How does the Google Treat 301 Redirects?

[mezozcorp]

Hi,

My website was one of many that dropped in rankings this last Friday, The company that i outsourced my SEO 4 months ago did a bad job. Now  i'm doing everything my self to recover, so i was thinking getting a new hosting, duplicate the website with a same content (i have original quality content) and 301 my old domain to new one? How long can it last with Google? Can penalties be passed via 301 redirects ?

Looking forward to your help.

[KarlBantleman]

You need to think about whether your site has been hit with a manual penalty or an algorithm penalty. If you have had no messages in WMT then it is probably an algorithm penalty. Panda is now part of all algorithm changes so you may have been hit by that.

One of our testing sites got hit by Penguin in May and we decided to test out if a 301 to a new website would work...it didnt!! It took just over 5 weeks for Google to catch up and the site lost all its rankings again. I was actually surprised it took that long to be honest, Google's algorithm is too smart for that so I would advise trying to fix any problems before you give up and start a new website.

Penalties will last as long as you have the problem. The issue here is, if it is an algorithm change then it is harder to figure out what is wrong. Whilst a manual penalty is worse, at least you know what to do in order to fix the problem. You need to look at any duplicate content issues you may have and if that is all ok then look deep into your backlink profile because it must be 1 or the other. If you show us your URL then maybe one of us could take a quick look and give you some more info.

[LynnPatchett]

Hi,

Everything Sharia says is correct in terms of being sure you know what you are dealing with. Assuming that your drop in rankings/traffic is related to the reported penguin update last weekend and again assuming that the bad job your seo firm did was related to building loads of crappy links to your site then I would suggest taking a deep breath and start looking for more information on penguin/penguin recovery. There is lots of info on this on the qa and the blogs, for example:
http://moz.com/blog/the-difference-between-penguin-and-an-unnatural-links-penalty-and-some-info-on-panda-too
http://moz.com/ugc/what-a-penguin-recovery-looks-like

A short answer to your question is that there seem to be mixed thoughts on using 301s to try and 'get out' of a penguin related drop in rankings. Personally I think the balance of opinion points towards 301s being either a very short term tactic or else just passing the problem on to the new page/domain. So I would not jump into the 301 to a new domain route without thinking things through (a lot!). A couple more relevant posts:
http://moz.com/blog/save-your-website-with-redirects
http://moz.com/blog/google-disavow-tool

[Sharla]

Do you have more information about what went wrong?  I think the first step would be an in depth analysis to try and discover why your ratings went down.  Did they just fall for the first time last Friday; did you get any penalty notifications; was it four months ago they started falling?   Why do you say your SEO company did a bad job - how?

There are many reasons a site can fall in the SERPs, and they aren't all penalty related.  And, it is possible to recover from some penalties. I've seen sites fall after algorithm changes even when a site has been doing everything correctly.  Sometimes volatility is temporary.  Google Local hit a couple of our clients pretty hard just because they no longer ranked across the county, a big disappointment since we'd successfully put a lot of quality work into getting them to the top.

Anyway, if you give more information, it will be easier for the heads here to give you good answers.