?

Here is what I would do:
- merge two domains to branded domain, taking only quality pages of the second domain.
- from the second domain, implement redirects to the quality pages you moved to the branded domain. Pages that have not been moved should either return 410 or be redirected to a quality page (if the content was sufficiently similar)
- sort out branded domain to have only high quality content (trim unecessary pages). Again, either return 410 for pages removed or redirect 301 to a quality similar page (if exist)
- remove internal pages that widgets have links to and return 410 for these, if the content was high quality, move that content to a different URL

If executed well, this should create a good site so wait to see the results.

If the results are not satisfactory, it would probably point to some kind of link penalty. You can then discard branded domain name and move the improved and trimmed down site to a new domain name. In this case redirecting may be a mistake as if there is a penalty caused by internal links, redirecting may result in a new domain inheriting this penalty.

[ogletree]

I'm sure they thought it was a good idea for SEO to create a site about one service so it could rank better.

Both sites have an obvious penalty. The front pages don't rank for anything other than the domain names. Some internal pages rank page 5 for some terms that the front page used to rank page one for. We do get SEO traffic from Google but since Google won't tell us any more I don't know what terms. When I try lots of searches we never show up. Both sites have lots of low quality links.

[Robert Charlton]

Probably I'd try to fold the second site into the first branded domain as aakk9999 describes, but keep in mind that 301 redirects are likely also to redirect any backlink penalties. Tradeoffs between preservation of the domain, preservation of the brand name, the pain of disavow, traffic redirection, etc, need to be considered.

Sounds like the company has been around long enough that its branded identity is likely to be worth preserving. That said, the WordPress themes are a major transgression, with unmistakable intent to spam... and, as you notice, they tend to be hard to get rid of.

See this discussion, which as I remember occurred before the disavow tool became available...

Google wants me to remove links from sponsored WordPress themes
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4445558.htm [webmasterworld.com]

My guess is that to demonstrate sufficient penance in your reconsideration request, so Google is reasonably sure that this won't happen again, you may have to go so far as to make available an unlinked version of the theme and perhaps offer it to the domains now using it as an "upgrade", and to document those offers carefully.

Backlinks from themes to inner pages could be removed by dropping those pages. Theme links to branded home page, though, may or may not be disavowable if they continue to pop up. So the price of keeping the branded domain may be constant monitoring and disavowal of new uses of the theme.

To simplify the task, I would consider using some kind of blocked redirect page to redirect traffic-only from the second "seo" domain to the branded domain. See this discussion...

Best Way To Redirect Home Page Without Forwarding Penalty / Penguin
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4606464.htm [webmasterworld.com]

Ultimately, you'd be preserving the home page of the branded domain, and also the brand name.

[ogletree]

We would not change the brand we would just change the domain to .net or append tx to the existing domain.

I have talked to some people with experience in fixing penalties and 301's don't seem to pass penalties. Have you tested this to see if a 301 really does pass the penalty or is this just something you heard or expect would happen?