Agree with Zakaria, hang in there, My niche was exactly the same, i tried to compete doing as the bad guys were and got penalised. thankfully im back on track, not where i was but traffic is steady.

If its any consolation I see the the spammy sites come and go, however the white hat sites are still there or about's .

Keep things real and don't cut corners you will get your rewards.

One thing i have noticed as that some sites can get away with a mixed bag of links, but my advice is don't gamble, do it right and reap the rewards

Good Luck

Hi Kyle

Submitted a site map originally,  Google can see and has indexed all the current pages and visits regularly, however non of the authority has been pushed over yet, not even all the PR..

Just must be super unlucky

I am really tempted to revert back, but i have had some extremely busy bot activity since i turned on those internal URLs for a few days as posted by

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/uncrawled-301s-a-quick-fix-for-when-relaunches-go-too-well

Although this image says humans they seem to be bots, the blue is current and the red line is last month so something is going on but not sure yet

Ill await another week then make a decision

Many thanks for taking the time to respond,

current-visitors.jpg

@ Billy

Thank you for responding

The link profile is not good in fact i have not linked to this new site that much as i wanted to see where i was before i embarked on a strategic plan of action, because i did not get much time i employed a third party to start a facebook and social media for me opposed to the linking however they thought they were doing me a favour by added random links.

I have many more than what you can see but most i have removed, i reported those to Google and showed them what i have done and they confirmed there was no manual penalty holding me back (no manual actions)

but i thought the 301 should push most of the link juice over from the old and that has not happened

I may just have to face facts that the 301 is not going to pass the juice over

but what my real question is why and where is the PR from the home page, there has to be an issue because the PR has gone to many inner pages but not the home

I thought like you did that im caught up in an algorithmic penalty but that wont pull PR from the home page and let inner pages have their page rank

Thanks

Done pretty much everything i can think of.

the content is identical to the old site as i just changed names  everything else including site structure is identical, the old site is totally removed from the Index (which only finished around 3 weeks ago (17k page site)

Had many of links changed over .. PR has updated  many of the inner pages but the home page is still a PR1, down From a 4 and if you copy text from any of the pages it wont show in Google search

This to me says i have an issue, but what that issue is i do not know, i had a problem a few years back where i missed the Http:// from an internal link and somehow Google had interpreted that as a 301, i fixed that and PR and rankings returned within 48 hours. this seems awfully similar and checking for this throws up nothing.

Also open site explorer still has the old site at a PA of 60 my new url at 42 with hardly any of the links moving over, so its just not Google slow or cannot read the 301 correctly

Header responses are what they should be so little lost on this one

Ill give it to the next  Link update which is the 11th and if not much else changed then ill remove the 301, but i was hoping there was something stopping me from ranking opposed to just bad luck

Hi

Im Looking at reversing a 301 i did 5 months ago, I originally changed names of a site for reasons where the site was going to be split into 2 where part of the site i would run and the other where i would get my business partner to run it

However since the 301 i have lost 80% of traffic and cannot find the reason as to what especially as everything looks perfect except the rankings, to put it into context 150 keywords i was tracking all were page 5 and below with 40% being page 1

Now only 7 from that same 150 are in the top 10 pages (First 100 results), The issue i have must be very rare as i have posted for help with little or no response, which tells me that the kind people who have looked could not see any issues as this is normally a very helpful community (below is the last thread i asked for help)

http://www.seomoz.org/q/301-redirect-how-to-get-those-juices-flowing

So 5 months on i am considering removing the 301 and hoping that some kind of normality returns by reinstating the old URL

So my question is that is what im about to do wise, do i have any options, is this something you have done in the past if so how did you get on

Thanks in advance

HI Guys

Following on from my previous posts i have still not got my rankings back,

http://www.seomoz.org/q/301-redirect-have-no-ranking

i am beginning to think that i do have a underlying issue in the site which is restricting me

My old site www.economyleasinguk.co.uk was moved to www.economy-car-leasing.co.uk, as mentioned the 301 seemed to go really well and all pages updated within 48 hours, however over 5 months on and the juice from the old site is still not pushed over and i hardly rank at all for anything.

here are a list of things i have tried

1:Swapped the original 301 which was PHP for an Htaccess

2: added canonical tag to all pages

3: Turned on internal links as per this post by Everett Sizemore http://www.seomoz.org/blog/uncrawled-301s-a-quick-fix-for-when-relaunches-go-too-well

number 3 was only done 5 days ago and initially bot traffic was immense, and may need a bit more time to see any results.

