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Okay, first of all, I don't think penaltyis caused by the duplicate templates (just think of all the wordpress sites using the same template!!)

Possible reasons for the penalty:

• Duplicate content (spin articles much?)
• Low quality links (link farms? paid links?)

The reasons above might all contributes to the reason why your sites are penalised.

From the sound of things, it seems like you are doing some black hat stuff here, milking adsense and not providing unique and useful content to users. I am afraid this would not be a quick fix, it's hard to justify how your 270+ domains will become relevant and helpful resources overnight!

There are a lot of factors that might affect where you will rank once you do the redirect, such as the age of the website2 compare to website1, if you have the keywords in domain2 etc.

As redirect does not mean you will get all the value from website1 to website2.

Another thing you need to look into is whether the links you got for website2 are similar to website1 as Google will not pass value to twice.

In ideal situations if you have complete different linking profile, similar age etc, the second scenario will occur.

My ideal office:

• Pool table
• Large screen TV with sports on 247
• 3 monitors with top end computers (helps productivity)
• nice views
• lots of free snacks and drinks (fruit box!)

I guess it really comes down to what key phrase you are trying to rank, adding new pages with unique copy doesn't mean they will rank automatically, apart from onsite factors, you need to look into external factors as well, this includes building links to the new pages or taking advantage of social signals (if this applies to your industry).

To see whether there is any duplicate copy issue, I recommend using this http://www.copyscape.com, you can check whether there are any duplicate copy floating around on the net.

In regards to the flickr images, it really depends on the alt tag, how they describe the images, I don't think there is a problem using the same images on different pages with the same alt tags but if alt tags are all keywords, that might be a problem.

In regards to link building, my recommendation is to link to the page that would benefit users the most because apart from getting traffic in, I look into getting them to the most useful page to get them to convert, and I believe Google likes this more than just ranking the homepage. So if you find the "not-ranking" page beneficial to users, I would link to it and it will help get them indexed/ranking. One other thing you need to look into is the quality of the link, make sure it's relevant to your industry, because if they are just random links, Google might not pass value at all.

Hope this helps

New profile pages on any site (high DA or low DA) will also have a PA of 1 to start off with.

I believe that is not something you have to worry about as long as it's from a high authority trusted site

One thing you might want to look into is whether the link is a do-follow link or a no-follow link as Google don't follow no-follow link, if you are trying to rank in other search engines (such as yahoo), then it won't be too much of a concern

Hi Annemieke,

Looking at the websites you mentioned, they seem like paid links to me. This seems like a JC Penny scenario http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/business/13search.html where they got a lot of links with good anchor text. I strongly advise you not to go down this path, you can report this website using Google Webmaster Tools, this might help speed up the process for Google to find these links.

Clement

Hi there,

I am actually in the exact same situation as you are in for 2 of my clients, but they are doing a re-design not for conversion issues, but just updating the site and moving it to a cms.

I got the client to map out all the new pages so we can put all 301 redirects in place, especially for pages that will no longer exist, we make sure we point them to the right category page.

Also we try to contact as much of the webmasters from where we have links from as possible to point the links to the new url, because you don't want your links to lose value due to redirects.

Keep an eye on Google WMT after you made the migration to make sure no errors come out I guess, I don't see much issues with site migration if you can keep urls the same but you never know.