Should We Rebuild Our Site?

[pumasare]

Hello BHW community,

Our e-commerce site has been hit with a Google penalty, likely because we've been using AI-generated content for all our product descriptions and blog articles. The domain is about a year old. We're considering whether it would be better to rebuild the site on a new domain or try to recover from the penalty with our existing one.

Has anyone been in a similar situation? What would you recommend in terms of recovery vs. starting fresh? Any advice on the best approach to handle this?

Thanks in advance for your help!

 

[MrDenz]

I’d personally start fresh.

The time you will spend trying to recover and rebrand an old site (especially one that’s only a year old) could be better spent building a new one without the uncertainty.

With the old site, you’ll constantly be wondering if Google will ever fully lift the penalty, even after putting in all that effort.

Sure, the penalty could be removed eventually, but in my opinion, since the site is still fairly new, you don’t have much to lose.

Starting a new site could give you a clean slate and potentially more to gain in the long run.

 

[TechEinstien]

Start fresh. There will be some risk in reviving penalty domain. So, it's best to invest your efforts in a new one.

 

[alonelywriter]

I had a penalized website. and I changed the design with content.
And the keywords were not that competitive. (It didn't work for me)
Only my brand name keyword came back. Other's didn't.

 

[pumasare]

I’d personally start fresh.

The time you will spend trying to recover and rebrand an old site (especially one that’s only a year old) could be better spent building a new one without the uncertainty.

With the old site, you’ll constantly be wondering if Google will ever fully lift the penalty, even after putting in all that effort.

Sure, the penalty could be removed eventually, but in my opinion, since the site is still fairly new, you don’t have much to lose.

Starting a new site could give you a clean slate and potentially more to gain in the long run.

Thank you for your reply, I do have another question, can i use the same product images in the new website? Will google define those duplicate content?

 

[georgetoons]

Have gone through this with a few clients now, after rewriting all content with natural human written content that is considered "helpful" our rankings returned. So it is up to you how you would like to go about it.

But it depends, did you receive a penalty in GSC? or was it an algorithm penalty and your rankings just suddenly all left together?

 

[MrDenz]

Thank you for your reply, I do have another question, can i use the same product images in the new website? Will google define those duplicate content?

This is from my experience... Because I never had a problem with images, I copied, changed, and made similar ones, and they all ranked again.

For the images, you’re good to go.

If we search even larger sites, we will find hundreds of images that have been copied, so... Google doesn’t really penalize for duplicate images as it does with text, so reusing your product images on the new site shouldn’t be an issue at all.

A couple of things you can do just to be safe and give the new site a boost, you can:

Rename the image files to something more relevant to your products. It helps with SEO.

Use unique ALT text for each image, it gives your images a better chance to show up in Google Image Search.

It's worth noting that most people don’t really focus on this, images bring us solid views.

Also, just make sure the images are compressed so your new site loads quickly, Google loves fast websites.

So yeah, go ahead and reuse them, no need to worry!

 

[pumasare]

Start fresh. There will be some risk in reviving penalty domain. So, it's best to invest your efforts in a new one.

Thank you for your reply!

This is from my experience... Because I never had a problem with images, I copied, changed, and made similar ones, and they all ranked again.

For the images, you’re good to go.

If we search even larger sites, we will find hundreds of images that have been copied, so... Google doesn’t really penalize for duplicate images as it does with text, so reusing your product images on the new site shouldn’t be an issue at all.

A couple of things you can do just to be safe and give the new site a boost, you can:

Rename the image files to something more relevant to your products. It helps with SEO.

Use unique ALT text for each image, it gives your images a better chance to show up in Google Image Search.

It's worth noting that most people don’t really focus on this, images bring us solid views.

Also, just make sure the images are compressed so your new site loads quickly, Google loves fast websites.

So yeah, go ahead and reuse them, no need to worry!

Thank you very much!

 

[abhi752002]

I think start a new website and full focus on it

and beside

Work on the old domain and try to recover your old domain