I still think i have another underlying issue due to the below reasons

1: Page rank on home page is one but inner pages mixture of 1,  2 and 3 sporadically

2: If I copy text from home page no results

3: Open site explorer still has the old site at with a PA of 60 compared to 42 for the new site

4: Checked server logs and Google is visiting old site

5: Header responses are all correct for the canonicals and see no chaining of the 301’s

6: All pages are do follow and no robots restrictions

7: site:has only in the last few days removed the old site from the index naturally

it could be that its just a matter of time however 5 months for a 301 is a very long time and 80% traffic loss is immense

I would really appreciate it if someone can give the site a once over and see if i have missed anything obvious.

Thanks in advance

Its a myth, as what would stop anyone posting spam comments on a blog to help it rank, just search the web 1000's of sites with 1000's of comments

However im going back to the original answer i gave , if you have a very well written content that people are visiting and commenting on then yes Google and the other search engines will follow this and see all the activity which would be a good thing which could increase your authority and then hopefully your rankings, then you hope someone shares your post (which will attract a few links)

Do it right and then the rewards will follow, any tricks are short lived and will catch up with you in time

Well if your site is worthy of a link you will get the links, if its just a run of the mill site then your correct no one will link to you unless you have something of worth for them, and that could be excellent content

High PR wont do anything for you at this stage so why the urgency ?

Have you thought about sponsoring a site, taking advertising out on some selected sites, even guest blog if your content is up for it.

Don't concentrate on trying to manipulate Page Rank, instead concentrate on getting unique quality content added to your site, content that will encourage people to link to you and this my friend will increase your page rank naturally.

But in answer to your question get some links from High Pr sites linking to you that will increase page rank too.

Hi Patrick

Thanks for responding

I still have no rankings 80% down, its 14 weeks since i implemented the 301 and some of the inner pages are ranking (Therese are a lot lower than when we did the 301) however the home page even if i copy a line of text wont bring up my site.

The original 301 went textbook style and everything looked perfect, but rankings did not follow and all we did was a straightforward name change

My developer insisted on doing this in PHP however most his functions and he states when i asked him for the code "The 301 on the new site is integrated into the application and has dependences on other functions, which in turn will have dependences on other functions, which would basically mean handing over a substantial amount of code. Potentially most of the application"

So basically on the outside i am 100% convinced that the 301 is chaining somewhere causing me a problem, so i am going to change both old and new sites for htaccess

I currently have this single line on the old site

RewriteEngine on RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.newdomain.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L]

Originally tried the below but got an internal 500 error (ps any reason why that would give me a internal server error) as below would have been my preferred code

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^olddomain.com$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.olddomain.com$
RewriteRule (.*)$ http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

I think really what i need is the answer to is what do i put on the old site which is on server 1 is it just a single line 301

and on the new site which is dealing with the canonicals and removal of trailing slash

The original issue came when i changed URL name, and it was only the crawler that brought to light that i could not crawl the non www. version of my site (even though it is the www. version i wanted to crawl because the crawler should have gave a message that the site is 301 to the ww,

. version but it said page unavailable, however doing it on a colleagues site which had been correctly 301'd gave a message that the site had moved do you want to crawl the current or the new page ... so the crawl test will pick up on a 301 if implemented correctly

Hope that made sense

Guys

Another post by me in regard to a 301 redirect which follows on from this post here

http://www.seomoz.org/q/seomoz-crawl-test

To quickly summarise all i have done is change URL name and done a simple 301 to change name where respective urls form old go to the relevant new pages

Ok Now 14 weeks since we implemented our 301, Originally done In PHP everything looked text book but still 80% down on rankings PR has returned to inner pages Home page has not updated

After some advice from some of the members here i changed the 301 on the old domain name from PHP to Htaccess

This is the code i used on the old server is below

RewriteEngine on RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.newsite.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L]

On the new site the canonical is fixed by PHP , i want to change this to Htaccess, capturing the canonical element along with removing the trailing slash (This is only what has been done in the past so just keeping consistant)

This is the situation

Old site sits on a different server from the new so each have their own individual I.P addresses

I am convinced somewhere in the PHP application we are chaining so want Htaccess on old server to do the 301 and want htaccess on new server to deal with canonical elements and remove trailing slash (if that best practice)

