Redirecting users from a Penguin hit website to a completely new domain

Hi folks

I recently read an article on Searchenginewatch* about various methods of redirecting a Penguin hit website to a new domain in order to get rid off the penalisation without having to actually rewrite all your content. Out of all the six different options given, one states that you possibly could redirect to an intermediate domain blocked by robots.txt and then redirect to your new domain from that blocked intermediate site.

Now I'm wondering whether this would also work page by page. Assume I had an eCommerce website with loads of products ranking on Google, I certainly would prefer to do redirects page-by-page to ensure that my old product page is correctly redirected to the respective new product page on my new domain. My understanding is that you might have to create those new product pages not only on your new target domain, but on the intermediate domain as well, which to me seems to be quite a lot of work (although probably worth it considering it might get you out of a Penguin penalisation).

What are your opinions on this? Anyone got any experience with this so far?

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* Since I am a new member, I cannot post any links yet. For those of you who would like to dig deeper into the issue, please do a search query on Google for the article's title: "Can you safely redirect users from a Penguin hit site to a new domain". Sorry about that.

First of all 301 redirect is temporarily solution IMO, penalties do transfer through 301, it's just a matter of time and no one can tell you after how much time your new site will tank.

I haven't read the article on SEW but blocking the intermediate domain with robots.txt doesn't make sense, because if you do wildcart redirect G bot won't see the robots.txt file on the intermediate domain.
Think about that way: G bot tries to access intermediatedomain.com/robots.txt >> 301 redirect to yourmoneysite.com/robots.txt, so googlebot will see the robots file on you $$ site.

Ganes said:

My understanding is that you might have to create those new product pages not only on your new target domain, but on the intermediate domain as well.

Click to expand...

You don't need to create pages on the domain you're redirecting.

Thanks for your quick reply.
Well, the articles suggests the following:

SEW said:

You would 301 redirect this [your old domain] to [intermediate domain], which really can be any domain name. (...) In the robots-txt file for [intermediate domain], you want to block search engines from crawling it by including the following:
User-agent: * Disallow: /

Click to expand...

snaip said:

I haven't read the article on SEW but blocking the intermediate domain with robots-txt doesn't make sense, because if you do wildcart redirect G bot won't see the robots-txt file on the intermediate domain.
Think about that way: G bot tries to access [intermediate domain]/robots-txt >> 301 redirect to [yourmoneysite]/robots-txt, so googlebot will see the robots file on you $$ site.

Click to expand...

I wouldn't wildcard redirect for the whole domain, because this doesn't make a whole lot of sense if I wanted to do this page-by-page.
What I'd consider doing is this: Think you've got certain product pages, let's name them A, B, and C. Now I would redirect [olddomain]/product-A through [intermediate domain]/product-A to [moneysite]/product-A. After reading the SEW article, I figured if G bot is blocked on the intermediate domain via robots-txt this might work, but only if done page-by-page in this case. Which is why I thought I might have to create product pages on the intermediate page as well because how else would I know how to properly redirect them to the respective new product page?

Make any sense?

I think you got him wrong, he does not want to rank new website with 301 redirect, he wants to redirect his traffic without getting new domain penalized.

That's exactly what [she] wants, yes, thank you.

Ganes said:

That's exactly what [she] wants, yes, thank you.

Click to expand...

I've read the article. Adding a disallow directive in the robots.txt file of the intermediate domain can prevent the negative link signals and penguin penalty from passing to the new domain.

To answer your question, if you want to follow the method as described, you will have to recreate each product page on the intermediate domain and redirect them to their respective pages on the new domain.

Alright, thank you. Sounds like a whole lot of work, though. Some things just can't be done with shortcurts, I guess
Any recommendations on how to simplify the process of recreating each product page on the intermediate domain?