301 Redirect domain with penalty

[Grumpy_Carl]

Wondering if I could get a few views on this please...

I have added an affiliate store to a domain I own, however I forgot to noindex the product pages which were duplicate content of the merchants. Despite a good deal of backlink building the site will not do much in the engines at all, doesn't even come up on the first few pages for it's own name!

This suggests to me that I have a duplicate content penalty. Try as I may I cannot get it removed so am thinking of cloning the domain to a new domain, however, I do not want to lose the links I collected so I am planning on 301ing them.

While I will not get all the link power moved over, I should at least get credit for some of them which will kick start the new domain.

Can anyone forsee any potential issues with doing this? Is there a danger of 301ing a site with a penalty that the penalty would be carried over? I know there is no penalty on the links, no WMT warnings etc, it is the content causing the issue.

Thanks,

Carl

[Grumpy_Carl]

Oops not sure how I ended up with a pound sign in the title

[MickEdwards]

If you 301 a toxic domain then the toxicity will pass on to the new domain.

The first thing to do is determine if there is an algorithmic penalty applied to the domain, which could relate to either content or the link profile.

[Grumpy_Carl]

Michael. thanks for the reply.

I'm 99% sure it is a duplicate content penalty. A couple of years back, through an old company, I used to run affiliate review sites which would get lots of datafeeds and build auto stores from them. These were very profitable until google clamped down on dup content, after that the sites wouldn't rank for anything.

The current site seems to be along the same lines, all seems ok for the links but it seems to have a minus x place penalty on it. I have no indexed all the affiliate pages on the new site (an oversight when making it) so, in time, I would expect the penalty to be removed, however cannot be sure if this will be weeks, months or never

[Rushmark]

Are you sure that it's a duplicate content issue?  There's some useful insight here:

http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-duplicate-content-wont-hurt-you-unless-it-is-spammy-167459

If you've been "link building" are you sure that it isn't a Penguin issue.

Alternatively, if the content is duplicate is may not be a penalty as such, might just be the case that Google is not indexing/returning the pages as it does not see any value to them?

Seen plenty of websites hit by Penguin (algorithm) with no warning or notice in WMT (manual ?).

Would agree with Michael that a 301 will almost certainly carry forward any penalty/bad reputation issues.

Chris.

[FedeEinhorn]

As Michael said, a 301 will carry the penalty to the new domain, if it didn't everyone would do it without actually fixing the issues.

Instead, take another approach, try to fix the issue. If it is an algorithmic penalty, once you fix everything you think could be causing the "penalty" (as you are not 100% sure), noindex the entire store or the pages using a meta tag or the robots.txt.

Are those pages within the same subdomain? domain.com/penalized-pages or is it a subdomain? penalized-pages.domain.com

[MarieHaynes]

It sounds like you are mostly concerned about the Panda algorithm.  A site with lots of duplicate content and nothing else of value other than the duplicate content could definitely be affected by Panda.  While it is true that redirecting a Penguin hit site to another will pass on the algorithmic issues to the new site, redirecting a Panda hit site really should not.  With that being said, it doesn't make sense to do a redirect.  If the issue was that you had page after page of non-original content then noindexing that content should do the trick.  The next time Google refreshes Panda (which is usually monthly) then you should be in the good books as far as Panda is concerned.  Putting the same content on a new domain, and noindexing the duplication wouldn't really work any better IMO.

However, you have to have good, useful content there in order to rank.  If all you've got is affiliate content that adds no unique value, then you're in trouble.

There are things other than Panda that can affect rankings though too.  You may want to look at your analytics data and sort it by Google organic traffic to see if you can pinpoint the day of your decline.  Then, compare that to known Panda/Penguin dates.

As mentioned by others, if you have been building links then you should look at the Penguin algorithm as well.