If I NoIndex/NoFollow a website, does it count as duplicate content?

Ok so ive been recently penalized by Penguin.

I want to copy my old website to a new domain, and keep all the existing content.

However I still have a substantial amount off traffic directing to my old website (from business cards, flyers, brochures etc) and would like them to still be able to read the old website under the old domain.

My question is, if I no index / no follow my old domain, and copy all the existing content to my new domain, will I be penalized by Google for duplicate content issues? I do not want to 301 redirect since it would transfer the penalty.

Thanks

bumpppppp

There's no guarantee a 301 will transfer the penalty I think.

Regarding noindexing your old page, I'd be careful with that. Keep in mind google caches as well and since it's indexed, honestly I doubt anybody can give you a reasonable advice what will happen.

If you can afford it, I'd just have the previous site completely rewritten by a good writer to be on the save side.

Thanks for the response.

I was actually planning on waiting until the website is completely deindexed from Google (using site:* query), before transferring the website to the new domain.

If a website is completely gone from the index, can it still be cached in the database?

Personally I think there's a difference of the index you/me can check and what they really index. For example back when the ALN network got de-indexed, many people reported back being able to harm websites by sending them bulk links from unindexed blogs they were still able to post on.

Same experienced with social bookmarks (pligg) that went deindexed - again, nothing proven but to be a 100% save, get it rewritten.