If I have 6 or 7 domains that point to a main site why should Google penalize me? After all google has gogle, gooogle, googlee, ect. all pointing to Google.
This is news to me. Let me see if I get this right. For example if I have a domain on youtube that redirects to my main domain that I would somehow have my main site penalized by google.
I think google don't penalize your main site... google will penalize all those 6-7 domains pointing to your site. COZ.. we can't control incoming links (as google also knows )
Few months ago, I 301'ed four domains to a single domain.. and whoa!! I was penalized. I didn't do this with wrong intentions.
Assuming you use something like this in your apache config: <VirtualHost> Servername www.maindomain.com Serveralias www.alias1.com Serveralias www.anotheralias.net Serveralias www.yetanotheralias.org ... </VirtualHost> Code (markup): You may find yourself in hot water. Thats what someone might do who wants to get PageRank the cheap way, e.g. for pushing the resell value of a grabbed domain. Also, of course this can be used for building linkfarms and linkselling is something Google is not fond of at all. In fact, it is even a reportable offense, since bought links are a big threat to Google's business model: You rank higher in SERP the more inbound links you can collect. In theory, people would link to you if you provide great content. Unfortunately, they also link to you, if you provide great money, which means SERP can be deluded and people would stop using Google, if the highest ranking pages are not the most relevant ones. Last but not least: Having a lot of URLs pointing to the same content could be used to push competitors out of the market. Just consider you want to corner a market segment. You provide fairly good content, which gets a high SERP ranking. Now you alias your content with the result of all pages ranking lower then you will be pushed back. Now consider the user experience for Google's customers, if an entire SERP is just filled with your aliased content.
what is this method about? don't people that want to try to achieve what you are saying just use 301 redirects on completely different servers, and for that they would get no penalty at all?
Ok I don't mean anything complicated like blackonyx is saying. I just mean a simple 301 redirect from a registrar like godaddy to a site hosted on a non-godaddy site.
Why does google punish you for redirects? I thought only parents or tutors can punish you, but sounds really funny from a search engine... though I know you meant penalize you and that can be corrected with appropriate redirects.
I had several of my sites get slammed for this. I had used a footer that said my sites were all part of the same network and apparently that didn't go over so well at Google. All of sites were thrown out of the index (after having first page rankings!) and it took me over a year to get just one of them back! My advise, better safe than sorry. Don't ever cross link your own sites.
I really doubt that your site was penalizer for 301, maybe you link spam this domains or other issues, but Google don't penalize for 301 redirect, in fact Matt Cutts recommend using 301's, check the "Moving to a different domain" section hxxp://www.mattcutts.com/blog/moving-to-a-new-web-host/