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Thanks for the response Andy! That makes perfect sense.

Does anyone else have any other opinions or info?

Hey Moz,

I have several questions in regards to whether I should a start a new second site to save my online presence after a series of Google penalties.  The main questions being:

• Is this the best way to spend my time/resources?
• If I’m forced to jump my company over to the new site can Google see that and transfer the penalty?
• I plan on all new content (no link redirect, no dup content) so do I need to kill the original site? Are there any Pro’s/cons I am missing?

Summary of my situation:

Looking at analytics it appears I was hit with  both Penguin 2.0 and 2.1, each cutting my traffic in half, despite a link remediation campaign in the summer of 2013.  There was a manual penalty also imposed on the site in the fall of 2013, which was released in early 2014. With Penguin 3.0’s release at the end of 2014, the site saw a slight uptick in organic traffic, improving from essentially nothing to next to nothing.

Most of the site’s issues revolved around cheap $5 links from India in the 2006-09 time frame. This link building was abandoned, and replaced with nothing but “letting them happen naturally” from 2010 through the 2013 penalties.  Since 2013 we have done a small amount of quality articles on a monthly basis to promote the site, social media, and continuous link remediation. In addition the whole site has been redesigned, optimized for speed/mobile, secured, and completely rewritten.

Given all of this, the site has really only recovered to page 2 and 3 of the SERPs for our key words.  Even after a highly circulated piece appeared on an Authority site (97 DA) a few months ago there was zero movement.  It appears we have an anvil tied around our leg until Penguin 4.0.

With all of the above, and no sign of when the next penguin will be released, I ask, is it time to start investing in a new site?  With no movement in 2.5 years, it’s impossible to know where my current site stands, so I don’t know what else I can do to improve it.  I am considering slowly building a new site that is a high quality informational site.  My thought process is it will take a year for a new site to gain any traction with Google.  If by that time my main site has not recovered, I can jump to that new site, add a commercial component, and use it as a life boat for my company.  If I have recovered, then I have a future asset.

Thanks in advance!

I didn't think so, but wanted to double check.

Regarding redirects, will I have to change old 301 redirects in our .htaccess file that are setup for individual pages from http to https? Or will the site wide redirect take care of this?

Thanks!

Another question just popped into my head!

Does the Google WMT "Change of Address" tool still not support https?

Thanks for the info!

Does anyone else have experience with the issues I raised above? I'd love to hear other peoples thoughts too.

I honestly can't remember, as I started the research months ago and the project had to be put on hold.

I do know that Moz recommends the following: "Make sure every element of your website uses HTTPS, including widgets, java script, CSS files, images and your content delivery network."

Will the redirect I posted above take care of this?

Hey Dmitrii,

Thanks for the response...you seem to be everywhere in the Q&A!

As far as I understand the redirect below would make it impossible for users to reach our http website, which means we wouldn't have to change our relative internal links, correct? Keep in mind, the rewrite below may look a bit different since our website uses a load balancer.

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP:X-Forwarded-Proto} !https

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.jwsuretybonds.com$1 [R=301,L]

Hey Moz!

I read Moz's guide on migrating websites from http to https, and it seems changing all relative internal links to absolute https is recommended (we currently use relative internal links). But is doing this absolutely necessary if we will already have a redirect in our .htaccess file forcing all http pages to https?

Changing all of our internal links to absolute https will be very time consuming, and I'd like to hear your thoughts as to whether it's absolutely recommended/necessary; and if so, why?

Thanks!

Thanks for clearing that up and all of the help!

Hey Dmitrii,

I was planning on using two rewrites.

One rewrite for replacing the underscores with hyphens.

And another rewrite for removing the file extensions.

Just so I fully understand, you recommend implementing the rewrite for replacing the underscores with hyphens in our .htaccess file. Then once the new URLs are indexed, change the webpage file names themselves by replacing the underscores with hyphens, make the newly named files live and remove this rewrite from our .htaccess. Is my understanding correct?

Again...thanks for all of your help!

EGOL, I had the same mindset when creating our scholarship program (see: http://www.jwsuretybonds.com/scholarship/).  I figured the $25,000 prize and allowing anyone going to an accredited U.S. school would take care of it self.

We still decided to play it safe and have an internal resource reach out to universities and scholarship sites to get the seed started.  We started this in the beginning of the year and here is what we've found...

1. Sometimes a spectacular prize is something perceive as too good to be true.  This goes for the universities and students alike.
2. Universities WILL link to you, but you need to search out the ones that do.
3. Universities are AWFUL at letting their students know about scholarship resources.  If you want a lot of entries, it appears www.fastweb.com is by far the best resource.  We now get about 1,000 hits a day from FastWeb (just got listed 2 weeks ago) and are only now beginning to see entries pick up.

I'd like to do this every year, but in order to justify it we need more qualified entries and **a lot more buzz.  **

In our experience, the spectacular prize did not care of things like you and I presumed.  Our internal resource is still working hard to spread the word.

It is done using CSS, but it needs to be clarified if the content is down far due to other content on the page or if it is down low due to HTML tags (perhaps from a navigation).  The former might make a difference, but I think G can detect that trick anyway.  The latter is irrelevant in my opinion, as the tags will be discounted.

Thanks for the in depth response.  We just had a marketing meeting last Friday where we used your slide presentation on this topic as a reference.

I think the best thing my friends can do is just put themselves out there and film the videos themselves.  They have the technical know-how, they just need to get over being camera shy.

I'm surprised as well.

I was thinking that creating PR release about how "I can't give away $25K" might get the fire started.

I am looking into incorporating Facebook Comments into my site.  When commenting it gives the option to the commentor to post it on their FB wall.

Can it be setup to post everyone's comments on my site on our FB business page?  I tried to use the commenting tools while logged in as a page, but it said I had to be logged in as a person.

If not, how do I get notified someone has commented on my website through FB Comments so I can reply?

I want to 301 redirect all "id" and "type" numbers from my page dynamic.php page (I have thousands of IDs and thousands of Types) all to a single URL.

So for example the following....

www.mysite.com/dynamic.php?id=1&type=5

www.mysite.com/dynamic.php?id=2&type=5

www.mysite.com/dynamic.php?id=3&type=5

www.mysite.com/dynamic.php?id=1&type=6

www.mysite.com/dynamic.php?id=2&type=6

www.mysite.com/dynamic.php?id=3&type=6

...would all be sent to:

www.mysite.com/page.html

How can this be done without doing a redirect for each ID/Type?

My guess is that Google doesn't use time on site as an important metric.  Is a site that answers my search query in 15 secs less valuable than one that takes 2 mins?  If user satisfaction is key, I think searchers are happier with getting the answer quickly.  Google has data that we don't...specifically, whether or not your site answered the search query, whether they clicked on another site after yours, or if they did a new related search.  I believe that this is more important to user satisfaction for Google and our rankings.

I know our data is limited, but I'm just not sure how to make heads or tails of my engagement on a lot of my pages.

Using your example, what if bounce rate increases, but time on site does as well?

...what if bounce rate drops, but time on site does as well?

Wow this is great!  I didn't know about it.  Thank you so much!!!

Thanks Egol.  I've appreciated your advice going years back to the SEOChat forums!  

I'm a bit disappointed that you appear to be playing in the dark as much I am.  I can usually make arguments/guesses for various scenarios when looking at bounce rate and avg time on site.  However, I never walk away feeling confident in whether the changes are actually an improvement.