301 redirect - how much damage has it done my client?

Putting this one out to the floor for advice.

Am doing some SEO work for a client and came across 3/4 additional domain names where they have been using a 301 redirect back to their original site.

My questions are:
- How much SEO damage will this have done the search rankings of their primary site?
- Once 301 redirect URLs are taken down, is there anything I can do to rebuild the damage done with Google?
- Any experiences you have of resubmitting a site to Google to reconsider would be good to hear.

Thanks!

 

Why do you think that damage was done? Has the money site been deindexed or has it lost rankings? Were the redirected sites spammy at one point? Were they penalized domains? What do the backlink profiles of the redirected domains look like?
I have used the 301 method to burn and churn in the past, so I have always had another money site ready to go once Google drops the money site due to the redirects. Never tried to get the site back afterwards. Might be less work and quicker to get the content removed from the index and re-use it on a new domain.

 

Thanks for the reply.

Aside from a poorly performing SERP for the primary website I've not yet got any evidence of delisting / penalties - more just a suspicion that the mirror sites are impacting on the primary site SERP due to bad practice.

There are three other domains. All are identical mirror sites, serving the same content as the primary site. Apologies, my original post has confused the issue by talking 301s when it's a mirror site issue. My bad.

Re: backlinks, two domains have zero backlinks, the third has 50-odd backlinks.

Your thoughts appreciated.

 

Its not a good idea to do 301 redirection to the original third party sources but go for temporary 302 or 307 as 301 will cause the deindexing of the pages and they will stop appearing in search results anymore.