[Case Study Results] Google Penalty And 301 Redirection Method

For those who might want to try the 301 on your penalized site, I have found out the hard way.

The account below is my experience and hope that this may help others.

Some History And Background:

I have a medium sized website (>1000+ pages) with unique contents written by my writers and most of the articles are copied by other sites. Site was 3 years old and was ranking among the top 5 for most of my keywords consistently. The site was then generating around $10,000/month.

Various backlinking methods were used prior to the penalty. These include SB, AMR, BMD, Private In-Content Networks, Link Pyramids, PAD, PR, Paid Directories, Link Exchanges and others...

The last action before the penalty was an AMR blast to 1000+ article directories with an article spun to 40% uniqueness by SC. This action was meant to build deep links to one of the internal pages.

Site was penalized by Google. All the internal pages including the main domain were shifted back to by around 50 positions and ranked on pages 5 and 6. This appears to be a site-wide penalty.

What I did:

I panicked as the traffic from this site has drop by 95% and the sales slows down massively. I continue to build backlinks to the site and update new contents. The new contents added are indexed by Google within minutes.

Finally, I decided to do a last ditch effort to bring the site back and embarked on the 301 redirect. I bought a new domain and cloned the whole penalized site. All the pages were 301 to the corresponding pages on the new site.

The Results:

The next day, I notice my traffic increase and most of my pages were back. My new domain and internal pages was ranking at almost the same positions as before the penalty. Sales were flooding back again and I thought all is well. Within 5 days, all my new re-directed pages were indexed by Google and ranking on page 1 again.

Then came the shocker...on day 7 after the 301 redirection. My new domain and all the internal pages were back to pages 5 and 6. I know that the penalty has been passed on from the old site to the new site.

I guess I would have to write off this site and embarked on other projects now.

Hope my experience can help others shed more light on the 301 redirection on penalized site...

If you do all your blasts to 301 site from day one and keep money site clean, then if you get penalty you just kill the 301 redirection and your money site is safe to be used with another 301 redirect.
Its well known that penalty is also passed on with 301 redirection.
To go extream BH and lowlife scum style you can redirect your 301 site with penalty to competitors site

i have an old site with penalty(deindex)
if i redirect to new domain.
will this trick help me ?

if you redirect you penalized site to new site you also redirect your penalty.
if you redirect good high ranking site to penalized site.... I dont think it also helps to lift the penalty.
what I would do is clone the site (as much as possible) and start over with fresh domain. Also I always build links via 301 sites. In that case if i get penalty to on of the 301 sites I can just replace that 301 with another. Think of it as proxy. Just keep few of them just in case. Build links to them and if turned bad redirect to competitor.

So that means i could get Squidoo/CNN/Any other highly trusted site to get penalized, just by setting up a 301 redirect to it from a penalized site? Highly doubt it ...

301 redirect realy good to avoid supplemental results but you need to erase all your mistakes of old site to avoid new sanctions and dont forget that 301 redirect will be 180 days or so on old site ( as google said )

When comparing penalized sites to a site thats google sandboxed, how long does the penalty usually last? I've never had a site get penalized, do they usually come back, or is it more like an adwords suspension, which I have had and is definitely permanent.

Hmm so its good to rank pages before 301. How do you know site is penalized? and not in google dance?

Is your site still penalized by the way?

301's are basically worthless.

Yup, the site is still penalized today.

Tertsim said:

Is your site still penalized by the way?

Click to expand...

RealEcon said:

301's are basically worthless.

Click to expand...

Sorry but I have 2 live examples (competitors of a client of mine) that did the 301 and still being on top 3 positions...Not for days or week, but months.

And believe me, keywords are among the toughest....

However, could not find a clear pattern - for some sites it simply works, for other it does not.

I did the same f*king thing and the same thing happened to me. It`s strange how Google let`s in the first place and then after about 8 days (for me) baaaang... i`m banned again. I`m thinking of 2 different bots from Google... one that ranks you, and one that bans you...

kryseo said:

Yup, the site is still penalized today.

Click to expand...

It has been 3 months, I think can confirm that this is really no joke of serp dancing etc. I read many ppl got penalized after using AMR.

Your problem is that your content has been used on other websites. Before this wasnt a problem because google indexed that content on your site first, and then the rest. Now that you put your content up on a new site, it appears as you are getting the content from the sites that posted your content in the first place.

Get the content back on your old domain and you'll get back up there. Backlinks cant hurt your sites, just make some quality backlinks. (wikipedia, dmoz if u havent already, manual blog comments, etc...)

What you should have done (granted I have no personal experience with this, only hearsay from a couple of people I know), is spend good money doing very high quality *manual* backlinking etc.

If you have a competent VA, get them to spend a month on it. Alternatively, there are a couple of people here offering $200+ packages that involve a fair amount of original content, manual Web2.0 linking etc. In short, manual everything with no footprint.

If you were earning $10k per month with the site, it is worth spending $1k or $2k to try and salvage it. Doing more of the same AMR+XRummer etc, is unlikely to help. And stay away from Paid Directories and Link Exchanges. Google have stated explicitly, and on numerous occasions, that they will penalise link exchanges.

dogdog said:

It has been 3 months, I think can confirm that this is really no joke of serp dancing etc. I read many ppl got penalized after using AMR.

Click to expand...

Yup, a penalty has been imposed and not a simple GDance. Not sure about the AMR part as I have used it successfully for other sites with no adverse effects.

So what I'm gathering from this thread is:

301 redirect from day one on a site, and build all backlinks to the 301 redirect site?

For example: www.301site.com - point to -> www.realsite.com, and build backlinks/article submissions/profile links to 301 site?

Are you doing the 301 redirect through the domain registrar or .htaccess?

Kameeleon said:

If you do all your blasts to 301 site from day one and keep money site clean, then if you get penalty you just kill the 301 redirection and your money site is safe to be used with another 301 redirect.
Its well known that penalty is also passed on with 301 redirection.
To go extream BH and lowlife scum style you can redirect your 301 site with penalty to competitors site

Click to expand...

I find this hard to believe. Do you have experience or are you just postulating?

Because G ranks the *target* domain behind the 301, the penalty will land on that site, not the 301'd site. Before the penalty, due to the 301, you get the link juice, but nothing else and it's all ranked to the target domain. So the penalty goes to the target, too.

So when you try to take the 301 away, you only remove the link juice, but not the penalty and you've done double the harm to the main domain.

I don't have experience with this, but I've done a lot of reading and what you say does not sound logical based on my reading. I'd appreciate other people's input on that.

Frostedbutts said:

So what I'm gathering from this thread is:

301 redirect from day one on a site, and build all backlinks to the 301 redirect site?

For example: www.301site.com - point to -> www.realsite.com, and build backlinks/article submissions/profile links to 301 site?

Click to expand...

(In order to avoid possible future penalty from your crap link building?)

NO! I think the person who suggested that is smoking something. From what I've read you can't simply remove a penalty so easily. What a 301 is good for is if you have a domain with some link juice that you want to pass on to another domain. That's all.