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I can see why a penalty would transfer a penalty to a new domain, if in fact it's a new domain. It's a fresh domain with 0 history and 0 backlinks.

But, if the penalized domain was 301'd to an existing, already established website, that's the kind of situation where I don't see why it would make sense to transfer the penalty. That's where you can hurt competitors.

Google somehow managed to find several of our images index folders and decided to include them into their index. Example: websitesite.com/category/images/ is what you'll see when doing a site:website.com search.

So, I have two-part question:

1) Does this hurt our site's ability to rank in any way?
Because all Google sees is just a directory listing page with a bunch of links to images in the folder.

2) If there could be any negative effect, what is the best way to get these folders out of Google's index?
I could block via robots.txt, but I'm afraid it will also block all the images in that folder from being indexed in Google image search. I could also turn off directory listing in cpanel / htaccess, but then that gives is a 403 forbidden. Will this hurt the site in anyway and would it prevent Google from indexing the images in the directory?

Thanks,
Tony

I'm having the same issues with the SEOMoz crawler.. but with a gallery featuring 15 thumbnails for each page. I'm wondering if Google is also seeing all of the gallery pages as duplicate content... The site that hosts the gallery was hit by the 2nd Panda update. The gallery is a small section of the site.. the rest has unique articles.

I can see why a penalty would transfer a penalty to a new domain, if in fact it's a new domain. It's a fresh domain with 0 history and 0 backlinks.

But, if the penalized domain was 301'd to an existing, already established website, that's the kind of situation where I don't see why it would make sense to transfer the penalty. That's where you can hurt competitors.