Same Branding, Same Followers, New Domain After Penalty... Your Opinion Please

[Immanuel]

I'm interested to see what you will do in regards to redirecting the visitors to the new address. We're going trough a similar process at the moment where we are replacing the current site which was hit with panda and penguin updates to a new branded domain although with a new design and new content. Would placing a message asking visitors to visit your new address with a no-follow link do the trick?

[Bondara]

Redirecting the old website would worry me, it wouldn't surprise me if you redirected the problem along with it.

I would do what you suggested, modal popup with something like 'Hey, we have built a bigger, better website just for you' then block the url pointing out in the robots.txt file.

But that's just me.

[Bondara]

No-Follow will stop PR passing through but the bot will still go through.

You need to block the bot from going through using your robots.txt file.

[sbrault74]

In theory, using a no-follow link would do the trick. However, looking at the list of backlinks from my GWT account, I also see lots of no-follow links, don't ask me why.

So in that regards, I would rather avoid any kind of hyperlink association between the two sites. I mean, if that fails, my $5000 domain name is screwed so I'm not taking any chances.

[sbrault74]

What about website structure? Would it be better to start off with a completely new layout and navigation to avoid duplicate content issues?

[sbrault74]

There's also some content that's highly valuable on the original website. Suppose I wanted to transfer this content to the new website, how about setting it to "noindex" on the original website and once it's out of G's index, I'd publish it to the new website.

Does that makes sense or would it get me another slap from Google?

[sbrault74]

How about redirecting visitors from the original site to the new one using Javascript?

[Mike.Goracke]

As far as structure is concerned, having the same layout and navigation will not get you into duplicate content troubles. Have the same content will.

[Mike.Goracke]

I guess I would suggest you don't.

Hidden text and links: "Hiding text or links in your content to manipulate Google’s search rankings can be seen as deceptive and is a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines."

[Bondara]

I would just rewrite the outbound url to look like sub folder so abc(dot)com/visit and then block the sub folder /visit in the robots.txt file.

I may even run a really good competition and try to suck the users up into a email list so when the time is right, expose the other site.

Its a tough one because you can't indicate the move to another url to Google so it's like starting again but at least you have a few lists and some traffic to the old site.

[Carson-Ward]

You have some great responses here. To summarize some of the advice and add a little new advice, this is what I would do:

• Display a text warning at the top of the site that the site has moved. I'd not worry about the text somehow contaminating the new domain.
• Keep the old site running, and try to get the penalties removed on the side.
• Noindex (or delete, if it's not important to the user) all the content that you want to keep but has few links, then move it to the new site.
• If the penalty is lifted, redirect the old site over to the new site's counterpart. Still, don't 301 redirect pages with low-quality content or spammy links. (You can just kill the pages that are "all bad" now.)

The only question left is what to do with the content you want to keep and has with clean external links. You could probably redirect and cut the internal links without too much risk, which is what I'd do. The completely safe thing to do would be to avoid linking altogether, leaving it out there to gather what traffic it can.

Good luck!