Penalties forcing us to move to a new domain

[brads07]

My ecommerce company has been under an unnatural link penalty for some time now.  Over 2 months, removing 13,000 back links and submitting two reconsideration requests we have still been denied.  We think the best route to take is to start a new domain.  Does anyone have advice, resources, articles or anything else that can help us  with this transition?

Just a recap : we want to move our existing site to a new site and pass no negative "link juice".  Thanks in advance.

[brads07]

Ryan,

Thank you for the great information.  Was your last sentence cut off or was that the end?

We do not believe it will be possible to fix the penalty in time frame we have so we have decided to just go with a new domain.

We would like to try and maintain any customers that happen to stumble upon our old site but want to make sure we do not get penalized in any way.  We were thinking of just putting up a generic single landing page stating that we have moved but are afraid to actually mention or link to the new site as we do not want the new one to be penalized.  Is this something we should be afraid of or could we link to the new domain?  Or should we keep our current pages in place and link to the new corresponding page?

Do you have a recommendation / procedure to shutdown the old site properly and remove from Google before the new site is launched?  Is there a problem just making small changes to the site but pretty much making an exact copy of the old site?

Thanks,

Brad

[RyanKent]

Hi Brad.

Your situation is somewhat common. If you acquired a manual penalty for manipulative links, you are highly unlikely to resolve the issue on your own. In most cases, even SEOs fail to resolve the penalty. Google is quite firm on the steps required to resolve the penalty.

If you decide to pursue the penalty removal, you should understand it does not matter how many manipulative links you remove. On my first penalized site I removed 3.5 million links which represented 97% of the links to the site, and the Reconsideration Request was declined. Google only removed the penalty after I gathered a list of every link to the site using multiple sources, then evaluated every link according to Google Guidelines, then turned in a spreadsheet demonstrating all the communication between the linking site and my client's site.

What matters is how many manipulative links remain. The number should be zero, which is not reasonably possible in most cases, so you need to thoroughly document for each link the efforts taken to remove the link. You need to solidly demonstrate you have taken every reasonable action possible to remove all manipulative links. If you complete this task, Google will remove the manual penalty 100% of the time in my experience.

we want to move our existing site to a new site and pass no negative "link juice"

In that case, do not 301 redirect the old domain to the new one. You will need to make a clean break. You can still salvage some good links by asking webmasters to update their links to your new site. Some links such as Dmoz or the BBB may be under your control and you can make the change yourself.

Otherwise, the standard advice to starting a new site apply. Choose the best domain possible. You basically have three choices:

• a branded domain (i.e. Nike, Google, Twitter)

• a keyword domain (i.e. carinsurance.com, seotools.com, etc.)

• a hybrid (i.e. SEOmoz.org, burgerking.com, etc)

Each option has value. You should also thoroughly evaluate your website architecture, especially your URLs. You will have a clean chance to incorporate all best practices.

If you choose to begin a new domain,