Do Google Penalties Always Follow a Redirects to New Domains?
-
I have a couple sites that were penalized by Google for hosting content that made Google look bad. After a major newspaper showcased what was going on they suddenly took a major hit as if someone at Google flipped a switch and told their system not to rank the content for anything other than their brand names. The article made Google look bad because the newspaper highlighted a lot of unverified user generated accusations the reporters assumed not to be true in the context of "these accusations are mostly false, but they still show up on the first page when people search Google."
I was thinking one way to fight this would simply be to host the content at a different domain, but I am concerned about the new domain being penalized as well. I don't want to completely shut down all of the original sites because some of them have brand recognition. The oldest domain is 12 years old with backlinks from several news outlets which is why the content ranked so well, but after the penalty that is only the case on Bing.
I've read various articles about this tactic. Some say that you will almost always pass the penalty to the new domain if you do a 301 redirect, but the penalties at issue in those articles were for things like buying links or other black hat tactics. This is somewhat different in that I wasn't doing anything black hat, they just decided not to let the site rank for political reasons. I was hoping that maybe that type of penalty wouldn't follow it, but right now I am leaning towards simply creating a second site to syndicate articles. It will need to attribute the articles to their sources though, so they will need either no followed links or possibly a redirection script that bots cannot follow.
I would really like it if I could simply change the first site to its .net or .org equivalent and 301 everything though.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Changing domain and transferring SEO power to new.
hi, i have a website with some pages index in google on first page. i want to change the domain name but also want to keep the old domain. How can i transfer the index pages SEO power to new domains pages? So the new domain page can appear instead of old domain. 301 redirect will permanently redirect the user to new domain but i want to keep the old domain running for users only, not for Search engines. any idea. please share. thanks.
Technical SEO | | green.h0 -
Is repurposing an old sub domain better than creating a new sub domain?
We have a good sub domain like** art.ourwebsite.com** which currently sells custom canvas art. We have owned the domain since 2013 but it has only been live for the past few weeks. We want to redesign & repurpose the page to continue to sell custom canvas art but will eventually include other merchandise like mugs, tshirts, etc which wouldn't be custom. Would it be best to keep art.ourwebsite.com since is a shorter/more memorible & older sub domain or would it be best to update the name to something that encompasses our new products? Our marketing team has suggested yourart.ourwebsite.com
Technical SEO | | sb10301 -
Why Google ranks a page with Meta Robots: NO INDEX, NO FOLLOW?
Hi guys, I was playing with the new OSE when I found out a weird thing: if you Google "performing arts school london" you will see w w w . mountview . org. uk at the 3rd position. The point is that page has "Meta Robots: NO INDEX, NO FOLLOW", why Google indexed it? Here you can see the robots.txt allows Google to index the URL but not the content, in article they also say the meta robots tag will properly avoid Google from indexing the URL either. Apparently, in my case that page is the only one has the tag "NO INDEX, NO FOLLOW", but it's the home page. so I said to myself: OK, perhaps they have just changed that tag therefore Google needs time to re-crawl that page and de-index following the no index tag. How long do you think it will take to don't see that page indexed? Do you think it will effect the whole website, as I suppose if you have that tag on your home page (the root domain) you will lose a lot of links' juice - it's totally unnatural a backlinks profile without links to a root domain? Cheers, Pierpaolo
Technical SEO | | madcow780 -
Undo a 301 or Starting New Domain?
Hi Guys & Gals, I have a question I'd appreciate your input on. Quick History
Technical SEO | | Nobody1560986989723
When I first started in web design it was just me and a couple of clients. I had a website based on my name on the domain moxby.org.uk. The only 'SEO' work done on it was a bit of on-site work, various links based on forum and blog activity I was involved in (genuine involvement not crappy link building) and of course, building websites with a credit in the footer. When we got serious about the business we considered and finally put in place a new website, new branding and 301'd old URLs to their shiny new location on the new domain: _summitweb.net _(put in place about 12 months ago) Ranks were pretty much maintained and until recently we ranked well locally (still figuring the fallout from the last week or so's changes). The Question I would like to build a personal website, well I'm going to anyway. But as it's a personal/showcase website I need a personal URL for it and my natural choice would be my old url moxby.org.uk. However it is not that simple because summitweb.net is benefitting from redirected links and I don't want to harm our business' rankings just to reclaim a personal URL. So... is there benefit or would it be to my detriment to undo the 301 and build a website on moxby.org.uk or would it, in fact, just make more sense to buy a new domain and have a clean slate?0 -
Prospective new client it by webspam looking for new resource
Background:
Technical SEO | | tcmktg
Prospective client recently hit by webspam update. (I have verified hundreds of low-quality links, porn links, backlink exchanges etc.) They want us to step in and remove bad links and start over. Question:
What is the best way to examine all the links to determine which need to be removed? We can create the report from open site, but how can we identify the bad links? Here are the site metrics. 5000+ linking domains, so in this example we need to research the 5000 links, and possibly send notifications to thousands of webmasters to remove the links? Open site states about 25,000 total links, but root links are shown below. Yikes. Domain Authority 75
External Followed Links 112,000
Total External Links 115,000
Total Links 150,000,
Followed Linking Root Domains 3,900
Total Linking Root Domains 5,300
Linking C Blocks 2,7000 -
301 redirect domain to page on another domain
Hi, If I wanted to do a 301 permanent redirect on a domain to a page on another domain will this cause any problems? Lets say I have 4 domains (all indexed with content), I decide to create a new domain with 4 pages, one for each domain. I copy the content from the old domains to the relevant page on the new domain and set it live. At the same time as setting the new site live I do a 301 permanent redirect on the 4 domains to the relevant pages on the new domain. What happens if Google indexes the new site before visiting the redirected domains, could this cause a duplicate content penalty? Cheers
Technical SEO | | activitysuper0 -
Redirecting an Old Domain
One of my clients has a newish e-commerce website that was just redesigned. Part of this new marketing push is shutting down an old yahoo store. The problem is that this old store's domain has a 10 year old link in DMoz and is there fore in about 200 other directories. Is pointing that old domain at the new website going to be enough to keep all of that link juice flowing?
Technical SEO | | Simple_Machines0 -
How to Redirect only specific pages to new domain
My HTACCESS FILE IS AS FOLLOWS: rewriteengine on
Technical SEO | | askthetrainer
rewritecond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mydomain.com$
rewriterule ^mydomain/(.*)$ "http://www.mydomain.com/$1" [R=301,L] #4d864805b49b5 I want to move ONLY specific pages from this domain to a new domain How do I edit my HTACCESS (which redirects http:// to www.) to move specific pages from old domain (which I have to delete) to new domain.... I.e. http://mydomaon.com/move.html needs to move to http://mynewdomain.com/move.html Where i can delete the original domains0