One of my good friends started a company with his father a while back and the company is doing great. His father paid one of his friends to redo their company's website since the old one looked terrible. However, his father doesn't know a whole lot about web design and the like and ended up buying several different domains for the site over the past couple of years. All of these different domains were essentially a copy of the original website, and they all linked to each other at one point or another. Eventually the site started falling further and further down the Google search results and now it can't be found anywhere in the first 20 or so pages.

I have a bit of knowledge about web design and hosting and the like, but I have no idea how Google works or how websites are ranked in the search results. My friend's father believes the site continues to fall in the results because of all the extra domains linking to each other and essentially being direct copies. His idea is to cancel all of those domains and buy a new .org domain and rebuild the site from scratch.

What I'd like to know is, will this help him start fresh with Google? If we rebuild the site on a completely new domain without any links to the old domains, will we be able to get a more prominent spot in the Google search results?

Google works roughly on what they call the PageRank system. Basically this means that the more pages link to your page, the higher result it will have in Google search results. Recreating the page with a .org address will not help, basically. At least, that is my understanding. Someone who is more versed in Google's algorithms might be able to help you more.

You can also find a website (http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php is one) that will let you check the PageRank of your friend's father's website.

Unless you have dozens/hundreds of these extra domains that all have links to the main site, they're probably not doing you a whole lot of good, and in the long run may even do harm, since I believe Google tends to frown on essentially linking to yourself (or worse, paying to have dummy/non-relevant sites link to you) to try to inflate your search ranking (assuming they get around to noticing). JCPenny got stomped for it in 2011. Which is not to say your friend's dad is in JCPenny territory. Just pointing out that sort of thing isn't considered good form these days, possibly because of spam-site issues.

Bottom line is that it's very difficult these days to get high up in the ranking without decent amount of effort at promoting so other sites are linking to your site, or luck at suddenly finding yourself in the center of some popular internet trend/craze.

Try a search on "how google search ranks sites" or something like that, to get more information. The about.com site has some basics articles, but I don't know how recently relevant they might be, since so many sites don't put dates on their articles anymore.

A few links from the about.com site:
http://google.about.com/od/searchengineoptimization/qt/improverank.htm
http://google.about.com/od/searchengineoptimization/qt/hyperlinkqt.htm
http://google.about.com/od/searchengineoptimization/tp/badseo.htm

For those intrigued: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/business/13search.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0

1. Redirects should be done via CNAME or not at all. It's very possible for web page redirects and iframes to hurt your pagerank.

2. Set up Google Webmaster Tools for all domains, tell Google which one the main one is.

3. If the title and URL match for keywords, you get bonus points.

4. Content above the fold matters more, even to spiders.

5. Make the site active. The more updates it has, the more times google will index it, the more times it'll index keywords.

And most importantly: Links and link placement. Post links on social media. Any sale/deal/announcement for this company should be plastered across all social networks. Get active in the social internet for your company's sector: comment on other content, link back to your site.

Also, linking from your site to other sites can not only hurt your page's pagerank (if it's to a misbehaving site), but also lower your pagerank vote power (the more watered a site with links, the less each site's link's value is).

Besides that, making sure your site is easily indexable goes a long way. If you can figure a way for a blog, that can help too.


Well, this really depends on what keywords you're trying to get on page #1 for. If keywords are in your title, in your URL, and your site is updated more regularly than other sites with those keywords, you'll easily go up high.

Thanks to having a fairly uncommon last name, with a bit of site updates, my family domain was able to get a high ranking for family member name searches. If I were to put my name in the title of my blog, I have no doubt I'd jump up to into the top five for a google search of my name (currently at the bottom of the first page).

Choosing what keywords you want to be optimized for is probably as important as any other aspect.

Fantastic, thank you for all of the great information! It is pretty obvious that the current website doesn't really follow any of these points and I'm assuming that is why it is failing with Google. I'm curious if it would be worth trying to fix and salvage the current site or just start fresh with a new domain and all, and then properly redirect the old site to the new and fresh one. The reason I'm really quite curious about this is because I feel that the current website is rather bad, and the person he paid to code the site didn't do a great job (he uses a lot of atypical HTML code).

If you'd be willing, could I PM you the link to the current website so that you could take a quick look and see what you think?

True enough. I was thinking more about generalized concepts tho, when I said that. Having a unique family name is a bit of a different thing than if you wanted to sell diamond rings and the name of your new company was not based on an uncommon name. Or if you're a blog about entertainment/movie news, in a sea of 100000's of other such sites all using/needing the same keywords/phrases.