Do 301 Redirects pass algorithm penalties?

tazarbm said:

it depends on the penalty. If google really hates you and they create a specific rule in their algo that prohibits your domain from ever ranking again you can be sure that the 301 will carry the penalty over to the new domain.

But usually, many penalties don't get carried over, but like I said, it's circumstantial

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fasttrak said:

Depends on what the penalty was for? Also, as @tazarbm said, Google is unpredictable and you may be unlucky even with a small penalty. All you can do is try.

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tazarbm said:

I will be honest: 301-ing is not my strong point, I've never had to do a 301 redirect for any of my websites although I know how to do it (well, it's easy anyway with a WP plugin, or via cpanel). So, I'm probably not the best to answer this question.

However, given that your site is still getting organic traffic I wouldn't 301 it to your other domain, especially if the penalty is recent (by the way, the domain in your screenshot is the one you wish to 301, or the non-penalized one??). I'm assuming it's the penalized one, but I want to make sure...

But like I said, seeing as the domain had been penalized but is still getting clicks this tells me that the penalty is not big and it will probably not get carried over to your other domain, but I still wouldn't do it because if the penalty is this soft it means that the domain can be recovered relatively easily. You just need to figure out when exactly the domain got penalized (because the graph in your screenshot is not very pinpoint-y), then check what algo update google have released up to 1 month prior to the penalty and then fix what google have broken on your site and the penalty should (in theory) be removed. But that's as far as I'm willing to point you in the right direction, I hope you'll understand that deeply analyzing your domain is a time consuming task and I'm not offering site audit / SEO consultation anyway, which is why you will either have to do it yourself or hire an auditor through the HAF forum, here:
https://www.blackhatworld.com/forums/hire-a-freelancer.76/
But if you do decide to 301 it, at least make sure you recreate the non-penalized URLs of the faulty domain on the clean domain (including copy-pasting the content that's on the non-penalized pages of the penalized domain) and do the redirecting for each URL, individually, instead of in bulk... or you could create a new page (Acquisition & Merged) on the clean website in which you explain visitors that you have acquired the (penalized) domain and that you've integrated it into the (clean) domain, and then 301 all of the URLs of the penalized domain to this new (A&M) page on the clean domain. I've seen people doing this type of thing with great success for their penalized domains, so it should work....

So yeah, I personally would not do it because the penalty doesn't seem very severe and could probably be done away with, but it's obviously your call. But you should probably wait for a 2nd opinion

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fasttrak said:

I initially thought the exact same as @tazarbm when I looked at the screenshot. If you do not have a manual penalty and it is just algo, I would try to fix that before 301'ing anywhere. Looks recoverable with some effort.

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Dark rai30 said:

Yeah I think you guys are right, i'll try recover it first before trying anything drastic.

Thanks for the help

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