Site Penalized - 301 Redirect Question

[Prime85]

Hello,

We have a website that was penalized roughly two years by Google for "Unnatural Links"...

We are experiencing a lot of problems with this site, completely unrelated to the penalty or SERPS, and we're debating doing a 301 Re-direct to another site we own that is totally clean and has no "Unnatural Links".

If we do a 301 from the penalized site to our alternative website, will there be any cross-contamination?  Will the penalty carry over to our other site?

Please let me know what you guys think.

Thanks

[JaneCopland]

Hi there,

In order to reduce the risk of passing the penalty but to ensure customers and repeat visitors get from site A to site B, you can try a 302 redirect, a meta refresh or a JavaScript redirect. Google traditionally does not pass authority or anything else through these types of redirects; however, there have been discussions lately in the SEO community about these types of redirects possibly carrying penalties over to the new domain as well.

However, I'd still say they're safer than a 301 if you ONLY want to take traffic with you, but essentially want to start afresh.

Cheers,

Jane

[MarieHaynes]

If you do a 301 redirect from Site A to Site B then you will be passing all (or close to 100%) of the link equity from Site A to Site B including the bad links.  While there is a possibility that this new site might avoid a manual review, there's a good possibility it will get a manual review and be penalized.  Also, most sites with a manual unnatural links penalty will have Penguin issues.  If you 301 redirect a site with Penguin issues to a clean site then initially the clean site may perform well but the next time Penguin refreshes it will be affected.

There is potentially a way you can do this but I have not personally tried it and am hesitant to give instructions on how to do it.  You can apparently pass links via an intermediate page that is blocked via robots.txt and then on to the new site.  This will stop the link equity from flowing through the links.  This could be a solution for you but you'd probably want some guidance from someone who has done it successfully.

[Kingof5]

The penalty will probably pass to site B if you do a 301 redirect. If it were that easy to get out of being penalized then you wouldn't have companies whose marketing is solely based on penalty recovery.

[Prime85]

Good Morning and Thanks for all of the responses.

I guess I left out an important detail, so let me recap:

Site A <-- Unnatural Links Penalty From Google

Site B <-- No Penalty

Since Site A is having a lot of problems unrelated to the penalty (for example, the site is completely down right now), we wanted to redirect it to Site B.  The goal is not to pass any link juice or influence/boost the rankings of site B, it is solely so that the repeat customers who have been purchasing from Site A for many years can now will be taken to Site B where they can purchase on a fully functional site, rather than seeing that Site A is down and searching for products somewhere else.

So the question is will the Penalty from Site A be applied to Site B if we do a 301 redirect at the registrar level?

[Silkstream]

I agree with Jane.

TBH I'd rather start with a brand new domain without the redirect, however sometimes we have to go with what the client wants, even if we advise against it, ultimately its their decision.

I have warned them that it's still early days and the penalty may still be passed. My suggestion was made to provide another response that didn't involve potentially destroying a second established domain via a redirected penalty.

[JaneCopland]

It's generally accepted that penalties pass through redirects (this wasn't always the case - up until a couple of years ago, a 301 solved a lot of penalty issues). I have to guess that Silkstream's experience is uncommon in the long-term - a bad penalty will probably transfer over sooner or later. However, there are no set rules for this and perhaps several people who try this will get lucky.

I wouldn't rely on that though.

[Silkstream]

I've also seen this discussed a lot here on Moz, and have been involved in some of those discussions. You could try redirecting it to a new domain.

I have a new client who came to me suffering an obvious penalty (they weren't ranking for their own brand name), I asked them NOT to redirect the domain as I wanted to carry out some backlink research amongst other tasks to try to understand the problem. However they chose to go with the redirect against my advice - and it worked.

They went in at number 2 and a week later are at number 1. I cant say for sure how long this will hold, I'm concerned if there is a penalty of some kind that they may well disappear again in the next few weeks. But we are not losing anything in the meantime.

[evan89]

I would agree with Anthony on this. I would reiterate that if your existing site has some authoritative and valuable links, you should make sure that you have an equivalent page on your new site, and contact the linking site to change the link to your new site.

[anthonydnelson]

I've seen this debated numerous times as to whether or not a penalty will pass. Personally, I wouldn't risk a good clean site with another website's troubles. I mean, why risk a "totally clean" website?

A better route may be to simply contact the website owners of the good links your penalized website has and ask them to point them towards the same content you've put on your clean site.