Penguin Busting Using 301 - How Effective Is It?

[niggy]

It has been said before that 301ing a page touched by Penguin to a page on a few domain can restore your rankings. I have actually tried this recently (on Monday, to be precise) and as of today my rankings have returned.

Here's Exactly What I Did:

-Did a little KW research to figure out which landing pages were the best performing pre-Penguin and selected the top 50
-Copied all the content from those pages over to a subpage on a new domain
-Cleaned up the spammy copy (in a control group)
-301ed the pages from the Penguin domain to my new domain
-Pinged the new pages and the homepage with Pingomatic.
-I did NOT 301 my entire domain over because I built the majority of my links there. I do have it linked indirectly, though, as I have 301s to my domain that are linked to from my homepage.

Within a day or 2, I saw a lot of these pages become visible in the SERPs (i.e. in the top 50 again.) Today, I effectively doubled the amount of Google traffic.

I should also note that the domain I 301ed over to is an aged domain that I've had for years. I did very little link building to it; I got a bunch of directory links (most are pretty spammy, but a couple are from legit sites and I even have a Yahoo! directory link,) blog comments on some sites relevant to my niche (most are no-followed, but I have .edu and .gov,) a handful of web 2.0's (almost all branded links or raw urls that I created by hand,) 2 press releases, some forums posts (again, all in relevant niches and done by hand,) and a couple of wikis. I have done nothing black hat as far as I know.

I will yet again confirm that 301ing does work to bust Penguin.

Now, while this is working for me right know, I don't know how long it will last. I have also heard from a few people on this forum that 301ing works, but only for a limited amount of time before the penalty has passed.

I want to hear from someone on these forums that have successfully 301ed pages from an old domain to a new domain and managed to keep those rankings.

Does it matter if a Penguin touched page indirectly links to the pages that you 301? Is this against the Google TOS? Has anyone else tried this and been successful? If you know the answers, please contribute to this post!

 

[Em][n3m]

rankinks won't last because penguin penalty will pass throgh 301 redirectt

 

[niggy]

rankinks won't last because penguin penalty will pass throgh 301 redirectt

Would you mind explaining what pages you 301ed over and how long your rankings lasted?

 

[jakeruston]

I tried the same process and the rankings returned a few days later. Then after about 2 weeks the penalty passed and the rankings fell once again, that'll probably happen in this case too.

 

[niggy]

I tried the same process and the rankings returned a few days later. Then after about 2 weeks the penalty passed and the rankings fell once again, that'll probably happen in this case too.

Jake, I've read the thread you started about this form 3 months ago. It appears that you moved the pages to a new directory on your domain. Have you tried the same method with a new domain? Is it possible to ditch the Penguin penalty on the next Penguin rollout by simply cutting the 301s?

 

[Sparrow]

Have also done the same thing. Rankings have not immediately improved but after 30-35 days a nice jump. Don't know for how long will this last as some people have observed drop in rankings later. For the time being I wouldn't be blasting any new links. Would share more as the it goes.

 

[linpap]

rankinks won't last because penguin penalty will pass throgh 301 redirectt

you are right , it will won't last more than 2 weeks, I already do this for 2 of my clients , the ranking came back for 2 weeks and then they gone completely.

 

[DarkMeta]

ok tahts strange.......why ranking go back any idea?