Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research
      Moz Pro

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research

      Try it free!
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4. Does redirecting from a "bad" domain "infect" the new domain?

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    Does redirecting from a "bad" domain "infect" the new domain?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    3
    6
    936
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • gaiaslastlaugh
      gaiaslastlaugh last edited by

      Hi all,

      So a complicated question that requires a little background.

      I bought unseenjapan.com to serve as a legitimate news site about a year ago. Social media and content growth has been good. Unfortunately, one thing I didn't realize when I bought this domain was that it used to be a porn site.

      I've managed to muck out some of the damage already - primarily, I got major vendors like Macafee and OpenDNS to remove the "porn" categorization, which has unblocked the site at most schools & locations w/ public wifi. The sticky bit, however, is Google. Google has the domain filtered under SafeSearch, which means we're losing - and will continue to lose - a ton of organic traffic.

      I'm trying to figure out how to deal with this, and appeal the decision. Unfortunately, Google's Reconsideration Request form currently doesn't work unless your site has an existing manual action against it (mine does not). I've also heard such requests, even if I did figure out how to make them, often just get ignored for months on end.

      Now, I have a back up plan. I've registered unseen-japan.com, and I could just move my domain over to the new domain if I can't get this issue resolved. It would allow me to be on a domain with a clean history while not having to change my brand. But if I do that, and I set up 301 redirects from the former domain, will it simply cause the new domain to be perceived as an "adult" domain by Google? I.e., will the former URL's bad reputation carry over to the new one?

      I haven't made a decision one way or the other yet, so any insights are appreciated.

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • Jgfbjvvnnvvvb
        Jgfbjvvnnvvvb last edited by

        Yes, the same thing happened with my new domain. after that, I am unable to take it back. Bank Branches made me out.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • gaiaslastlaugh
          gaiaslastlaugh last edited by

          On the potential good news side, I got someone from Google engaged in finding out how to perform a reconsideration request, given that the current method is broken. Hopefully this pans out.

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
          • effectdigital
            effectdigital @gaiaslastlaugh last edited by

            To be honest that's exactly right. In actuality you aren't ban evading, because you aren't that site and it no longer lives on that domain. But if Google's algorithms are unaware of that, more issues could arise

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
            • gaiaslastlaugh
              gaiaslastlaugh last edited by

              Thanks for that detailed response. That all makes sense. It sounds like my best path forward is to continue to work to build legitimate links from legitimate sources, continue to try and contact Google for a reconsideration, and avoid taking any drastic action that might be interpreted as skirting the rules.

              Thank you!

              effectdigital 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
              • effectdigital
                effectdigital last edited by

                There is a risk of the new domain being infected with the prior domain's negative equity. Basically if you put exactly the same site up as before with the same content and the domain-name is very similar, Google will assume it's the same site. For a lot of people that can be a good thing (preserving their SEO authority) but if you have negative equity it could be a very bad thing

                If Google has mislabeled your site, that's what they believe your site is. Since they believe your site IS a porn site, their algorithms will probably see the new domain (with the same site on it) and interpret that as, hey this porn-site owner is trying to evade our listing bans. Ban evaders are bad, slap it back on!

                Since you're already at a point where the algorithm(s) have failed you, I wouldn't anticipate them to randomly be more generous in the future. You might get lucky, but you might find the issue does creep across

                The good news I guess is that usually, web-hosting and domain purchases aren't bank-breakingly expensive. As such it's worth a try I suppose. Just don't be shocked if it does well for a few days, and then suddenly declines again

                I know that content similarity matters a lot for positive redirects (e.g: if you want to move SEO authority from one page to another, you'd better be sure that the content is very similar - otherwise it has little to no effect even with 301s). Does this also hold true for negative redirects? I'm not certain but I would suspect that the same logic would be at play. In this situation though, since it's exactly the same site and content it could work against you and let the negativity flow through

                Maybe you could create 302 redirects instead of 301 redirects (keeps the authority, in this case negative, on the redirecting URL - not the redirect destination). Maybe you could also exempt the Googlebot user-agent from the redirects so that it doesn't see them at all

                That would be some stuff I would try, but I wouldn't be amazed if Google got really cross with you for SERP ban-evasion behavior. If you could possibly re-brand slightly and re-write a load of the content that might help significantly. It's a lot of money though when in reality, it's a 50/50 gambit

                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                • 1 / 1
                • First post
                  Last post

                Got a burning SEO question?

                Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                Start my free trial


                Browse Questions

                Explore more categories

                • Moz Tools

                  Chat with the community about the Moz tools.

                • SEO Tactics

                  Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers

                • Community

                  Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!

                • Digital Marketing

                  Chat about tactics outside of SEO

                • Research & Trends

                  Dive into research and trends in the search industry.

                • Support

                  Connect on product support and feature requests.

                • See all categories

                Related Questions

                • DmitriiK

                  Optimization for "Search by Photos" feature

                  Howdy, fellow mozzers, Does anyone know what affects a given company photos show up in the "Search by Photos" section? I can't find any decent info.. Here is the link to SEL, describing the feature (not even google themselves seem to have an announcement about it). https://searchengineland.com/google-showing-mobile-search-by-photos-option-in-selected-local-verticals-323237 Thanks in advance!

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DmitriiK
                  2
                • ims2016

                  Should I run my Shopify store on a subdomain or buy a new domain for it?

                  I'm planning to set up a subdomain for my Shopify store but I'm not sure if this is the right approach. Should I purchase a separate domain for it? I'm running Wordpress on my website and want to keep it that way. I want to use Shopify for the ecommerce side. I want to link the store from the top nav and of course I'll use CTA's in a variety of ways to point to merchandise and other things on the store side.   Thanks for any help you can offer.

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ims2016
                  0
                • atomiconline

                  Best way to "Prune" bad content from large sites?

                  I am in process of pruning my sites for low quality/thin content. The issue is that I have multiple sites with 40k + pages and need a more efficient way of finding the low quality content than looking at each page individually. Is there an ideal way to find the pages that are worth no indexing that will speed up the process but not potentially harm any valuable pages? Current plan of action is to pull data from analytics and if the url hasn't brought any traffic in the last 12 months then it is safe to assume it is a page that is not beneficial to the site. My concern is that some of these pages might have links pointing to them and I want to make sure we don't lose that link juice. But, assuming we just no index the pages we should still have the authority pass along...and in theory, the pages that haven't brought any traffic to the site in a year probably don't have much authority to begin with. Recommendations on best way to prune content on sites with hundreds of thousands of pages efficiently?  Also, is there a benefit to no indexing the pages vs deleting them? What is the preferred method, and why?

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | atomiconline
                  0
                • inhouseseo

                  "sex" in non-adult domain name

                  I have a client with a domain that has "sex" in the domain name. For example, electronicsexpo.com. The domain ranks for a few keywords related to the services offered. It is an old domain that has been online for over 10 years. It ranks well for local keywords. No real SEO effort has been made on this domain, so it is rather a clean slate. I am going to be doing SEO on this site. Will the fact that the word "sex" exists in the name have any sort of negative consequence. There is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING adult related or pornographic on this site. I would think that search engines are sophisticated enough to differentiate, but would potential customers with things like parental filters be blocked from viewing content? Is this hurtful in anyway? If so, would I be better off changing domain names? TIA

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | inhouseseo
                  0
                • khi5

                  "noindex, follow" or "robots.txt" for thin content pages

                  Does anyone have any testing evidence what is better to use for pages with thin content, yet important pages to keep on a website? I am referring to content shared across multiple websites (such as e-commerce, real estate etc). Imagine a website with 300 high quality pages indexed and 5,000 thin product type pages, which are pages that would not generate relevant search traffic. Question goes: Does the interlinking value achieved by "noindex, follow" outweigh the negative of Google having to crawl all those "noindex" pages? With robots.txt one has Google's crawling focus on just the important pages that are indexed and that may give ranking a boost. Any experiments with insight to this would be great. I do get the story about "make the pages unique", "get customer reviews and comments" etc....but the above question is the important question here.

