Can a move to a new domain (with 301's) shake off a google algorithm penalty

[Direct_Ram]

we have done everything under the sun using the holy grail of google guidelines to get our site back onto page 1 for our domain. we have recovered (penguin and panda) algorithm filters for keywords that were page 1 going to page 7 and now page 2.

its been 2 years and we cant hit page 1 again.

this is our final phase we cna think of.. do you thin kit will work if we move to a new domain. and how much traffic/rankings can we expect to lose in the short-term?

[Direct_Ram]

thanks appreciate for your help,

thanks

[MattAntonino]

You can temporarily 301 out of a penalized site but given that you said you've been trying to recover for a couple years, your recovery isn't "temporary" and the 301 will only hurt you long-term.

I would have a disavow/recovery professional take a look for you and come at it with fresh eyes. Get rid of any negative affect, build some positive authority to the site and you won't need to 301. You will lose long-term with that strategy without fixing the root of the problem.

[Direct_Ram]

Hi Eric

thanks for responding.. details are as below:

in 2010 our website was ranking number 1 for many keywords. we suddenly saw a crash in this a few years ago. we have since identified we have been hit by many shades of Panda and penguin updates. Mainly due to low quality back-links and poor content (some duplicates).

• since then we have done a major overhaul of our backlink profile. We have saved rankings that went from number 1 for many keywords to number 60 -70. We are now placed at around 11 to 18 rankings.
• We have also looked at our duplicate content issues, and removed all duplicate content, introduced a blog for fresh bi daily updates in an attempt to gain traffic. We also amalgamated many small low quality pages to larger higher quality content pages.
• we are now mobile friendly with a dynamic site, and our site speed is good (around 80).
• we have switched to https, and also upgraded our website for better conversions.
• we have looked at the technical issues of the site and don't have many major issues, although we do have 404's coming up in the google webmaster tools for old pages we removed due to duplicate content.
• we are link building at a pace of around 40 mentions a month. some are no follow, some do follow and some no links. We are diversifying links to include branding in addition to target keywords.
• We have pretty much exhausted every avenue we can think of now, but we cannot jump over to page 1 for any significant keywords we are targeting. Our competitor websites are not that powerful, and metrics are similar to ours if not lower.

1. please can you advise anything else you can think of that we should look at.

[Eric_Rohrback]

If you're still being impacted by a penalty (algorithmic) then I wouldn't 301 any URLs, since that would carry the penalty over. Did you get a manual warning in webmaster tools? Do you have specific dates of traffic drops that would line up with known algorithm updates? Kind of hard to diagnose without knowing the site or understanding traffic fluctuations, but if this is the last resort then you might want to think about starting a new site as a fall back. If you've bounced back from 7 to 2, there still could be hope you could make it to page 1 again but it will take some work. Do your competitors have better onsite optimization? Do they have higher quality links? If this is a local business, are you optimized on and off site?

There are still a lot of factors to consider before jumping to a new domain. Keep in mind that a new domain would be starting from scratch, and it will take just as long (if not longer) to see page one in a competitive market. I would only move domains if that is your absolute last resort.