Recover all my sites (under one parent company) from Google penalty

[sdtechie]

I run a small news/publishing company xyz.com, which is my parent company.

Under xyz.com i run several brands:
abc.com
efg.com
ijk.com
lmn.com

In all of these sites i use the email of [e-mail] as contact address.

Now, after the March Google Update 2024, all my brands under the parent xyz.com lost their ranking.

The traffic is almost ZERO for all sites.

I want your opinions and help to detect and recover from the penalty.

[not2easy]

Hi sdtechie and welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]

Are you seeing a manual penalty in your GSC accounts for your sites? If so, you should have an idea from the penalty about what to work on. If not, you should consider working on your sites' content and performance.

[sdtechie]

Thanks for your reply. No manual penalty or security issues on Search Console.

It might be a content issue.

[RedBar]

Under xyz.com i run several brands:

I do assume that the brands are displaying unique content and images and not clones of the main site?

[tangor]

Bit confused here... are these actual domains, or subs? Are these under one host? Are the DNS records all the same owner? Is a single adsense account used for all the sites?

If the only common element is the info address, create separate info-abc, etc for each of the "sites".

[lesseo]

Hello; Is the content of all websites the same?

[sdtechie]

All are different (actual) domains, different dns records, different hosting, different content..

But, yes one adsense account. I don't think one adsense account is an issue.

The problem was;
We have linked privacy and terms page of all sites to the parent site's privacy and terms. Also, the contact email was same for all.

We have made the changes few months ago but no recovery. We are also taking a close look on content.

But, i personally don't much care about the same type of design of multiple website. Because i'have seen many even big brands are doing this. For ex: take: futureplc

I think we need to wait until the next big update...

[lewis1]

There is no harm in having multiple websites that belong to the same group. But it looks like your other domains have been deemed to be low quality. I would be careful merging them all into one if all you are doing is that. Maybe look to take the best content from the other domains and move them into the main site but delete all other content which perhaps is not that great as you don't want it to impact the main site. Note that if you move (redirect) a lot of pages to the new site, Google may have to recalculate the quality of the main site again. Best to do it stages, test moving some and see what happens.

[RedBar]

We have linked privacy and terms page of all sites to the parent site's privacy and terms.

I don't believe this should be a problem, it certainly did not use to be since until I decided that running multiple widget sites was becoming far too work-load heavy, I actually had about 50 unique widget sites with the footer links for cookies, legal, privacy etc all linking to the same example.info site. I had a major site re-build and consolidated these all into one site in 2014 when I re-launched everything in html5 responsive.

I think we need to wait until the next big update...

The problem with this, practically speaking, is that no one knows when G will update anything fully! 1 month, 3 months, 6 months ... I have some sites waiting for more than 1+ year ago. It's bizarre, I can get new pages ranking well within, usually, 3 months these days, but updates ... Whenever!

But, for the home index.html page, G visits and updates many of my customer sites on a weekly basis therefore this, for me, indicates that any new important pages need to be linked through the index page for faster indexing and ranking.

YMMV!