I had been working on a site for a number of months before I realised that the domain had an idnefinite penalty in Google due to what previous owners of the domain had used it for (I was unaware of this when I was building the site). Therefore I received no traffic, even though I had obtained a decent amount of quality links. I submitted a reinclusion request, but the domain was still penalised, and I don't really have time to wait for it to recover. I decided to take the site off the penalised domain and set it up on a new one afresh. However, my concern now is duplicate content, as around 15 pages of the old site are still indexed (even though the pages are no longer there). The problem is this... Do I 301 the old pages to the new domain and avoid a duplicate content error, but then risk carrying the old domain's penalty over to the new site? Or do I not 301 the old pages to avoid letting google know that it is essentially the same site on a new domain, but then risk the duplicate content penalty? I am really not sure what to do. Any help would be much appreciated.
i suggest you to create a robots file in the penalized domain, to tell google "dont include this domain in your search engine" to avoid duplicated content. if you dont know how to use a robots file, search it in google.
how can you be certain you've accrued a penalty? Are you sure there isn't any life in the old domain? Technically you'd think a 301 couldn't pass on a penalty otherwise people would just knock their competitors down all the time. I'd go ahead an 301 the domain, but just make sure not to link back to it or have any other tangible association, otherwise you could be in trouble.
I agree with T_Media. Just 301 redirect each page to its respective new pages and you should be alright.
If you are going to move the site, then move it clean. Do not do any redirect. Just run both sites in parallen until the new site gets indexed the first time. Then shut down the old site completely. If not, Google will think there is a tie between the two sites. Bad old site = bad new site. It is just to much work to gamble. Just start over.