What would be the best way to do this where we wont be chaining 301's

at present all looks perfect and doing what it should, but i know there is an issue and i believe it to be with the php script

Thanks for taking the time to look

Paul

Ps where i had the issue on the old site where Crawl test said page don't exist i now have on the new site if i try and crawl the non www. version of the new site , tested on a site that has the htaccess 301 in place and get the option of crawling the old or the new page so something don't stack up so its not the tool its the PHP

Fetch as Googlebot and every other tool reports the correct header responses

It's so hard to tell whats natural and what's not in Google's eyes, i think the rule of thumb here is, if you have paid someone to do link building for you question those links and start there, also look out of poor directory submissions too (there are some good directorys) however you know the ones i mean.

Download the links in WMT and start there,

It's an absolute pain in the backside as you will never know what links your removing and how Google views them

Make a Google doc's account, list every single link you can find, Visit every single one of those links and catalogue what has been done, if its been removed note is has been removed , if you have requested the removal note that down too so in your next reconsideration request Google can see you have been actively trying to resolve the issues, and don't forget to link in that Google doc

If you have used a 3rd party who's is getting your link building for you be honest and name them, if you know you have done wrong apologise and tell them it will never happen again,

Never say its a competitor as that is very highly unlikely, you may have 1000's of links so good luck and it wont be easy,

Hi Robert

Htaccess uploaded, however the code you provided i think was relying on the sites sitting on the same I.P where in fact they are on different servers with different a I.P

so only the bottom line was needed , if we put your code up all looked good but some tools reported 403

Site explorer and site crawler now see the site as 301. so fingers crossed

Just need google to visit the old site and see the change and its not been there for ages , ill just ping it and add it to twitter or something

Im sure i can do that for you, especially if your doing it for the good of education and science ..

If you mail me through the site your mail address ill let you have the analytic s too, so as you can see the visitors and the improvements and if all works well it should be a good graph as im currently around 60-70% short of what i had before

This is assuming that what i have already is actually wrong but would make a great topic for some

Thanks Robert

Thats just a straight forward htaccess 301, makes sense to keep it simple

Again thank you for taking the time in getting back to me

I will get you a version of the 301 As soon as i can to see

Me and my developer had a debate whilst doing this and as he is the expert he kind of won but i still question his thinking

What he did was only send over clean URL's from the old site he insisted on sorting out the canonicalization of the URL along with lower and upper case before the URL was sent so in theory on both servers you have a 301 , we know they are not chaining but if the new site has a 301 capable of resolving any bad URL's that come our way , why have it on both

I wanted just the minimum with less chance for anything to go wrong

If you were doing a name change for a site would you do as Robert Fisher suggests above and do this on a URL to URL basis or would you just do the header response 301 as in your example.

as i do see the benefit in both, but just really need this fixing as business is at an all time low right now

Wow

That's really kind of you, i have trouble getting hold of my developer on the weekend so good luck

Many thanks again for your help

Hi Robert

Many thanks for taking the time to answer

It was just a domain name change

What we did was a URL Change where all the relevant URLS got to their new names in just a couple of lines of code Like in Ians example, I cant post the code yet as its the weekend and my developer is not working

You state i should have done this URL to URL however the sites has 17k pages

I Know In Open site explorer it sees the 301 however when you use the crawl test tool it does not and this is what maid me ask this question again and its that which bothers me the most

My site prior had a DA of 68 and PA of 62 (but even if you check the pages in Google Pr for the home page is showing 1 where it used to be 4 but the inner pages are between 2 and 3 so it just seems the home page is suffering

Guys

I really have an issue that i know have but cannot see if that makes sense.

Basically 3 months ago i did a site wide 301 from economyleasinguk.co.uk to www.economy-car-leasing.co.uk

Every thing looks good get all the correct header responses , all canonicals work perfectly , Google webmaster tools is updated fetch as google bot shows the old site is 301

I tried the seomoz crawl test today on the old domain and got this message

Oh no! Looks like the page you were trying to access is temporarily down

which at first thought ok because the site was not there it wont do it on an old 301 domain, however i tried it on a domain i know has just been 301'd and i got this message

The URL http://www.site1.com/ redirects to http://site2.com/. Do you want to crawl http://site2.com/ instead?
Would you like to:
Continue with www.site1.com
Continue with site2.com

I really do not know what to do, its either the redirect script is missing something however its doing what it should or the server is a problem but again its doing what it should so why would SEOMOZ not be able to crawl the old URL like it example site above.

