Should I cut my losses and start over again or reverse 301 re-direct my way out of hell?
- SEO |
I started an Australian e-commerce website on Shopify in early 2014 when I knew nothing about SEO. I use two domains - www.###.com.au and www.###.com., I have canonicalized .com.au as my primary domain. All backlinks point to this domain. There is currently a 301 redirect from the ###.com to ###.com.au.
When I was starting out I stupidly decided to buy some (a lot) fiver link building packages. I was clueless about anchor text over optimisation so I bought dozens of packages using money keywords as anchor text.
As I started to self educate myself about SEO over I realised that I had ****ed myself over. I started buying links and social signals from more reputable sources using naked and branded terms to try and negate the anchor thext over-optimization.
At the beginning of 2015 I somehow managed to crack page 1 (SERP volatility between 6-10) for a couple high volume keywords and a bunch of smaller volume keywords.
I have been monitoring my backlink profile and there are still plenty of spammy backlinks with shitty anchor text that are still indexing today. I got slapped with Google’s manual action spam penalty in October 2015 which only affected incoming links (not a site-wide penalty). This didn’t have an effect on my SERPS (nothing dropped). I disavowed a bunch of spammy links and submitted a consideration request but got rejected, because there are still spammy backlinks pointing to my site that are being indexed daily.
So my question is: I want transfer my e-commerce store to a fresh domain. My ###.com domain that I own has no links pointing to it and is the same age as my ###.com.au domain. I was wondering if you guys think I should reverse my existing 301 redirect from ###.com>###.com.au to ###.com.au>###.com. My concern is that the 301 re-direct will transfer the over-optimisation of my anchor text AND my manual action spam penalty over to ###.com.
I would love to hear what the community has to say about this. Cheers!
When I was starting out I stupidly decided to buy some (a lot) fiver link building packages. I was clueless about anchor text over optimisation so I bought dozens of packages using money keywords as anchor text.
As I started to self educate myself about SEO over I realised that I had ****ed myself over. I started buying links and social signals from more reputable sources using naked and branded terms to try and negate the anchor thext over-optimization.
At the beginning of 2015 I somehow managed to crack page 1 (SERP volatility between 6-10) for a couple high volume keywords and a bunch of smaller volume keywords.
I have been monitoring my backlink profile and there are still plenty of spammy backlinks with shitty anchor text that are still indexing today. I got slapped with Google’s manual action spam penalty in October 2015 which only affected incoming links (not a site-wide penalty). This didn’t have an effect on my SERPS (nothing dropped). I disavowed a bunch of spammy links and submitted a consideration request but got rejected, because there are still spammy backlinks pointing to my site that are being indexed daily.
So my question is: I want transfer my e-commerce store to a fresh domain. My ###.com domain that I own has no links pointing to it and is the same age as my ###.com.au domain. I was wondering if you guys think I should reverse my existing 301 redirect from ###.com>###.com.au to ###.com.au>###.com. My concern is that the 301 re-direct will transfer the over-optimisation of my anchor text AND my manual action spam penalty over to ###.com.
I would love to hear what the community has to say about this. Cheers!
Who told me this? An ex Google web spam engineer.
What's your excuse?