Redirecting Penalized Site?

Hi,

So like many other users on here, my site was hit with the unnatural links penalty. My site dropped #2 to around #10 and has kept decreasing since, even with further link building. It's currently ranking in #36, I've lost an income of around $250/day because of it.

I was just wondering if anyone had redirected their penalized sites and had success with it? I was considering purchasing an old domain that was registered in 2005 and 301'ing my old site to the new one, with hope of avoiding the penalty I was given and gaining some trust from Google with the age of the domain.

My site at the moment was registered around a year ago and contains hundreds of unique articles all written by myself. It's also PR5 and has had a huge amount of link building done to it. I really want to get my rankings back to how they were (I received the penalty in February).

Thanks!

Here is my theory:
Google is crawling the internet looking for "bad link profiles". When they see a site with a bad link profile, they penalize them. That penalty will eventually expire. If you do not clean up your link profile during the penalty period, google will again notice your "bad link profile" and penalize your site all over again.

With that in mind:
I don't think that your remedy will work immediately. The penalty will probably transfer. However, in the long run, once the penalty expires your 301 redirect may pass enough quality links that your profile will look better and the penalty would be lifted.

I am trying the opposite technique. I 301 redirected some strong domains that were not penalized to my penalized domain hoping that it would transfer some positive link juice and help end the penalty sooner. So far, no results, however I think we have to wait out the penalty no matter what to see if what we have done works.




I think that when you have this penalty, you have to improve your overall link profile, so that when your penalty is lifted you will not be penalized again.

Sometimes it is ok to redirect.
My sites were penalized (totally banned from Google) for bad content, I've made 301-redirect to new domain - now all my new domains are back in SERP.

If you do a 301 redirect, initially your site will come back to the previous position it held, but I have read many people report that about after a week the penalty is transferred to the new site.

I don't have first hand experience with this, this is just what I have read...

Manny, Thank you for this information. do you by any chance have a reference for this?

If you do a 301 redirect, initially your site will come back to the previous position it held, but I have read many people report that about after a week the penalty is transferred to the new site.

I don't have first hand experience with this, this is just what I have read...

Click to expand...

I did this a few weeks back..

I 301d a penalized site to a clean one.. ranking shot up for about 2 weeks then are basically back to where the penalized site was. I mean I guess you could keep doing this for the meanwhile while you are working on cleaning up your linking profile.

Comparing absolutely banned site (no results in "site:***" - "did not match any documents") with new website (About 1540 results) - it is not the worst way to take some traffic back.

I did this - penalized site was #8 for a term. Got slapped back to page 9.. i had a few small PR3 domains with a few articles each that linked to the main site. Redirected the penalized one to one of the promo sites and removed links to the site being 301'd.. built quality links to the promo site in the meantime. Promo site is now in the top 5

AlexMit said:

Sometimes it is ok to redirect.
My sites were penalized (totally banned from Google) for bad content, I've made 301-redirect to new domain - now all my new domains are back in SERP.

Click to expand...

Did you completely copy everything over to the new site?

Some interesting ideas here.

What do you think is the likely effect of combing multiple penalized sites into one? I have around 5 sites all of which got this same penalty (Probably going to be impossible to fix it manually, they all have literally millions of backlinks each). They all have hundreds of pages of unique content, I was thinking of combining them into 1 site and just using subdomains.

It'd be a site with a clean link profile, registered many years ago and would also have over a thousand pages of unique content on it. I'm hoping this would be enough to get decent rankings back, although I'm not sure if all of the penalties would pass through.

301 Redirection Case Study:

jdwurn said:

Manny, Thank you for this information. do you by any chance have a reference for this?

Click to expand...