Now the strange thing is Open Site Explorer does see the 301 and asks if i want to check the new URL instead

Ps the redirect is done using PHP redirect which i am asking him to change to a htaccess as its now on a apache server and was wondering if this could be an issue, all pages go to correct pages as requested

Thanks in Advance

I do tend to agree the quality In Google has gone downhill, I blogged about this In March after the latest Panda, there have been so many updates it looks like Google has lost its core reason for being the best search engine out there

I predicted that profits from Google would rise from those last updates as you have genuine businesses that were doing ok on Google demoted to the nether regions to be replaced by garbage sites, non relevant sites or massive brands like Amazon

These business now have to buy their traffic or go under, the same will happen to these garbage sites that have been promoted to the first page their revenue will rise whilst they are there, they will employ more staff to help cope, Google will fix whats currently broken and then cycle continues

Just search for SEO UK , have a look at the backlinks , total manipulation yet been promoted to top spot, the company's earnings have been 10 fold since it's promotion

Hi craig

There is loads you can do, first off get some text on the home page, image only pages do not tend to rank very well

Change titles, you do not need to have your domain name in the title if you are looking to be found lets say the example you gave then a tiltle like

<title><span>Edinburgh Kitchen Fitters, Designers Of </span>Q</span><span><span>uality Kitchens Scotland</span></span><span></title> (each page must be different to rank for its contents)

you need to add a description

As your using word press download the SEO all in Plugin this will help add these Meta Titles, descriptions and help with some other On page SEO elements for you

Just by doing the above there is no reason you wont make page 1 in your local area the competition is fairly low.

Also use the Blog and get some content written regularly, and publish that and article here and there on your own site could do well, or utilise the blog as a diary of current installations, i know a bathroom company that does that and they got all their links from people following and publishing his before and after images and that was enough for them to dominate their local area and booking work out for 6-8 weeks in advance

Good luck the site looks nice but needs content

If the content is followed then yes they will count this, as how will Google know what is a comment and what is not

Its a great way of creating content just be careful you vet what people write as you dont want that content full of foul language and lost of external linking

Good luck i just hope you can keep up with the spammers

I dont think there is a right or wrong answer, except don't do the spam

Some of the best links i ever had i got from a 1 man band and cost me $400 for around 100 links, there were some great gems in there, I have also paid a well established company 10X that fee and got not much more than spam.

• Personally I would go with a bit of a mixture, try some guest blogging, really don't have to be actual blogs but you could approach company's for a link in return for some great content
• You could hire a virtual assistant for $400 per month but do vet anything they will do for you before they do it
• You could submit some great articles or content to your own site and hope they will get linked to

Again all depends on your niche and is such a hard question to ask, if your in the insurance market then 4-5k per month if your a local business then no more than 1k even less

If i have read correctly then i would not have let the old pages over to the new site just to 404 them, also never redirect a whole site to the index

Have you thought about 301 the important pages to their closest match on the new domain, rather than just push all the old site to the index push them to the closest match possible so as you don't waste any of the old link juice.

How long ago did you do the 301?

also noticed hardly any of the new pages have more than 1 or 2 word in the titles,

Is it not possible to rank your contact page for Denver seems like the most obvious place.

I have seen sites with locations based on every page and they seem to be getting away with it, however with the way Google is working its hard to say what they are thinking or what they may do in the future

I don't think it is going to hurt your site as long as it reads well and the way you described them above it looks just fine, however do they really need to be on every page put them on the most relevant page.

Paul

As long as the pages are there it should not be a problem, especially if your just keeping the blog updated, i personally would not link to any page unless its finished.

But to keep a blog updated may not be a bad thing and just add the pages when your ready

It may be a good idea to start the site small with like a home page , contact page and you blog and then add the new directory as you go as not to confuse the search engines

Post your URL , you will have a lot more chance of people responding, as its hard to see without looking at the site and running a few tests

I quite like the new look,

its the first time i viewed the site and the colours look great

you have the email down the right hand side i cannot read it , you need to change the colours, it also looks like you have Google analytics installed twice

I also see many links with the same anchor pointing to different pages, just search hypertension why send the same keyword to different pages, could explain some ranking drops as Google wont know what page to favour for those links, and there are better ways to distribute the sites internal linking

Do you really need 3 forms on one page for a newsletter sign up ?

