Can 301 redirecting deindexed sites cause Google to penalize the target site?

Hello,

I have a question about a fairly unique situation, but I'll provide some background information first. I know someone who was awarded ownership of hundreds of domains via a court order a few years ago. Prior to being awarded ownership, he had successfully petitioned the Court to force Google to remove all of the domains from its index. (Google immediately sent notification of its removal action to the "Chilling Effects" website for publication online.) So, he suddenly found himself with ownership of hundreds of sites that were now deindexed in Google. Because he didn't deem it worthwhile to pay for design and SEO for hundreds of sites that would never receive any more traffic from Google, he decided to use 301 redirects to forward all of the many, many backlinks from those hundreds of domains to the home page of his 11-year-old, main site in the same industry. Almost all of the backlink anchors are "exact match" in nature and completely relevant to the target site, by the way.

Here's my question:
Can redirecting many hundreds of exact-match backlinks from domains that Google removed in response to a court order several years ago be the cause of the target site's recent loss of home page ranking for all major keywords for which it had ranked highly for over a decade?

 

Simple answer is yes.

If the domains were de-indexed via google there is a good change they were basically banned. Doing a 301 will cause problems as you are pointing banned domains to a new domain and thus passing a penalty across as well.

However you could go down the route of asking for a re-inclusion via Webmaster Tools to get the penalty removed from said domains. Providing the domains were not banned as they were doing something very dodgy Google may (may as getting a response from Google can be a challenge in itself) lift the ban meaning you can use the older domains again.

 

OK, but is a domain that has been deindexed due to a Court Order as "toxic" (for forwarding purposes) as a domain that was deindexed due to spamming or duplicate content?

 

I think, it is beneficial, if you do 301 redirect, which is SEO friendly and permanent redirect.

Have you found anywhere ban links shouldn't be 301-redirected?

 

I doubt anyone can say for certain but I would personally think that the domain would of still had a penalty in order to remove it from the index. Best bet would be to add some content to said domain and do a re-inclusion request via webmaster tools then wait. If the site starts to index and rank for a few keywords you know the domain is fine again and you can just redirect to a different domain.

Long way to go about it but rather be sure there is no issues rather than chance it and bugger up another domain.