Hi there, I got two websites that are related to sports and I want to close one of them but I have a bunch of good articles there that I paid for and I dont really want to "lose" them.Could I transfer the articles without being punished ? and what is the best method ? Thank you !
This is fine to do. Once the content is deindexed from google it won't be considered duplicate content.
First restrict your site (which you want to close) for Google to crawl and wait for one week to ten days, now check your site in Google.. whether it is listing in Google or not, when it do not shows any link to the site then you can add those same articles in new site. This wont create any problem for duplicate content..
And why don't you just do a 301 redirection? From site A be sure to redirect to Site B.. If this was your idea!!
Google shared step by step tutorial about "How to move your content to a new location" at here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.in/2012/04/how-to-move-your-content-to-new.html It may be helpful for you.
I've done this and I was not negatively affected. Here's how I did it - Step1:Saved all the articles on site 1 (site that is being shut down). Step2: Since both sites were blogs, I continued creating content for site 2 as well as adding in the saved articles from site 1.