Can penalties be passed via 301 redirect?
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I have a well established domain that's been hit with some penalties. It hasn't been nuked off the map, just downgraded, especially on short-tail, one word type queries. I'm planning on redirecting this domain to another well established domain. The domains already have a history of lots of interlinking and are very similar from a subject matter standpoint.
I feel that the penalized domain has been hit with an "over-optimization" of link anchor text penalty (I'm hoping it's algorithmic, but it could be manual). My question is if anyone has ever heard of a penalty like this being transferred to another domain through a 301 redirect. My hope is that the penalty just puts a cap on how much juice the redirect can pass, rather than transferring the penalty to the other domain itself.
Any thoughts on this?
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It's always so hard to get a straight answer on this. There isn't much in the way of an official one from Google (of course), and I've experienced what I think to be both results (penalty passed, and penalty not passed).
Personally, I think it has a lot to do with the penalty, etc.
More importantly though, why do you think it has been penalized. You mention that it hasn't completely lost visibility, but you've lost rankings. There are many things that can cause that.
First, I would check this vid to get a grasp on your situation:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-oh-i-got-a-penalty
If you still think you have a penalty it can be a bit tricky. Like I said, I constantly hear debates on this, and have anecdotedly seen both results. It's tough to test really.
I would take a step back and put the SEO goggles down. Ask yourself "How do I genuinely fix this situation?" Not the penalty itself, but the cause of the penalty. If you think a 301 is your best hope, then go for it.
As for actually redirecting the penalty, I don't think that's going to happen...unless you did something really naughty. Rather I think people 301 without fixing the underlying issues, and when they get penalized they assume that it was transferred via the redirect.
I'm pretty interested though. Let us know what happens/what you decide to do.
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Hi Josh,
To answer you questions,
I have some direct feedback from Google that I have links that look like they are designed to manipulate pagerank. And some of the pages that were hit particularly hard with targeted anchor text were ones that fell a greater amount than the rest of them.
To complicate the matter, the site was hit by the first iteration of Panda on 2/24 last year. It was not torched like some sites were, but fell a fair amount. It has recovered quite a bit on a lot of keywords...except for the short-tail vanity keywords that are doing worse.
So, I think the site is still a little pandalized, though it is hard to say, since this link penalty is likely having an impact...and I believe Google's increased emphasis on brand signals is part of the reason for decreased short tail rankings as well.
I'm making the changes to clean things up but this is a huge site with a lot of history and lots of links and it's not that easy to do quickly.
Also, part of the reason for the redirect is that Google is loving the domain that I'm redirecting to - it has higher rankings than ever across the board. I've always had the domains separate for technical reasons, but that situation is changing so now I have the option to combine them for the first time. So it's not "just" for SEO - it makes some sense for them to be together.
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Man, please don't sue me if this doesn't work, but I say go for it.
Think about it like this. What's to stop a competitor from getting a bunch of those links, wait til a site is penalized and then redirecting it to you? Nothing. It's unlikely I think, and quite the investment but it could happen, right?
Plus, if you're getting hit because your links look shotty to Google, then wouldn't a redirect to a well-established site help to curb that perception.
I vote do it. But seriously, let me know how it goes.
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I've talked to a couple people that have said that 301's will pass on the penalty. A better alternative would be to try move the links over to your new website in waves. If you experience a drop, then you know the link exists in that group. Just do some quick checks on their domain, and see what you find.
Of course, if you are working with 10,000+ links, your batches are going to have to be pretty large.
Then again, if you don't have more than a couple hundred, go through the various domains, and try to identify problematic links.
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In short - Yes it can
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im shocked by the people who think a penalty can be passed, definately do the redirect. You won't be passing the penalty. No point losing you're link juice. If your not going to redirect it at your site, PM me, i'l take the juice haha
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I've seen a bunch of these and weirdly, the 301s do seem to (often) remove the penalty in cases where it's a true penalty. However, what you're describing sounds like it could just be a negation of the value of many external links (which is much more common than the actual "penalty" that downgrades you).
If that's the case, 301'ing likely won't do much positive or negative - it will pass on the "juice" that Google's still counting and thinks is legit, but probably not the devalued juice (though, to be honest, I've seen a few times when it has and black hats sometimes do use this strategy - constantly re-pointing stuff as it gets hit). This certainly isn't recommended, as eventually, you will have that "burnt-to-the-ground" effect. If you're looking to go clean and white hat on a different domain, and want to take some of the content and link efforts you have in the penalized site, that's certainly a way to go.
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In my experience, penalties are not passed through a 301 redirect.
Think about how open this would be to abuse?? You get a domain blacklisted then just 301 redirect it to a competitor? It would be too easy for people to completely abuse that so I can't see, just on that practical level, how passing a penalty through a 301 redirect would ever be a consideration.
Where I have dealt with websites that have been penalised and have subsequently set up new domains and 301 redirected the old ones, I've never seen a penalty passed through that redirect.