Other than that great job

And Good luck for the future

Kind of answered my own question to a point

The encoding of a = sign converts to %3D (no idea why SEOMOZ is picking this up on its crawl, the 301 is being done by my htaccess because its an upper case D the 301 it 301's  the upper case to lower case then to a 404 page which is not good, i have fixed this but still wonder why SEOMOZ is seeing the %3D instead of an = sign

It certainly wont harm you having non UK sites linking to you, a lot of the wrong sites may harm you as long as the sites are varied you should have no issues.

If you can find some relevant UK links based around you theme these could do really well for you, but certainly don't discount any link as long as its deemed natural and not a link just for the sake of another link.

HI

SEOmoz has finished crawling the site and surprised me with nearly 4k of 301's

all the 301 are on my deal pages

Example of the 301

http://www.economy-car-leasing.co.uk/van-leasing-deals/ford/transit-lease/transit-lwb-el-minibus-diesel-rwd-high-roof-17-seater-tdci-135ps%3D586165

as you can see from the above URL it returns a 404 but the URL is actually sent as below

http://www.economy-car-leasing.co.uk/van-leasing-deals/ford/transit-lease/transit-lwb-el-minibus-diesel-rwd-high-roof-17-seater-tdci-135ps=586165

For some reason SEOmoz crawler is converting the = to %3d and reporting its a 301 even though it returns 404

Is this an error on SEOMOZ part ? or is there an error on my site

Googlebot when i do a fetch as Google bot returns all on with the = sign and every other tool i have tried is ok too

so not sure why SEOMOZ is seeing it different and then adding the URL as a 301

I am hoping this is just a glitch on the report tool part as im struggling since a recent site 301

HI Doug

Posted twice on this subject and the other 2 are here http://www.seomoz.org/q/301-redirect-how-long-until-the-juice-passes-through-to-new-site

I have checked server logs and response headers and everything looks absolutely correct, not used screaming frog but have used Xeno

I have been complaining for now 10 weeks that i have no traffic since i did the 301, and as i said im only reporting on the new site now which n theory should be 301 clean, except the canonical element part

I am now convinced there is a issue as otherwise the crawl from SEOmoz would not pick up those redirects,

Hi Guys

Posting here again in regard to 301 redirects, SEOMOZ has just finished my second crawl, and its showing me nearly 4k 301 redirects, i am only tracking my new site which by the way changed domain name , however all im doing is tracking the new domain and there are no 301 implemented on that side (Except Canonical), so was wondering how SEOMoz is finding 4k of redirects.

do you think it could be chaining somewhere ? as all the tests look good or could there be a problem with the reporting

Its the same for SEO UK, the number 1 site there is just a spam site with 1000;s of pages all created for local searches and all pointing back at them.

Its a shambles at the moment the quality of the web is going downhill  however, Googles last quarter results are up and i suppose to them it shows they are going in the right direction.

Surly Google can see all of this its not quality any-more

Thanks for the replys

@Billy

What i mean by old content wont move, all we have done is change the URL name of the site the new site is a mirror of the old site with all the correct 301's going to the mirrored pages,

Although  all the new site is indexed fully, there are around 100 pages of the old site left no important pages just some really deep linked pages which is normal i think.

My ranking is not ok, it was on the old domain but not the new i am down at least 85% compared to site now and the site as it was.

@CleverPhD

Thanks for the feedback 6 month wait is not what i was hoping but if that what it takes then so be it i just needed a figure to work too, hopefully the site will start to rank again soon

Hi Guys,

Following on from a question i asked last week in regard to a 301 http://www.seomoz.org/q/301-redirect-have-no-ranking

I was thinking that i had some kind of issue on the site, although i have gone over it with a fine tooth comb i cannot find any issue's and from the amount of reads the thread has had im sure if there was something obvious it would have been pointed out.

