Best practice for 301 redirecting a penalized/banned domain to a new site?

I have a website that got hit with a Google penalty/ban . I want to redirect it to a different domain I own and have that new domain become the main site going forward and start ranking well.

A few things I'm trying to figure out:
Does a 301 redirect from a banned/penalized domain carry the penalty over to the destination, or does Google evaluate the new domain independently?
If the content on the old site and new site is similar/same niche, is it better to do a full site-to-site page-by-page redirect, or just redirect everything to the homepage?
How long should I wait after the ban before doing anything, and is there a way to confirm it's actually a manual action vs just a ranking drop?
Would appreciate input from anyone who's actually gone through a domain penalty and tried to recover using a second domain — what worked, what made things worse, and any technical mistakes to avoid .

Smart Ranking Hub said:

Redirecting a penalized domain with a 301 will carry the penalty straight to your new site, so your best move is starting fresh without any redirects. Check Google Search Console's "Manual Actions" tab first to confirm if it is a real ban or just a major algorithmic drop. If you must redirect, you have to get the penalty officially lifted first and then use 1:1 page-level redirects, as bulk-redirecting everything to the homepage will only trigger soft-404 errors.

Click to expand...

If so, wouldn't that be very easy to take down domains? (negative seo) Or Google still not smart enough to ignore the 301 of a penalized domain?

Just sharing my personal experience here:

While most SEO theories claim that page-by-page redirects yield the best link equity transfer—I’ve done some bulk 301 redirects that turned out pretty well.

The mechanism usually plays out like this:

Say you redirect a restaurant domain A (let's say abcburger.com) to a travel niche domain B (e.g., defguide.com). Within 2 weeks, B will "inherit" some of A's original keyword rankings—sometimes ranking even higher than A originally did. For instance, if abcburger.com was ranking #20 for "NewYork hamburger," the landing page [defguide.com/abcburger] might end up ranking at #15 for that same keyword. Meanwhile, Domain B’s original keyword rankings will also get a slight boost.

Also, though I don't fully understand the algorithm behind it, almost everyone does redirects will add internal links from that transition page [abcguide.com/abcburger] pointing to their money pages.From what I've observed with real-world corporate mergers and acquisitions (which are "legitimate" redirects that should retain most of the authority), companies rarely go through the trouble of setting up page-by-page redirects. Instead, they usually just create a single landing page on the parent domain and do a site-wide 301 from the acquired domain to that single page.

To answer your question: if your time is limited, I think doing a whole 301 to a single transition page (or even the homepage) is acceptable. If you've already decided to completely abandon the old site anyway, there's no harm in trying redirect to the new site. The only risk is losing a few bucks on the registration fee.

These cases all involved normal domains so this might not work the same way for you. I‘d like to know how did you determine your domain was penalized? Massive de-indexing, or a severe drop in rankings?