Link Farms and The Relationship between 2 domain with a 301 Redirect

[KateZDCA]

I have an interesting scenario:

Domain A was worked on by a disreputable SEO company off shore. The owner of Domain A came to me for my assistance and evaluation on how the off shore company was doing. I concluded that he should terminate the relationship immediately. One of the bad things they did was register Domain A with a LOT of link farms.

I started working on a new site that eventually we decided to go with Domain B (a better, but totally related domain name to Domain A). I added a nice new site and had my client write clean, relevant information for it. We've done all legitimate, above ground by-google's-recommendation SEO for Domain B.

I have a series of 301 redirects from Domain A to Domain B. Since April 24th, organic search results have plummeted. I see many incoming links via Webmaster Tools as the massive link farms, but those link farms have Domain A in their databases, not Domain B.

My question: is Domain B inheriting the link juice from Domain A insofar as the incoming links are showing up in Webmaster Tools as directly related to Domain A? Should I sever the ties with Domain A altogether?

Thanks.

[RyanKent]

Hello Kate,

In my opinion, yes you should stop the redirects from Domain A to Domain B. Google has been cracking down on manipulative links recently and many sites have been penalized as a direct result of manipulative links.

My recommendation would be to disable the redirect then try to determine if your site has been manually penalized. If the site has not received a manual penalty, your rankings should be restored in a month.

[JustDucky]

@ Ryan :  Have you actually observed 301 redirects associated with transferring content to a new domain result in a penalty against the new site ?

I ask because one of the potential Pennguin recovery strategies is to transfer the best content on the old (penalized) site to a new site and start afresh.  Part of the plan is to use 301 redirects so that G does not mistake the pages transferred to the new site as duplicating what G believes is still on the old (penalized) site.

I understand that G may do whatever it arbitrarily wants to its algo.  For those of us with large (long tail) sites, creating a new site from scratch to protect our sites from further algo changes may not be the correct choice unless there is already a penalty that you described.

By the way, if penalties do pass through a 301, some of us have suddenly valuable domains available for sale to the ethically challenged. (LOLZ)

[KateZDCA]

Hi there --

Ok, so both of you make good points. The reason I'm accusing Domain A is that I'm seeing incoming links in webmaster tools (tho not in my SEOmoz interface, strangely enough) to Domain B, however when I go to the backlinked sites I see Domain A listed.

I was of your opinion, JustDucky, until last week.

Kate

[RyanKent]

Rand replies on this topic here: http://www.seomoz.org/q/can-penalties-be-passed-via-301-redirect

There is not much more I can add. I would love to find the time to perform some experiments and see results first hand.

My best guess is some penalties will pass while others will not. This variance would be logical and explain the mixes results which are reported. Some people seem convinced one way or the other. For example, a penalty based on manipulative links would be passed since those links are now pointing at the new site. A penalty based on manipulative on page tactics would not be passed if those tactics are not used on the new site.