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi5
                  0
                • AlliedComputer

                  Rel="canonical" and rel="alternate" both necessary?

                  We are fighting some duplicate content issues across multiple domains. We have a few magento stores that have different country codes. For example: domain.com and domain.ca, domain.com is the "main" domain. We have set up different rel="alternative codes like: The question is, do we need to add custom rel="canonical" tags to domain.ca that points to domain.com? For example for domain.ca/product.html to point to: Also how far does rel="canonical" follow?  For example if we have:
                  domain.ca/sub/product.html canonical to domain.com/sub/product.html
                  then,
                  domain.com/sub/product.html canonical to domain.com/product.html

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlliedComputer
                  0
                • lara_dar

                  Merging Sites: Will redirecting the old homepage to an internal page on the new site cause issues?

                  I've ended up with two sites which have similar content (but not duplicate) and target similar keywords, rather than trying to maintain two sites I would like to merge the sites together. The old site is more of a traditional niche site and targets a particular set of keywords on its homepage, the new site is more of an authority site with a magazine type homepage and targets the same set of keywords from an internal page. My question is: Should I redirect the old site's homepage to the relevant internal page on the new website...
                  ...or should I redirect the old site's homepage to the new site's homepage? (the old site's homepage backlinks are a mixture of partial match keyword anchor text, naked URLs and branded anchor text) I am in two minds (a & b!) (a) Redirecting to the internal page would be great for ranking as there are some decent backlinks and the content is similar (b) But usually when you do a 301 redirect the homepage usually directs to the new homepage and some of the old site's links are related to the domain rather than the keyword (e.g. http://www.site.com) and some people will be looking for the site's homepage. What do you think? Your help is much appreciated (and hope this makes sense...!)

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lara_dar
                  0
                • Kadel

                  Pipe ("|") in my website's title is being replaced with ":" in Google results

                  Hi , One of the websites I'm promoting and working on is www.pau-brasil.co.il.
                  It's wordpress-based website and as you can see the html's Title is "PauBrasil | some hebrew slogan".
                  (Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/2f80EEY.gif)
                  When I'm searching for "PauBrasil" (Which is the brand's name) , one of the results google shows is "PauBrasil: Some Hebrew Slogan" (Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/eJxNHrO.gif ) Why does the pipe is being replaced with ":" ?
                  And not just that , as you can see there's a "blank space" missing between the the ":" to the slogan.
                  (note: the websites has been indexed by google crawler at least 4 times so I find it hard to believe it can be the reason) I've keep on looking and found out that there's another page in that website with the exact same title
                  but when I'm looking for it in google , it shows the title as it really is , with pipe. ("|").
                  (Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/dtsbZV2.gif) Have you ever encountered something like that?
                  Can it be that the duplicated title cause that weird "replacement"? Thanks in advance,
                  Kadel

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kadel
                  0

                Get started with Moz Pro!

                Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                Start my free trial
                Products
                • Moz Pro
                • Moz Local
                • Moz API
                • Moz Data
                • STAT
                • Product Updates
                Moz Solutions
                • SMB Solutions
                • Agency Solutions
                • Enterprise Solutions
                • Digital Marketers
                Free SEO Tools
                • Domain Authority Checker
                • Link Explorer
                • Keyword Explorer
                • Competitive Research
                • Brand Authority Checker
                • Local Citation Checker
                • MozBar Extension
                • MozCast
                Resources
                • Blog
                • SEO Learning Center
                • Help Hub
                • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                • How-to Guides
                • Moz Academy
                • API Docs
                About Moz
                • About
                • Team
                • Careers
                • Contact
                Why Moz
                • Case Studies
                • Testimonials
                Get Involved
                • Become an Affiliate
                • MozCon
                • Webinars
                • Practical Marketer Series
                • MozPod
                Connect with us

                Contact the Help team

                Join our newsletter

                Access all your tools in one place. Whether you're tracking progress or analyzing data, everything you need is at your fingertips.

                Moz logo
                © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                • Accessibility
                • Terms of Use
                • Privacy

                Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.