How to avoid Google penalties being inherited when moving on with a new domain?

[spanish_socapro]

Looking for SEOs who have experience with resetting projects by migrating on to a new domain to shed either a manual or algorithmic penalty.

My questions are:

• For algorithmic penalties, what is the best migration strategy to avoid inheriting any kind of baggage? 301, 302, establish no connection between the two sites?
• For manual penalties, what is the best migration strategy to avoid inheriting any kind of baggage? 301, 302, establish no connection between the two sites?

Any other input on these kind of reset projects is appreciated.

[RobertFisher]

Spanish,

I think you really need to consider what you are doing and why you are doing it. First, a manual penalty means you are on Googles radar and you are outside their terms of service in some way. If your decision is to get a new domain then what you should do is put the old one in the trash and forget it ever happened. You are starting from square one if you are smart IMO. Why? because if it is a penalty around linking and you redirect to a new domain, you are going to carry that wait to the next site. That doesn't mean that the penalty will show up on your new domain at point just because of the old, but there is no real value in the links so why risk it? There are just too many reasons not to try and save the old and move it to the new with redirects. BUT, is there a reason you would not simply address the penalty? Maybe it is cost as cleanup is expensive; if so, you weigh cost of cleanup versus cost of rebuild to all new site with new domain.

Second, an "algorithmic penalty" is something we say from time to time, but if you are using that as a line of thinking - "the algorithm has in some way penalized us" - you are then setting yourself up for further pain down the road IMO. With a site failing to rank because you have bad links, poor content, ads everywhere, I suggest you not look at it as a penalty. Look at is as: "What must we do in order to grow our site in value to our customer and in ranking against our competitors?" If you believe you have a "penalty" of sorts you are really saying things are not as good as they could be. Why not change things? If it is linking, disavow bad domains and links and move on. If it is Panda in your thinking, what can you do to change the content, etc.?

Often, when this type of question arises there have been a series of missteps by a site owner trying to shortcut really building a web property. If there were true short cuts without risk, I can tell you I would have found them or learned of them from people on various forums like Moz. I simply do not know of any.

Clean things up and move on or start over and move on. I think that is the only choice you face. I wish it were easier for all of us. 
Best

[cian_murphy]

What is your domain authority, age and indexed page number?

If you've come to the point where you've tried every possible e.g. cleared all crawl errors, disavowed and removed 7/10 links on the spam score link scale in OSE. Remove pages that Google may perceive as invaluable. Then and only then would I go to a completely new domain.

I wouldn't use any content from the previous site either as your original site would most likely be given credit for the original source since it's in Google's index already.

As you can tell it would be a last resort for me to move domains unless I had very few indexed pages / valuable inbound links and a low domain authority I could easily build up again.

[spanish_socapro]

Thanks Cian,

It is an algorithmic penalty (likley primarily Panda). Significant recovery work has happened since over a year ago but we are not seeing any recoveries despite the recent Panda refreshes.

What I hear you saying is try to avoid any cross connections (including GA id etc) and start fresh and maybe repoint some valuable links?

[cian_murphy]

Are you moving domains just because you've been hit with an algorithmic or manual action?

I'd personally try and solve the penalties before I'd make the decision to move to a new domain. If you don't want to solve the penalisation issues on your current site and move directly to a new one I'd try and distance myself from the old domain and establish no connection between the two sites.

If you feel your old domain has a high authority and you desperately want to keep the value you have built up then it's quite simple. You need to solve those penalisation issues. Work with the Google Manual action team to disavow spammy or illegitimate links. Focus on only keeping unique and engaging content on your site and adhere to Google Panda's solution criteria - duplicate content, titles, descriptions etc. Use Screaming Frog or Moz Pro to detect these issues.

Focus on helping the user while not breaking Google terms and conditions and you'll be fine.

One last note. A client of mine was hit with a manual action and I believe algorithmic penalisation. His site was able to recover in three months with a lot of work. The back and forth between Google's Manual Action team was the most time consuming.