We are moving one website to a different domain and would like to know what is the best way to do it without hurting SEO

[DoitWiser]

The website we want to move, let's say www.olddomain.com has a low quality back links profile, in fact it received a manual notification from google of unnatural links detected; but the home page has a PR 3. We want to move it to a different domain let's say www.newdomain.com. We would like to know if it's better to do a 301 redirect to the new domain, in order to transfer the link juice or if it would be better to do a 302, taking into account that this redirect won't pass any link juice, so it would be like start from scratch with this new domain.

Thanks for your help.

[DoitWiser]

Thanks for your help guys. What we are probably going to do is build the new site and start doing good SEO, and since we don't want to pass the link juice from the old site, I think we will just do a 302 redirect so that we don't loose any customers. Thanks again

[CHarkins]

This is more of a business decision, but you want to dive into that manual notification to get to why you received it. Assuming you were running the link building for olddomain.com, you should know which links are problem ones. If not, then you need to go through an audit of the links so you know which ones are problem ones (and can have that for future reference.)

You also want to factor in how much brand building you have done with the current domain. Do you have print collateral, print ads, business cards and a current customer base that knows that domain? Do you get direct type-in traffic for the domain? How are those customers going to react when they see the newdomain URL when typing in the old domain?

My personal site got a manual penalty b/c I built a bunch of low quality links trying to beat wikipedia for a term. That killed the main domain for that site for a little while until I cleaned up the link profile. Now my personal site has the penalty removed and is back in the SERPs. It's not quite to where it was pre-penalty, but I've also done zero link building outreach for that domain since the penalty was lifted. I'm confident that if I were to implement a solid content strategy for that domain this year that I would get back to where I was pre-penalty. It's just a matter of content and effort.

If you have a notification, now's the time to clean up some bad links and disavow the ones you can't remove. That shows Google that you're taking action and can stave off a penalty being applied.

[Davenport-Tractor]

Alejandro

I really hate it depends type answers, but you have some choices to make, and only you can answer the question about starting over.

First how easy was it to get the links required to get the PR 3 result? Do you already own the domains that brought that type of page rank. Or do you have a friend that you may contact to quickly build the links back? How about negative baggage the old domain brings with it. Does the old domain have links that that are non desirable that you may want to separate yourself from? Is the new website a completely different idea than the old website? If the new domain and old don't share a similar idea, the spiders may look at the old domain redirect as a negative for the new domain. An example might be if you had a chat room about camping products, and the new domain is related to Indy race cars, your not doing yourself any favors doing a 301 redirect.

[ZephSnapp]

IMO this is more of a business decision than an SEO one (especially without looking at the backlinks and the Google notification).  Depending on the business, I'd probably just leave the old site up (and keep capturing leads through there) until it is actually penalized, and work on doing things the right way on the new site.

But only you know the extent of the dirt that was done on the old site, and that should probably be the determining factor.  Don't get caught up in the PR stuff though, It wouldn't factor into my decision.