Redirecting back to initial redirect.

[arousta]

Hello,

I have an example site A.com that is currently being redirected to site B.com. My client is having issues with B.com and finding that there is more equity in site A.com. The client now wants us to have A.com as the site.

What is the best way to proceed with implementing A.com without hurting search in the long run, since A.com was initially a 301 redirect to B.com.

• How should I proceed in this redirection back to A.com

• What pitfalls should I look out for that could affect SEO and how should I input safegaurds to protect myself?

I appreciate the support

[MonicaOConnor]

If you redirect site b to site a now, you will be passing along the negative effects of the penalties. Site a no longer exists in the search world if your redirect is that old. The best thing to do would be to fix the penalties, disavow bad links and submit a reconsideration request. Redirecting site b to site a would mean starting all over, and you would still have to deal with the penalties or site a won't rank at all. I suppose you could just kill site b, and make site a live again. You would still be starting over with site a, either way.

[arousta]

This redirect has been in place for some time now (at least two years). The reason why we want to now redirect site B to site A is that the previous SEO had done some shady practices to site B and google penalized us for it, for example we currently had and have a large number of inbound and outbound links to site B that are spammy, to the point where it knocked us off the first page.

We have already disallowed most of the inbound links and severed the outbound. But the damage is already done, and we feel it would take very long to get back on googles good side, just due to the work this previous SEO did.

So since we have Site A and it has clean equity, we would like to redirect to it from site B as to not loose equity from the content site B built;  The thought being to disassociate with the penalization of B, or at least lessen its blow and giving us a clean slate.

Thoughts?

Thank you for your response btw

[MonicaOConnor]

You will first need to remove the 301 redirect to site b, then add a redirect from b to a. If you don't remove the first redirect you will create a redirect loop and neither page will be visible.

How long has site b been up? I would say that making a change now is going to be confusing. If this change was done recently, within the last 3 months, you need more time to determine the benefits of site b. There is no overnight result, but the change was made initially for a reason right?

Depending on how long the 301 redirects have been in place, you could have trouble getting site a to rank again. The 301 redirects would have removed Site As URLs from the index, meaning you would be starting over, again. Aside from that, it will probably be very confusing for returning customers. They have already seen a change once, now they are going to have to make another adjustment. Those things would be my first two concerns.