301 redirect from penalized website to another domain

Hey guys, I want to share with you what I did for my website.
I have one website penalized, I think, and in this website I went from 4-500 visitors/day to 20-30 visitors/day.

What I did:

• Changed all posts content. I rewrite completely all 1200 posts.
• Removed 3k+backlinks spam from negative seo via GSC disavow tool.
• Added alt text to all images.
• Added no follow to CPA external links and removed cloak to this link.
• Added internal linking from each posts.
• Added external links related to the posts arguments (like 1-2 per posts).

After this I moved all content website with 301 to another fresh domain targeted by country (.it/.de/.es etc.). I was on .com, but it is not necessary since I’m targeting only one country.

After the redirect I did this:

• Added Facebook page and share post on it. Added also Facebook page to website with a link pointing on it.
• Buyed mixed social signals, like 15k from Facebook, tumblr, Pinterest etc. from seoclerk.
• Changed hosting and optimize website speed with cache plugin.
• Added Cloudflare.
• Added domain to a new fresh created GSC manually.
• Of course, submit sitemap on GSC.

This is the results after a few days. Traffic move from 20 visitors day to 70 visitors day.

Are you going to buy a new domain every time your site drops in visits?

SirLouen said:

Are you going to buy a new domain every time your site drops in visits?

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No, of course, but I changed all the restayling, I only speed up the recovery process with the domain change.

Any other comments?

You put in a lot of work to recover your site, like rewriting all the content, disavowing bad backlinks, improving SEO, and moving to a new domain. Now, your traffic has jumped from 20 to 70 visitors a day. Nice job!

To further improve your site, build quality backlinks (Traffic guest posts, Niche edits), enhance content depth, optimize for mobile and speed, boost user engagement, grow your social media presence, leverage local SEO, and stay updated on algorithm changes.

Website still improving in the meantime.
200+ visitors on a mixed page, so this is not a boost from a single page ranked well on Google.
I hope this continuing improving.

The steady increase in traffic after the redirect is a great job. Wait for a few more days and see. Also, publish more high quality articles with internal linking and optimize the pages to improve the user experience. Focus on building links from legit websites with diversified anchor profiles.

You have addressed key aspects that can impact SEO and recover from penalties.
The domain migration to a country-specific extension, along with social signals, hosting improvements, and technical optimizations like Cloudflare and enhanced site speed, are further steps that can positively influence your site's performance.
The increase in traffic from 20 to 70 visitors per day is a promising sign that your efforts are starting to pay off.

Recovering from a penalty is a positive sign. It means Google still trusts your website. Keep adding fresh content and acquire links from niche-related sites to give your website an additional boost.

The website continue growing, now reach 235 unique visitors:


I did the same today for another website that have 15-20 visitors only from Google. Changed all content, changed theme, plugin, hosting, added cloudflare, cache plugin, internal and external link and redirect to another fresh .com domain with 301. After this I created new fresh GSC and added sitemap Also added IndexNow to index fast my old and new posts.
Let's see in about 1 week if the traffic will boost as the other.

Amazing results, I have a website like this as well that went from 200+ daily unique visitors to 3-5 a day, I would want to give this a try as well but the original domain is very good and I wouldn't want to change it to a different one. Instead of this, soon I will try a similar approach, what I will do is I will buy another domain in the same niche, build a website on it, grow it a little bit and get some backlinks to it, then I will 301 the new domain to my old one and see if it works out. Anyways, please keep us updated with your traffic increase.

damnez said:

Amazing results, I have a website like this as well that went from 200+ daily unique visitors to 3-5 a day, I would want to give this a try as well but the original domain is very good and I wouldn't want to change it to a different one. Instead of this, soon I will try a similar approach, what I will do is I will buy another domain in the same niche, build a website on it, grow it a little bit and get some backlinks to it, then I will 301 the new domain to my old one and see if it works out. Anyways, please keep us updated with your traffic increase.

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Basically you want to do the opposite of what I did, right? You want to make a new one and send it to your old one.
My two domains were old (one was 3 years old, the other 7), but I preferred to use the 301 method, I think they were gone forever.

jyciap11 said:

Basically you want to do the opposite of what I did, right? You want to make a new one and send it to your old one.
My two domains were old (one was 3 years old, the other 7), but I preferred to use the 301 method, I think they were gone forever.

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Yeah basically, mine is also 3 years old and I had even registered it before for 10 years so I don't really want to change it, plus the domain itself is really good and perfect for the niche.

Just for talk..
I made the same changes on another site (9 years old, .net domain), but without redirecting. So I made the changes and kept the same domain. I don't know if the site was penalized or not, I didn't update it for about 7 months and it lost almost all of its traffic.

I changed the text to the posts (4000+ posts), I changed hosting, I sped up the website, added a Facebook page, sent about 15k social signals from Pinterest, Facebook and Tumblr, disavowed many toxic backlinks via GSC, added well-made internal and external links, added nofollow to advertising links.
After I made the changes I sent the updated sitemap to Google and manually scanned many urls via Indexnow. I'm also posting one/two new posts daily (or almost).

As you can see without the 301 redirect the method doesn't work... or it takes much more time and patience, I don't know.
There was a small improvement, but nothing major.

Good recovery. I think you should write a proper thread about this

did you find out why this happened?

was the reason the 3k+backlinks ?

cryptom0 said:

did you find out why this happened?

was the reason the 3k+backlinks ?

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Nope. I got many backlinks (around 3k, I did another thread), from spammy websites with anchor text “fuck you”, “fuck your website” etc.
Someone hate my website lol

And Google I think did not elaborate my disavow file yet, that’s why I can’t recovery in the website without 301.
But I only suppose, of course.

jyciap11 said:

The website continue growing, now reach 235 unique visitors:
View attachment 372829

I did the same today for another website that have 15-20 visitors only from Google. Changed all content, changed theme, plugin, hosting, added cloudflare, cache plugin, internal and external link and redirect to another fresh .com domain with 301. After this I created new fresh GSC and added sitemap Also added IndexNow to index fast my old and new posts.
Let's see in about 1 week if the traffic will boost as the other.

Click to expand...

After around 20 hours, the second domain redirected 301 started to get traffic from Google. Today (it’s 6pm in Europe) around 16 visits from Google.
Not bad, it’s not 24 hours yet after the redirect and I already have around 20 visitors from Google. The old website that I redirected to this one was 17 visitors from Google on August, so I already archived this number in a few hours.
Let’s see, I’m positive!

jyciap11 said:

After around 20 hours, the second domain redirected 301 started to get traffic from Google. Today (it’s 6pm in Europe) around 16 visits from Google.
Not bad, it’s not 24 hours yet after the redirect and I already have around 20 visitors from Google. The old website that I redirected to this one was 17 visitors from Google on August, so I already archived this number in a few hours.
Let’s see, I’m positive!

Click to expand...

LOL, this website after two days already double the visits compared to the old domain redirected. And I'm my country it's only 2pm, so I have to reach midnight. probably today I will reach 60-80 visits from Google.
I have other two domains penalized, I will use this method to fuck Google and get back all my websites with many traffic plus!
I found new method to recover websites fast? I don't know, but seems working really good at the moment.

The main domain focused in this topic seems slightly worsened in visits, we will see in the next few days it could be a temporary decline.
I checked the keywords rank on Google that in GSC give me the more traffic, and seems all ok. Some keywords seems in better positions, gained 1-2 positions, and some lost 3-4 positions. Normal fluctuations (I think).
BTW I checked with 3 different rank checker and all show me different results lol.