So i am quite confident the 301 from site A to site B is fine and working as intended, so my question is how long should it take until the juice is passed From site A to Site B as its 9 weeks now and still down 85% on traffic and even text for my home page if copied into the search bar don't bring up my site

Bing is fine and did not see any real traffic drops but Google is not giving me back the rankings i had prior

Whenever i have done a 301 before the rankings pretty steady and i see no real loss in rankings but this time ... painful

all changes in WMT made
Canonical tag implemented
all Pages 301 and correct 200 response from the targeted page
Sitemap Updated
Many Links Changed from Old site to new (including DMOZ)
no Robots text Blocking directory's 
Google crawling freely and regularly

The strange thing is New content is indexed immediately and ranks easily, I added a page for my service in my local area and went straight to position 5 in Google however old existing content wont move, I tracked 150 keywords only 4 are top 75

Don't know what else to do  so any advice would be much appreciated

PS site is around 17k pages

Paul

I think if you look hard enough you will find bad links to every site, as you never got an original message i would assume its an algorithmic penalty.

And yes by changing page content and varying your anchor text on new links can make a big difference, Google are clever in a way they word their messages and you will never know if its manual action taken unless they specifically say so.

I have worked with many people who have 301 a site for whatever reason and although i would not call myself an expert i am quite familiar with what i do.

In the UK there was a big SEO company that got the unnatural links message and then they had a drop of around -50 to -150 places created a new URL and recovered their rankings.

This same company who had many many clients also used this practice on their customers (the one's that stuck with them that is) and at the beginning  all were successful because the time spent correcting any issues was taken and links replaced

After a while they got complacent and would just 301 sites that they had spammed which took a drop in rankings and at first all seemed good, then after a few weeks they would drop, these were the sites that were caught in penguin or panda and did not resolve the out lying issue's be it over optimisation, thin content or just the fact that the links pointing to the site were devalued resulting in a loss of ranking juice.  once they addressed these issues (not removing links) the sites returned to a decent level higher than the original site after the penalty.

As i mentioned in the earlier post if a penalty could be passed through a 301 it would be easy to point at a competitor,

I do suppose its going to be one of those questions that in near on impossible to prove 100% and no real credible source is going to exist they are just going to be examples like mine, but i have seen it with my own eyes,

You may be looking at different data centres, or it could be on your pc/laptop you could have web history enabled, it wont be one set of ranking per device

Use the most relevant page for each keyword.

If you want to target any keyword make a page or tweak a page that is its closest match (that is if the page is not being ranked for anything else.

people make the mistake these days of trying to rank too many keywords for a single page.

Think about it the pages you create should be designed and posted around the user, each page Title, Description, H1 should be different, from the 4 pages i looked at on your site you are targeting the same keyword on 3 of the 4 different pages your kind of self cannibalising those keywords, Google is a little unsure what is the page it should be ranking for.

Plus the Birmingham page has very little text, and its out ranking the home page

add around 200 words to that page targeting that keyword and you will see a big improvement

Good Luck

Hi Guys wonder if you can help

my site www.economy-car-leasing.co.uk has just been 301 from www.economyleasinguk.co.uk

The reason for the move is the site is going to be structured for both cars and vans separately

we did the 301 around 8 weeks ago and initially we thought everything went well, all the new site was indexed within 24 hours, we updated WMT

on the old site we monitored around 150 keywords many were top 10 in Google 99% were top 5 pages

However 8 weeks on we do not rank for hardly anything, i have confirmed all the redirects are working, we have 200 ok from the home page and all the other canonical pages return 301

we just implemented the canonical tag to all pages.

we did factor that we will get some down time but not 8 weeks worth, i have done a 301 on this scale before with no real loss of rankings (Different site)

Really tempted to put the old site back however its not what i want to do, Bing seems to have picked up on the change really well but im thinking Google just needs time

The change looks like its done perfectly and everything is working as it should however it looks like that none of the original rankings or juice has been pushed over from Google yet and im wondering how long does it typically take to get the site ranking again

site have gone from 17k unique s per month to less than 2k

Paul

I Just searched that term here in the UK and i don't see any sites with that many pages in the UK, so you may be looking at custom searches, clear your browsing history and try again,

If the site that i did see come up around 4 times is you then, the reason for this is most of the pages have pretty much the same titles and descriptions with just very few words different

Rank Each page different than means content , titles and descriptions i am sure then you will see a big difference

The penalty wont pass through a 301 and that's 100% , however if you have Panda or Penguin issues that are not cleared before you 301 the site then the algorithmic penalty will picked up.

If a site had a penalty and was passed, then all i would do is 301 my penalised site to my competitor , As Mark Higgins who responded in this thread has done a 301 and all initially ok but i bet there are issues and would like to see the timeline of of drop after the initial 301