Google penalized site--307/302 redirect to new site-- Via intermediate link—New Site Ranking Gone..?

[Robdob2013]

Hi,

I have a site that google had placed a manual link penalty on, let’s call this our
company site.  We tried and tried to get the penalty removed, and finally gave up and purchased another name.  It was our understanding that we could safely use either a 302 or 307 temporary redirect in order to redirect people from our old domain to our new one..  We put this into place several months and everything seemed to be going along well. Several days ago I noticed that our root domain name had dropped for our selected keyword from position 9 to position 65.  Upon looking into our GWT under “Links to Your site” , I have found many, many, many links which were pointed to our old google penalized domain name to our new root domain name each of this links had a sub heading “Via this intermediate link -> Our Old Domain Google Penalized Domain Name”

In light of all of this going on, I have removed the 307/302 redirect, have brought the
old penalized site back which now consists of a basic “we’ve moved page” which is linked to our new site using a rel=’nofollow’

I am hoping that

-1- Our new domain has probably not received a manual penalty and is most likely now
received some sort of algorithmic penalty, and that as these “intermediate links” will soon disappear because I’m no longer doing the 302/307 from the old sight to the new.

Do you think this is the case now or that I now have a new manual penalty place on the new
domain name..

I would very much appreciate any comments and/or suggestions as to what I should or can do to get this fixed.

I need to still keep the old domain name as this address has already been printed on business cards many, many years ago..

Also on a side note some of the sub pages of the new root domain are still ranking very
well, it’s only the root domain that is now racking awfully..

Thanks,

[LawyerlyKit]

Out of interest, why did you decide to go with a 302 or 307 instead of a 301? 302s are extremely dodgy these days as they signify "redirect for unspecified reason" as opposed to "temporary redirect" as they used to.

If it's an algorithmic penalty it should correct itself if you change the redirect to a 301 (moved permanently) after some time. If it's manual, do the same and put a request in for it to be removed, but be aware that Google will do very little if it turns out to be algorithmic rather than manual.

[Robdob2013]

Hi,

thank you for the reply,  from what I have read it appears that there is a good change that a manual penalty will pass over using a 301 ( moved permanently ), this is the reason I never used it..

Are you saying this is not the case?

Thanks,

[LawyerlyKit]

You're LESS likely to see penalties passed on with 301s than other types of redirects, but it tends to depend how egregious Google determined your original penalty was. Rand chipped in on a discussion on a similar topic here:

http://www.seomoz.org/q/can-penalties-be-passed-via-301-redirect

[Robdob2013]

I have resurrected a one page version of the old penalized site, now it is just a moved too, with one button on it linking to the new site, encoded with nofollow.

my sub pages of my new site are ranking well for some other keywords, and in all cases ranking better then the root page is for its main keyword, so I'm assuming that the root page is the only one on the site being held back.  When I look in google web master tools "Sites Linking to your Site" the only thing that appears out of wack is the enormous amount "Intermediate Links" that were created from the 302/307 from my old site to new site..  I am really hoping that if I reduce this that the new site will go to where it should naturally be.  If not then I guess I have no choice but to file a reconsideration request..

wow what a pain,  What are you thoughts..

Thanks,