301 redirecting a penalized domain

Hey guys,

So I have yet to try this - and have a question for anyone who has.

I have a website "website.com" that was getting upwards of 100,000 unique views/day 6 months ago. It got hit by a penalty, and dropped to around 50,000 per day, which lead me to redirect it to "website.tv". After a week - it's rankings SOARED back up to 120,000+ per day. Then, 3 months later, the penalty hit again.. and it's dropped right back down. Now, that penalty has been there for over a month so far, going on two. But the penalty was for website.com not website.tv - so my question is: If I remove the 301 redirect from website.com to website.tv - the penalty should drop off, correct? And if I were to redirect website.tv to website.eu (now), after I remove the redirect from website.com to website.tv, would website.eu end up penalized as well? I'm looking to try it out, but don't want to damage my website more than it already is. I've done a good amount of link building to website.tv over the last few months.

Thanks for reading.

+thanks/+rep for anyone who can help shed some light on this.

Regards,
~ver.

you dont' know whether the current site website.tv is hit by penalty or not. So, remove the website.com from the redirection and wait for the rankings to settle for website.tv. After rankings settled then find whether website.tv is recovering. If it is recovering leave as it is. Giving another redirection will mostly lose the ranking and credibility.

These are my thoughts.

Verilix,

I would say that if the new URL is indexed and ranking well, then removing the redirect should help. Seems like there may be other factors in play here. What were the penalties you were hit with and what evidence do you have that it actually was a penalty.

Best,

Shawn

301 redirect won't pass penalty. If its so i buy a penalized domain and redirect to my competitor, easy money!!!
Why website.tv dropped may be did same linkbuilding technique on both website.com and website.tv and hosted both domains on same hosting/IP. OR you need to change your linkbuilding technique. If website.eu is a new domain and you din't build links on it better host that on separate hosting and redirect .com and .tv.

The link juice will flow through when you do the 301 redirect. We've been penalized by Google for doing this in the past so tread with caution my friend.

scorpion king said:

301 redirect won't pass penalty. If its so i buy a penalized domain and redirect to my competitor, easy money!!!
Why website.tv dropped may be did same linkbuilding technique on both website.com and website.tv and hosted both domains on same hosting/IP. OR you need to change your linkbuilding technique. If website.eu is a new domain and you din't build links on it better host that on separate hosting and redirect .com and .tv.

Click to expand...

301 redirect DOES pass penalty, but it take time. If a competitor trying to 301 a penalized domain to you, just enjoy that link juice for a while, then go to Webmaster tool, disavow all linking to that domain (since it's 301 redirected, backlinks to that domain will also appear on your domain)

Of course it passes the penalty, it redirects ALL backlinks. As mentioned in the post above, it will take time to transfer juice. You should check your backlinks for the original domain, website.com and let us know the results.

scorpion king said:

301 redirect won't pass penalty. If its so i buy a penalized domain and redirect to my competitor, easy money!!!
Why website.tv dropped may be did same linkbuilding technique on both website.com and website.tv and hosted both domains on same hosting/IP. OR you need to change your linkbuilding technique. If website.eu is a new domain and you din't build links on it better host that on separate hosting and redirect .com and .tv.

Click to expand...

This statement would have held truth a few years ago. Using the statement that you could just use it on your competitor doesn't work anymore because you CAN use it on your competitor and penalize him (assuming his link profile is weak - although this tactic is frowned upon here). Negative SEO is very real, and if someone doesn't think it's possible, feel free to post your site and you will see first hand how real negative seo is.

301 does pass penalty over eventually. It can take anywhere from 2-3 days to 2-3 months. However, if your site is very profitable, even being up for a few days means huge ROI.

I used to believe in building strong stable sites, but with all the new google updates, It's so much more profitable to invest time into churn and burn sites.

Thanks for the replies guys, but some of you have misunderstood what my initial question was. I understand redirecting passes penalty, but if I remove the original .com redirect from the .tv - will the .tv be penalized and pass that penalization to the .eu I want to redirect it to? Since the .com was penalized, not the .tv - I'm hoping that removing the penalized .com keeps the .tv without penalty. Since I've built up links to it over the last few months.

