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helloworld

Top Contributor
At what stage do you pull the plug on a website that just can't seem to recover. I have a client website, no matter what I do it doesn't rank for anything apart from longtails.
I've suggested we pull the plug and start over. The domain has a long history of spam, whether intentional or not, I'm not paid enough to go through every link. I think I disavowed some 7000 odd links. But the major term..Let's say Electrician Melbourne has a million anchors and I don't think it's ever going to rank.
It's a hard call as it's a brand domain.
 

Ashman

Top Contributor
This is an unfortunate situation and would require a lot of effort to make it rank.
I would personally start it fresh on a new domain name. I would look at spending a bit of money on an aftermarket domain with a clean history and a decent back link profile.
 

findtim

Top Contributor
i'm not SEO so take my advice with a grain of salt

my first question would be how many pages of information ?
because if its a good domain name i wouldn't get rid of it, the residual branding, business cards, brochures, yellow pages etccccccccc will all be lost and a 301 redirect isn't going to help matters, my next strategy would be to rename all the pages so the horrible backlinks have no effect.
let google know you are being proactive first.
if its wordpress, change the template, google will see it as being "renewed" plus the code will flow differently and spike googles attention.

its obviously a highly competitive market what ever it is, PUSH it back onto the client to provide content content content using a blog or paying you to do it, you are in "scope bleed" where the client expects you to fix the issues and not get an invoice for your work.

you HAVE to get out of that mode and say to the client " if you want it fixed you'll have to pay and no guarantees " , its hard but far better to get rid of them then to keep the stress.

tell them now your course of action:

hi john:
i'm going to do this
then this
then this
and after that we need to make a major shift
if its a highly competitive market feel free to say " you know what, maybe one of your competitors is doing "reverse SEO" on you and thats just not my fault and i can't track it.
and even if we go to a new domain, it may just happen again.

we web designers take on so much stress for our clients and they don't understand because we don't tell them ! silly hey !

anyway, thats my suggestion, change the theme and rename every page, that just leaves your homepage, you can actually have a homepage which isn't the index.php so that might help as well for stopping the backlinks

PM me the domain name.
tim
 

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