How to transfer 5 domains under one Brand domain without using 301 redirect with minimum SEO loss

[ngupta1]

My situation is rather complicated , I have 5 domains with different but identical services. Some with good traffic some without, but 2 main domains have manual penalty from Google (I have tried a lot to get rid of the penalty but no success) so finally I have decided to move all our websites under one anchor website 'a brand' and pass all the seo juice + blog articles under the same.

Now the problem with the procedure is that we cannot redirect the penalized domain urls to new one as penalization will also be transferred and the whole motive of creating a new brand will be lost.

So if somebody could guide me as of how I should proceed transferring SEO value with minimum traffic loss but without using 301)

**One way I could figure out is using canonical (Am not confident over it) but say I create 5 identical pages on new domain and declare them as canonical of old domain pages (So is it safe? will it transfer the penalty of old domain to canonical new urls? ) **

Rest i am bifurcating all the traffic sources like direct / organic / referral / Social etc and chalking out what we can control manually and in what ratio, gradually I will work on each section to transfer the traffic.

Main Problem is of Organic and Not available.

Some suggestions or blog urls would be appreciated.

[ngupta1]

Thanks a tons , Yes you are right if I don't want to pass link juice then I can always use 302 instead of 301. I will move along these lines

[Carson-Ward]

Okay, if you're not interested in maintaining organic traffic to the current site we have a few options.

In theory Google shouldn't even crawl the page to see the redirect if you Disallow: /, so that solution works fine. Still, I'd use a 302 redirect just in case Google the robots.txt doesn't catch something (maybe a subdomain with a different robots.txt or something) or if Google crawls a page before refreshing robots rules (they shouldn't).

So yes, your solution works fine, but I'd use a type of redirect that doesn't pass link as much equity like a 302 redirect just to be extra safe. Over a long period of time Google may treat 302 redirects more like 301s, but by then you'll be sure that Google understands not to even crawl the site so it won't matter.

[ngupta1]

Thanks for a good response first of all my confusion over canonical is cleared because as Google treats 301s and Canonical both as nearly same, I was doubtful if penalization will also be transfered, Anyways as I dont want to take any risk I can go for this technique with no follow link.

But i had one more thing in mind,(kindly note am not looking to transfer organic traffic) but I don't want to loose other sources so for that say my page is :

**www.oldsite.com/blog/example  I will 301 it to a new location www.newsite.com/blog/example, now to avoid SEO juice + penalization to be passed to newsite I will block that particular old page from googlebot using Robot.txt or htaccess , so now google cannot access that old page and for the user its redirected to new page. **

Will this work? i.e. my new website would be safe from penalization ?

[Carson-Ward]

For the sites that are penalized you have a few options. Canonical tags can transfer penalty in some circumstances, as will 301 redirects. Over time even a 302 redirect may begin to be treated more like a 301 redirect.

If you're just worried about direct traffic only, simply noindex, nofollow the whole site, disallow it all in robots.txt. After that you can do something like a client-side-rendering JS redirect or a popup with a nofollow link to the new location.

If you're worried about losing current organic traffic, you will have to avoid any redirects or noindexing and direct people over to the new location with something like a popup that contains a nofollow link to the new location. It's not ideal, but you can't do any redirects that aren't potentially harmful when pages have low-quality links pointing to them. Hopefully over time the new site will start to rank instead, and you can pull the old site down. Or, if the penalty is eventually cleared, you can 301 redirect the old site over.

[Asjad]

Here is What I will Do if I were You.

Simply Copy all databases of 5 Websites and Integrate them Into One Brand Website.

Delete everything from penguin hit websites. Let them die..

I have done this with our Penalty hit websites and New website started to Rank in few Weeks for Long tail Keywords.

Thanks