They have had the example.ca site pointing to the example.com site for several years.
They just realized that they has a ton of bad backlinks, thanks to their SEO.

From reading the above, I am not sure which domain has bad backlinks, .com or .ca ?

To clarify my understanding:

1) You would remove 301 redirect from .ca domain to .com domain
2) You would put the content of .com domain to .ca domain

3) What would you do with .com domain after this - kill it or you wish to redirect it to .ca domain?

4) The current .com domain - where do visitors arrive? Can you isolate few landing pages / handful of queries that bring these 10-15 visitors? Because if visitors arrive to small subset of pages using not so wide number of queries, you could perhaps "split" sites rather than kill .com site, so that .com site still attracts these 10-15 visitors whilst you are building .ca site as a replacement

Hi there, aakk9999:

thanks for the response.

"From reading the above, I am not sure which domain has bad backlinks, .com or .ca "

the example.com site is the current live site and has the bad backlinks.

example.ca redirects to example.com

example.ca DOESN'T seem to have any backlinks at all

1) You would remove 301 redirect from .ca domain to .com domain

Yes, that is what we would do.

2) You would put the content of .com domain to .ca domain

More or less; they are looking into a writer to rewrite most of it.

3) What would you do with .com domain after this - kill it or you wish to redirect it to .ca domain?

It gets some direct and referral traffic, so possibly noindex the site and put nofollow links to the .ca domain? I don't know what to suggest to them...

4) The current .com domain - where do visitors arrive? Can you isolate few landing pages / handful of queries that bring these 10-15 visitors? Because if visitors arrive to small subset of pages using not so wide number of queries, you could perhaps "split" sites rather than kill .com site, so that .com site still attracts these 10-15 visitors whilst you are building .ca site as a replacement

Well, most of them land on the home page... actually, it is more right to say "homepages" because their site is indexed for both the .com/ and .com/index.html and both of them get landings.

Unfortunately, it is the home page(s) that seem to have the spammy backlinks.

~~~~

I guess the main question is if a domain name with no history of its own - except for redirecting to a site that was affected by Penguin (or panda or a manual penalty) - has a chance of ranking well once content is added to it.

Their current example.com site only gets 10 to 15 visitors per day

10-15 direct requests, as opposed to the ones redirected from .ca? What's the proportion of .ca requests to .com requests?

I guess the main question is if a domain name with no history of its own - except for redirecting to a site that was affected by Penguin (or panda or a manual penalty) - has a chance of ranking well once content is added to it.

Uness you are getting type-in traffic on .ca domain, you have nothing much to lose to try. Remove redirect, put a few (very) good pages of rewriten content and see what happens.

I would also check logs to see how often (and how many and which URLs) Google crawls from .ca site. If there are not so many URLs, then removing redirect should result in Google processing removed redirect within a reasonable time.

If you want to be more careful, you could change WhoIs information of .ca site, and if it shares WMT with .com site, remove it from the existing WMT and create WMT account of its own. Then to speed up processing 301 redirect, do Fetch as Googlebot of the home page and submit home page and all linked pages to index.

Thank you so much, aakk9999.

I like the suggestions you made.

I do not know how .ca domain is set up at the moment with regards to hosting, but one warning:

Make sure that when you remove the 302 redirect, the .ca domain does not point to .com server webspace otherwise you will get instant duplicate content of your .com domain on .ca domain. Not a good way to start a new domain!

The best is to first sort out hosting of .ca domain with its own webspace and then pull out the 302 redirect.

Planet13,

I was just giving this very same question some thought last night. I've had a TLD redirected to the canonical (.com to .org) for years. I have the forwarding set up at the registrar level, and I just happened to perform a server header check on the redirect last night, and it was a 302. I also checked to see if the .com version was indexed in Google, and it is (despite being redirected to .org for 5 years). For instance, example.org is canonical, but searching Google for example.com shows example.com listed with the same title/description as the canonical (example.org).

I then checked the backlinks in Google, and both versions show the same backlinks (according to Google, not third party link resources). I don't know if I have a duplicate content issue here, but I did change the forwarding to a 301 (not sure if that will help). I also added canonical tags.

I found it odd that after 5 years of forwarding, Google is indexing both versions. Maybe it's because the forwarding was a 302? Nevertheless, it's possible that Google is already counting backlinks to BOTH TLDs in your case, like it appears to be doing with mine.

when googlebot sees a 302 the content is indexed for the initially requested url.
when googlebot sees a 301 the content is indexed for the redirected url.

@ lucy24:

Crap! I missed your question. sorry about not answering right away.

10-15 direct requests, as opposed to the ones redirected from .ca? What's the proportion of .ca requests to .com requests?

I don't see any traffic being sent from the .ca domain to the .com domain. None at all. Maybe I just don't know how to see it in analytics?

@ phranque

when googlebot sees a 302 the content is indexed for the initially requested url.
when googlebot sees a 301 the content is indexed for the redirected url.

thanks for clarifying that.

One other question (and this is slightly off topic):

their site has 16 google reviews with a 5 star rating. I am assuming this is from their google+ page.

So if we move their site from .com to .ca, all we have to do is go into their google+ account and associate the new .ca account with their google+ account, right?

Or will this end up being another google mystery?

I don't see any traffic being sent from the .ca domain to the .com domain. None at all. Maybe I just don't know how to see it in analytics?

You won't see it in analytics. You have to look at raw logs from the .ca side. Look for human visitors followed immediately by the same human at .com. This will tell you if in fact you're getting type-ins that put .ca by mistake for .com. (I recently acquired a dot com for this reason alone-- to catch type-ins aiming for the real site at dot ca. I check the logs periodically but so far it's clean. Still, better safe than sorry.)

Ok, Lucy;

so I understand you, in your opinion it is ok to move the .com site to the .ca site then, since the .ca site points to the .com site and since the backlinks on the .com site are way heinous to the max, right?

in your opinion it is ok to

I have no opinion. This is all so much Hungarian to me.

Their current example.com site only gets 10 to 15 visitors per day

So that's the total number of visitors, whether direct or redirected from .ca? If so, changing things can hardly hurt-- if only because there's not much room to hurt in :) Assuming for the sake of discussion that 10 = 10 rather than, say, 10K