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Since there are mixed opinions here, probably my short 'yes' didn't help, so here is my opinion, in little more details.
If 301s could ONLY pass juice but not penalty, wouldn't everyone try to get as many 301s as possible - ie. acquire dozens of sites, pay other webmasters to do 301s, etc? Think about it. In effect, the 301 would act as a 'paid' backlink except only more powerful and it would be much easier for everyone (with $) to game rankings.
If you still don't believe 301s can potentially pass a penalty, you can refer to this thread:
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4323639.htm -
Thanks for the input everyone. I probably will end up implementing the redirect, but not for a few more months, as it's going to take some serious preparation.
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Taking into account what your're saying here, one would then assume that inbound backlinks could never cause a penalty too - since competitors could do that intentionally as well? If Matt Cutts was reading this, he'd probably be all over you...
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I just went this route on Monday so I guess you can call me the lab rat.
I had a site ranking very well, and in the last 60 days with the latest panda and the penguin update it fell from page 1 with top 3 results for close to 50 money keywords to basically page 5 or below.
I am a photographer and was an engineer before so I love things that are technical like SEO. Before joining SEOMoz I did quite a few gray hat things that I learned from forums such as a ton of exact match anchor text on tons of irrelevant blogs, Senuke, forum profiles. Basically a ton of crap, but low and behold it worked and I ranked well until now. The problem was that I created such a huge mess with inbound links that it's impossible to clean it up. I have thousands of crummy irrelevant links (Rand would need to take me out behind the woodshed)
So what does all this have to do with a 301 redirect?
My old website was at the domain markandrewphotographer that I used the past three years (2008 to now). The good news is that when I started in photography full time in 2006 I used a domain markandrewphotography.com and in 2008 a branding consultant had me switch to the markandrewphotographer domain because it was more about me than the photography in attracting clients. (That was a big trend in out industry for a couple of years) I kept the old markandrewphotography domain as it had a page rank of 2 and did a site wide 301 to the markandrewphotographer domain.
This Monday I moved my site to the markandrewphotography domain and then decided to 301 the photographer.com domain that is penalized and we'll see what happens. The worst thing is I get the penalty passed and I can then just remove the 301 and slow work on changing the links cape of the site and then try again in a few months.
The markandrewphotography domain is a clean domain. It's almost 6 years old and has seven links. I will link using only white hat methods with this site within my niche. I started changing some of the inbound links yesterday on industry websites that I am listed such as weddingwire, marthastewart and that are considered authority sites. I plan on doing a few links a day and making sure that I use partial match anchor text and that my brand name keywords out number other keywords but a good margin, maybe 70% branded to 30% partial match.
I also wonder if I was outed by a competitor. The person ranking #1 for search terms like "boston wedding photographers" is a one man photography studio, but in opensiteexplorer her has 440,000 links?
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Thanks so much for sharing Mark! Examples like these are a gold mine for the rest of us (and good luck on moving from gray hat to white hat)
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It's working so far, but we'll see if the results hold true. I've been using the Copyblogger Scribe SEO wordpress plugin to make sure that my writing of posts and pages is natural and that keywords I'm trying to rank for are not over optimized.
| Keyword | | Current Rank | | Change |
| newport wedding photographer | 3 |
> 47 | |
| boston wedding photography | 4 | > 46 | |
| newport wedding photographers | 4 | > 46 | |
| boston wedding photographers | 5 | > 45 | |
| boston wedding photographer | 5 | > 45 | | -
3 weeks later and blamo! Dropped off the face of the earth. I think there is some negative penalty being passed from my old site to my new one.
I've been cleaning up the link profile of the old site, but many webmasters won't respond.
I'm at the point where I'm going to remove the 301 and set up a one page wordpress website on the old domain directing existing and past customer to the new site. Inelegant solution, but I can't think of anything else to do. Suggestion?
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3 weeks later and blamo! Dropped off the face of the earth. I think there is some negative penalty being passed from my old site to my new one.
I've been cleaning up the link profile of the old site, but many webmasters won't respond.
I'm at the point where I'm going to remove the 301 and set up a one page wordpress website on the old domain directing existing and past customer to the new site. Inelegant solution, but I can't think of anything else to do. Suggestion?
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Wow - amazing. That's a rarity indeed. I've seen only one other case (post-Penguin) where a 301 caused a penalty.
I think your inelegant solution is likely the right one, but definitely sucks.
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That's what I was thinking. A great one page wordpress site with some great content about wedding photography in New England.
Work on the linking issues and when I recover do the 301 to the new domain
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I would have to agree with Rand about the negation of value of the links vs the penalty. I just had a client we picked up who had a very polluted backlink profile and dropped off the face of the earth after Penguin. When we launched his newly designed site, we gave it a fresh domain name that retained his branding and 301'd his old site. So far it has worked beautifully and given us a fresh start.
I'm also in agreement that penalties passing through 301's is a can of worms for Google.....
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