Changling pagelink after penalty

spunko2010

Hi, Just a quick question to try to get consensus on this, as there's a lot of information around but I prefer first-hand experiences Let's say I build links to a URL and get penalised by Google, eg: www.mydomain.com/my-keyword. If I then move the content and don't setup a 301, to www.mydomain.com/mykeyword1 , would there still be a risk of penalising? Or is that classed as a new page, even though the content is identical?

2Take2

Hi @spunko2010, I think that the general consensus is that it's best to swap the content on the old (penalised) page for something else, and wait until google's cache of the old page has updated before you use the content somewhere else.

If you do the above, and there are no hyperlinks or 301 redirects between the 2 sites, then no penalty can pass to the new site.

ron

I always pull the content, replace it with new stuff (I like youtube videos, btw, as I then throw in google video sitemap plugin. You will have every bot known to man (and especially google) capture the new info.

It takes almost exactly two weeks for the old content to get flushed out of the cache. At that point I put up the old content on a new domain.

As you already seem to know, the 301 also moves the penalty. From my experience, that penalty happens when they refresh the algo and push an update. At that point, you are cooked. So never 301.

spunko2010

OK, thanks. So it looks like changing the content is important (and in my case not too long winded thankfully). @ron by 'cache' do you mean the Google Cache that everyone can access by clicking the down arrow > Cached link next to their link? Because if you do mean that, have you ever considered blocking it through robots.txt/htaccess? then perhaps it won't take as long to refresh. But of course you won't have any way to tell, if it's blocked.

ron

Glad you asked mate - it took a while for this to get through my thick skull.

The best way (most convenient for you) is to call up the site operator: site:yourdomain.com

You then have all your indexed results. Hit that little drop down arrow to see what is cached. Pay close attention to the date at the top of the last cache. Typically, new snapshots are taken and stored in cache about every two weeks. Ideally, you want the cache flushed out, with the new info now showing. Once you have new material up, make sure to check all (or most pages) to make sure. I typically just follow the homepage cache to get the heads up.

The reason I like to stick videos on there with that video sitemap plugin is because all hell breaks loose, and google bots pound your site. This is very critical as you want the new material noticed immediately. You simply increase the odds that your cache will get updated at the soonest update.

Now as to why not robots.txt, htaccess, etc. Bots, especially the googlebot, routinely ignores robots.txt So that way just doesn't work. I see noobs repeating this on seo forums, even people that should know better. Htaccess is always the preferred method to handle it as the commands are in the root directory.

So htaccess is the better method by far. BUT I still would not trust that. How would you like to move a big money making site, and take a chance that you could have duplicate content. There is no chance of that happening if you don't have duplicate content. And you definitely won't have that problem if you flush out the cache.

Lastly, the absolute best way to run/mask affiliate links is with htaccess. I wanted to throw that in there as that may have been one of the most valuable tips I ever learned.

 

Ovidius

@Ron how do you mask your affiliate links trough .htaccess ?

Ovidius

spunko2010 replace the content with garbage and use expressindexer . Repeat the proces 2 times with 2 days delay between tasks and all will be flushed from google's cache in 7 days.

ron

You designate what you want your affiliate link to look like. This is how the link will look when you hover:

httx://yourdomain.com/proteethwhitener

And here is the code to make it work:

RewriteEngine On

Redirect /proteethwhitener httx://www.kqzyfj.com/click-2879604-14755392

The advantages are really twofold:

1) Marketing - your link looks like a regular page to your website

2) Global control - you can change all links for the product, throughout the website, by just changing your htaccess file. So say a product really sucks on conversion, or it comes out with a new discount and landing page. Just flip the link to a new affiliate URL, and it changes globally.

spunko2010

@ron and @ovidius thanks. Since it will take at absolute minimum 2-5 days to get it cleared from the cache even using such methods, it's easier for me to just rewrite it (1-2 hours work at most) than wait I guess.

spunko2010

@ron do you know of a way via .htaccess to set something similar up , but for an entire folder? Eg: my outgoing affiliate links are http://yourdomain.com/out/link123 (I also have link124 to another page, link125 to another, etc, ie hundreds of them) - I block /out/* in robots.txt, but is there a way to block it with .htaccess so we know Googlebot will listen?

spunko2010

Also one other thing (sorry for multiple posts) but if you timestamp the content with rich snippets that you've blocked with robots.txt, you'll be able to see first-hand that Google does disregard the Disallow robots.txt directives - the dates when they were crawled are visible. I'm amazed nobody has sued for this.

Ovidius

@Ron Does this work for you to avoid affiliate penalty?

ron

@Ovidius - I have never had a penalty for my links - ever. That's why I do what I do  $-)

ron

@spunko2012 - The command to block (like a robots.txt equivalent) is not hard. I think you just need to modify the command line so you replace the page with the /folder/ instead. You would need to search it, but I am very sure you can do that. 

gtsurfs

@Ron - when 'flushing out the cache", are you putting YT videos and new content on every page of the site?

ron

Yes, for the pages I will re-use. If some page sucked, then I just leave it blank.

RayBan

@ron - i  am just curious why do you use  .htaccess trick and not plugins like pretty link that has simple e-panel. Is there any difference ?