Change domain whilst under a partial manual links penalty

[Ham1979]

Hi there

We're currently under a manual penalty for some unnatural links to our domain and have been working on fixing that but had our first re-consideration request rejected so we're doing a second round of link removals

The issue we have is that we were planning to change our domain before the SSL certificate expires in a couple of weeks and renew the certificate with the new domain but are unsure whether to stop working on the reconsideration request, change the domain and wait until the manual penalty moves to the new domain before continuing the link removal.

Alternatively try and use the domain change to select which links are 301'd to the new site and leave behind the bad links in the hope that the manual penalty wouldn't be applied to the new domain

Any thoughts or advice would be appreciated

[JaneCopland]

Hi there,

Unfortunately I think you will be lucky to escape the penalty being moved to the new domain, no matter whether you are selective with which URLs you 301 or not. Our understanding is that the penalty will be transferred with the 301 of the domain.

It would be preferable to resolve the penalty before the domain move takes place, but if you really can't wait to change the domain in line with the SSL certificate, you're best advised to keep working on the reconsideration / link removal process continuously to try and have it removed as soon as possible. The more links you can remove, the higher the likelihood that your request will be successful. As I mentioned earlier, unfortunately I doubt that the new domain will escape the penalty. As such, you're better off continuing with the efforts while the domain move takes place.

When you submit the next reconsideration request, consider including the information that you have changed domain names for business purposes and you understand that this is not a tool to escape the penalty.

Basically, Google wants to see real evidence that you've put a lot of effort into link removal. It always seems that the more effort that can be put in and demonstrated, the quicker you can get a reconsideration request approved.

Cheers,

Jane