I would like to hear some advanced/experienced opinions on options for migrating a site of about 600 pages to a new domain. In my early days of learning SEO, I did some very dumb stuff and got a google penalty on a very valuable site I have. Niche is law, PR4 site with many interior PR4 pages. I have done all the recommended steps to remove the google penalty, it's been over a year and a half, and I just figure I'll start over with a new domain, I figure I can move the whole site in about an hour. And, with what I know now, I can As much as I hate to start over, my rankings are just never going to get out of the 40s for anything in google. In Yahoo, I have a few dozen pages on page 1 for some long tail phrases. Questions: -If I do a 301 redirect to a new domain, will the penalty follow the pages, or does the penalty simply stay with the old domain? -Regarding duplicate content, if I take the old site down on the same day I put the new site up, is google going to trigger some duplicate content penalty? Can/Should I just do a robots.txt file and tell google to stop indexing the old site, or does the 301 take care of that?
This is a difficult issue to deal with and I'm not sure if anyone here will have a definite answer for you. A lot of people on this forum have a similar page 5-6 penalty and most of them don't know how to get out of it either. I am in this situation for some of my thin affiliate websites. I am just being patient and I am going to work at adding more and more unique content. I also plan on diversifying my link profile to get more high quality links. I honestly don't know if the penalty would transfer over to a new domain if you do a 301. Theoretically you would think it would transfer over since you are transferring over the same link profile. I'm not even sure if you can properly salvage the content. As long as Google has those old pages indexed and/or cached, I think you would stand a chance of running into duplicate content issues. Unfortunately your best bet probably is starting with a completely clean slate. Perhaps someone else has experience with salvaging a penalized domain.
since 301 redirect passess the link juice, it is logical to think that it will pass the penalty as well. regarding duplicate content, you can use noindex robot tag on your old site which will take care of the issue over time.
Guys, very helpful and thoughtful answers...I am going forward with a new domain--this time with no shortcuts... I think what I'll do is use the "URL remove" tool in Google/webmasters and then turn on the new site...
I dealt with this before. Just purchase a new domain and redirect it to your old one, then promote your new one. This is the simplest method and no the new domain will not be penalized or pass the same PR. I have a .info (new) and a .com (old), the .com is penalized and has PR 0, the .info now shows up in SEs like normal and is PR 4. I just have them both going to the same root folder instead of forwarding to same domain name.