301ed a high powered but non-relevant, off-niche domain to money site

[bonehead84]

Has anyone done this? I know it's a bone-head move, I'm trying to correct a past mistake.

Please note in the title of the thread, I'm specifically talking about a non-relevant domain to a different niche.

So something like a Photography domain being redirected to a site about Foot Fungus.

A few years ago I did this with two high-powered domains and everything exploded in traffic but about a year later my traffic hit a plateau. I didn't see a reduction in traffic. It's like it hit an invisible ceiling and can't grow past it, no matter how much I publish and how many new links I get.

Do you think this could be related? Has anyone seen anything like this?

[goodroi]

This is an old trick that worked well for too many years and still works to a certain degree today. Google continues to become better at spotting this manipulation so I would not suggest this for most new projects especially if you are trying to launch a long term site.

[lucy24]

<tangent>

something like a Photography domain being redirected to a site about Foot Fungus

Hurrah, it’s my favorite party game. “When photographing wildlife in swamps, make sure your footwear is fully waterproof, or else you risk . . . ” {LINK}
</tangent>

[bonehead84]

Does anyone have experience with Google specifically spotting you doing something like this? What were the negative consequences. The reason I ask is because I've never seen a plateau on rankings / traffic. I've seen severe dips, and I've seen things like -10, -20 position penalties (I don't hear about those much these days). Are they doing "fractional" or "dampening" penalties now related to links? Where instead of completely tanking you're either given a ceiling or you lose say 30% instead of 90%+ ?

[aristotle]

Well there have been a lot of discussions of traffic throttling/traffic ceilings here over the years. As far as I know, nobody has ever conclusively identified a cause or causes. But I'm pretty sure that most of those past examples didn't involve 301 domain redirects as a likely culprit.

[tangor]

Could simply be that the query itself (with covers both domains) has only so much interest in search itself.

Have you tried removing the redirects to get new data? After all, you're not looking at reality in the first place.

[bonehead84]

tangor, I'm not sure what you're saying. I'm not talking about a single query. I'm talking about a site wide problem. But yes, I removed both domains yesterday. I'll report back once I get any kind of feedback from Google but I suspect it'll take a while for them to re-crawl all the links and bake them into the new destinations.

[RedBar]

I removed both domains yesterday.

You did something ysterday and expect an immediate "positive/negative reaction" by Google or am I missing something?

FWIW these days it takes about two (2) months to get normal stuff crawled and indexed before anything even starts to happen ... in my neck of the woods!

Bing and DDG are actually faster and more accurate ATM.

[tangor]

tangor, I'm not sure what you're saying.

A search for "widget" and "widgetfungus" is probably not that common. :)

Report back in six months (not two, though happy to hear that result) as g is overburdened these days, despite the hype. Yes, they are crawling the web at a furious rate, but at the same time their present ideology (becoming too obvious in the last two years) is baked in and that slows things down considerably. Peter and Paul are in the back rooms arguing (look it up if you don't get the analogy).

[bonehead84]

RedBar, you're missing something. I don't expect a reaction for months, and I expect it'll be slight and steady as the links get re-crawled. Then maybe something big once we hit another quality update that contains Penguin. Nowhere did I imply I expect immediate results, I simply said I'd report back.

Yeah, tangor, I expect to probably not get a result in the next penguin refresh (I know it's rolling now), but the one after that since they'll have to collect data and still crunch it.