Cleaning up a Spammy Domain VS Starting Fresh with a New Domain

[murraycustomhomescom]

Hi- Can you give me your opinion please... if you look at murrayroofing.com and see the high SPAM score- and the fact that our domain has been put on some spammy sites over the years- Is it better and faster to place higher in google SERP if we create a fresh new domain? My theory is we will spin our wheels trying to get unlisted from alot of those spammy linking sites. And that it would be faster to see results using a fresh new domain rather than trying to clean up the current spammy doamin. Thanks in advance - You guys have been awesome!!

[DmitriiK]

Disavowing has nothing to do with traffic.

Disavowing is all about spam signals from spammy links. That and only that.

[murraycustomhomescom]

Thanks again for all the advice-  Truly appreciated-

What are your thoughts on "disavowing" with google- murrayroofing.com  so when it sends traffic to the new murrayroofingllc.com google will hopefully ignore...?   Can you see our account in MOZ.  You can see the old domain is sending traffic since it is listed on the spammy sites.

[DmitriiK]

You are always welcome.

If you got more questions, you can always hit me up on my Twitter @DigitalSpaceman

[murraycustomhomescom]

Thank you!! 

[DmitriiK]

Hard to say who and why is putting you on those websites.

The only way to truly get rid of those backlinks is to reach out to those websites' owners. You'd have to obviously find someone who speaks the language.

Now, what you can do though is this:

1. Disavow all those crappy links - that'll get Google to lower the "spam score" of your website;
2. Block all traffic by IPs, geolocation and/or hostnames/referrers (that'll prevent from actual unrelated traffic)

That should clean it up pretty good.
Of course, that requires full control and ownership of that domain and website code. If you can't get that - again, my suggestion is just to part ways.

[murraycustomhomescom]

This is awesome info!  Thank you.  What are your thoughts on trying to get backlinks removed from sites in China where we have no way to contact them - none of the wording o the sites are in our language-  and it seems like it would be impossible to get removed from some of them.  Additional thoughts greatly appreciated.  In analytics we see "more" traffic from china than the US-

I'm convinced a competitor may be listing us on these sites-  Or one of these SEO guys that get really pissed when we turn them down.  Could they be out putting our domain on listing sites?

[DmitriiK]

Yeah, your suggestion makes sense.

Keep the old one while the new one is ranking up.

Now, here is perfect scenario for you - keep working on the new site, and get full ownership of the old one. Then through IP blocks, cloudflare, removing all spammy backlinks etc, get rid of all or most of the spammy traffic and signals. And then redirect.

[murraycustomhomescom]

Thank you again!

I should  have been more clear-  The old website gets traffic that does convert-   If it loaded faster than 10 seconds I'm sure a lot more would convert- Super high bounce rate due to slooooow loading of that site.  But we do get "valid leads" every week from it.  But not a lot of leads- maybe 5 a week-  but our jobs are large dollar jobs.

What is your thought on running both sites separately?  We could go in and make sure they are not duplicate and assign different addresses and phone numbers to the old site-  But this "seems" black hat- We would not be doing it to get both site to rank- but just so we don't lose the traffic- then in a year or so get rid of it.  what are your thoughts?

[DmitriiK]

"... maybe a lot of traffic will convert. "

WILL convert? so it's not converting now? If so, it's kind of optimistic that will change, no?

Since you don't own old domain, you can't really reliably do anything about it anyway.

At this point, I would say not to forward at all, start from scratch.

[murraycustomhomescom]

Thank you-  Yes some of the traffic - maybe a lot of traffic will convert.  The problem is old "printed" directories and other places where we can't update the domain. We get a lot of business from a printed catalog that won;t change for a year or more.

I will look at the suggestions you made about IP limitations. The other issue is we don't "own" the original domain so we have to ask the owner who is also our IT guy to change settings.  This is another reason we bough the new domain.

Again thank you!

[DmitriiK]

Couple ways you can go about it.

1. Is any of the traffic going to the old spammy domain any good? Does it convert? If not, then don't worry about redirecting,  there wouldn't be any point, only spam signals

2. If there is some good traffic, then do IP limitations, hostnames limitations etc. That can be done in htaccess or on the server itself. There are other more elaborate ways to filter out spam traffic as well, but that depends on how you or your IT guy is familiar with it. One of the simplest solutions is to route all traffic through CloudFlare, it has quite nice spam filtering, and it's free.

Hope this helps.

[murraycustomhomescom]

Thank you-  we're talking about murrayroofinllc.com in particular-  we are not sure how to forward the old domain to the new-  We "know how" we just don't know if we should-  The reason we developed murrayroofingllc.com is because murray roofing.com had a high spam score and we got advice from this string to go for a new domain-

Now the concern is- if we forward all the traffic from murrayroofing.com to murrayroofingllc.com that the new domain murrayroofingllc.com will be negatively affected by the spammy traffic-  Somehow murrayroofing.com got on some spam sites and we get a ton of spammy traffic from china-  we don't want this traffis - and these sites there is "no way" to ask them to remove our website from their spam sites in china.

All thoughts are welcome here-

[ClaytonJ]

Ta Larry

Ok nothing much of substance, that said if ranking worth trying as it is an easier or usually faster route to page 1.

Had a look at the Murray Roofing site and has not been optimised for customer queries a roofing contractor would seek to rank for.  As it seems you are keen to start afresh - can do both in parallel. No harm to either.

That said would suggest you also look at your google my business structure - your effectively a local play.  Getting reviews and appearing in the local search pack for roofing contractors Omaha etc we would consider a client priority.

All the best go get them.

[murraycustomhomescom]

only for a few and we are in position 49 and 50 for them.

[ClaytonJ]

Hi

Is the current site ranking for any terms of value?

[DmitriiK]

Hi there,

Yes, absolutely get new domain. If you look at DA - it's only 15 (not too bad in some cases). But if you look at backlink profile - you'll see that most of the links are from listing sites - homestead, yellowpages, ezlocal etc. You can replicate that profile after a day of work. And, as you said, spam score will only bring troubles.

Hope this helps.