That's why I said check your backlinks for the .com, to see if the backlinks are transferred to the .tv or not. If they are, the same thing will happen when you 301 to .eu

You'd have to check your backlink profile and compare, and hope you remove the redirect from .tv to .eu before the spammy backlinks or "too optimized" anchor text transfers and you receive the penalty for that reason again.

As mentioned above, it could take upwards of months to complete the transfer, but it could take far less time than that.

Switch off the redirect and wait,likewise this can take time for google to realise and it will take some time before everything settles.I would 301 the penalised domain to a new unimportant site,this way google will see the redirect no longer applies to your .tv site a bit quicker.Of course if you have built the same type of links to the .tv site it's going to be hard to tell it's not penalised as well,good luck with it.

301's don't pass penalties they pass link equity/juice. Your new (dot)tv site suddenly has a massive influx of new links passed directly through the (dot)com 301 you created. If the links that caused you to receive a penalty on your (dot)com are redirected to your (dot)tv then your duplicate (dot)tv site won't be able to withstand the toxicity or over optimised anchor links either & your (dot)tv site will suffer the same penalty, as it did.


It's takes a while for the penalty to be applied and for Google to catch up but eventually, as you've experienced, those links will do the same damage to your duplicate (dot)tv site. If you remove the 301 from the (dot)tv site and you redirect website(dot)tv to website(dot)eu, then website(dot)eu will never rank anyway as it has no links & you're basically starting a brand new website from scratch.


However, if you 301'd your penalised (dot)com site to my domain/site in the same niche which was much bigger & older with a much more diversified link profile, then my site would be able to absorb all of those links without a negative impact. The 301 from your (dot)com site would probably actually help my site and give me a permanent boost as my overall link profile is still balanced enough to absorb it.


This is why 301's don't pass penalties, only link equity. I gets confusing because most people redirect the 301 to a duplicate site, or a site of lower or equal authority & size. Then their new site can only absorb the over optimised anchor text ratios or the spammy links for so long before the penalty flag is triggered & it suffers the exact same fate.


And this is what causes people to think that 301's pass penalties when they really don't. This is why you could point 5 penalised sites to an authority site via 301's and it wouldn't really do anything. The influx of toxic links wouldn't necessarily be good for the site, but the 301's wouldn't automatically pass the penalty on either as the established authority site may be able to withstand 100 spammy 301's without effect.


You can simply remove the 301 on from your (dot)tv site & continue to build that site as a project, but it will not achieve its former rankings anytime soon because its previous rankings were dramatically boosted by the (dot)com's 301 links and all of the (dot)com's transferred domain metrics such as DA, PR, PA etc.


Your question has the answer actually seeded within it. You actually stated "...After a week - it's rankings SOARED back up..." This is the word of 301 churn and burn. Your newly penalised (dot)tv site is now to be considered as another valuable asset as you did state "...I've done a good amount of link building to website(dot)tv...". Well that's good news too. The strategy is very simple & each newly penalised domain actually becomes an asset.


All you do now is 301 redirect both the (dot)com, & the (dot)tv to point to your new website(dot)eu. Then you should be ranking in the same position again within a week, just as you were before.


Wait it out again, bank on the profits for 1.5 - 4 months, get penalised again, and rinse and repeat, or should I say churn and burn... Next step, adjust the 301's for (dot)com (dot)tv (dot)eu sites and point them all directly to the next site - feshsite(dot)co. This brand new domain site should rank in less than a week and stay there for a minimum of 1.5 months. Each old domain gets pointed (301) directly to your new site and the old sites don't point to each other. You can also spam the heck out of your old (dot)com (dot)tv (dot)eu domains to pass more juice through your 301's onto your new domain until that gets hit and added to the list.


Time to duplicate site with wptwin plugin or cPanel = 10mins. Time to adjust 301 redirects via htaccess = 5 mins. Otherwise stick with your (dot)tv site, remove the 301 and make that site your pride & joy and rank it the normal way so it's nice and safe. But the (dot)tv site won't go back to where it was originally ranked because it was never really ranked there anyway. If it did really deserve to be there it would still would be there. It was only there temporarily because of the link equity passed on via the 301 from your original (dot)com site. Hope this helps...