Reusing content from 2 old sites on a new domain

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Hi Guys,

Please help me out with what I should do in the scenario below...

The question is that I have 2 websites in the same health niche. I bought them since 2013 and was hiring guys to do seo on them. They got all the links you can think about ranging from pbns to blog comments to web 2.0s to social shares etc etc.

One site has 2 pages ranking on first page of Google and the other site has one page ranking on the first page of Google. These posts are super long with over 4000 words each of quality content.

Also these sites are not hit with any penalty from Google as the links going to them are not too much. One domain has 77 referring domains with 500 referring pages and the other has 112 referring domains with 800 referring pages. But if you look at the link quality, I must admit they look spammy and not good quality.

The thing is that i bought a new domain recently and I would like to move the 3 pages of these sites that are already ranking on the first page of Google to the new domain. I plan to make this domain clean and only use white hat seo.

Now I'm worried if in the future if these 2 domains can break me bad luck ie. get hit by a Google penalty. I plan to do a 301 redirect from these three pages to the new domain and also take down these 2 websites. The redirect will be in the .htaccess file.

Also another strategy I'm I thinking about is to submit to Google in my webmaster dashboard to de-index these two sites and reuse these 3 pieces of content on my new domain.

What would you suggest? Thank you for your valuable time and advice.

Thank You.
#content #domain #reusing #sites
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  • Profile picture of the author Blakers1
    I have to say: If it's not broke, why fix it?

    If you have page 1 ranking, Google's clearly not currently penalizing you for the spammy links. In fact, they are probably actually helping you at the moment. At least some of them are. Others might need to be removed or disavowed.

    If it was me, I would do a deep backlink audit like this:

    Download all links from AHREFS or Majestic. Then download all links from Search Console. Finally, do the same for SEMrush and combine all these results into one spreadsheet.

    Now search for and remove all duplicates. Between those three tools, you should now have a nearly complete picture of the backlink profile of these sites.

    Upload that sheet into SEMrush's backlink monitoring tool. They have a pretty good program that will score you backlinks based on several toxic markers. You'll need to review any links that score a 40 or above to see if they are actually toxic.

    Some of the links will be spammy, yet score below a 40. This might be a bit controversial, but if it was me I would leave those links live for now.

    Then I would start building quality links to these two sites and I wouldn't worry about any spammy links still remaining. At least in the short-term.

    You've had these domains for a while and unless you buy a similarly aged expired domain in your niche for your new site, you're giving up a lot of built-up trust with Google.

    I would just buy your new site and start building it up. And I wouldn't be afraid to link to the new site within the content of a related post or two on your other two sites as long as it makes sense from an editorial standpoint to do so.

    At some point, Google could get more strict about spammy links. But to me, this is a low risk for you and even if it does happen, disavow files get updated within 48 hours.

    Google knows there were a lot of legit sites out there with a mix of good and bad links from the days when black-hat SEO actually worked long-term. I don't see them penalizing sites like that anytime soon because it would be total chaos in the SERPS.
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    Blake Akers
    Webology

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  • Profile picture of the author expmrb
    If you are ranking then why bother to disturb it in the first place. And if you really want to move then I will suggest that take down these sites and merge it into the new one. And you are right to redirect them through .htaccess file.
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  • Profile picture of the author Rajeev Gaur
    If your website is ranking on the first page, why do you even want move to another website in the first place.
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  • Profile picture of the author ryanbiddulph
    Hi mrwayne85,

    You have some sweet Google success with old sites. Leave them be.

    Replicate you prior success with your new domain name. Be patient. Follow steps used to rank the older sites. All will grow successfully over the long haul.

    It's better not to cross the streams - Ghostbusters reference - because it's an abundant, successful strategy to build each site up from scratch, patiently, following simple and powerful fundamentals.

    Ryan
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  • Profile picture of the author andrewaff
    You better get a new piece of content for your new launch. Try to get the new copy as much relevant as possible for end users and I don't mind to suggest again a 3k-5k words copy using LSI content. If users will like the new domain content and link back it on social media and other places, you might have a chance to get this domain too on top of Google. Keep peace for other 2 domains, which are rankings quite good as of now and yes, doing links audit is always helpful.
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