Using hreflang on multiple domains when one has been penalized

[Serpstone]

Hi,

I have two sites. One is a new .co.uk site which contains duplicate information to a .ie site.

Currently, if I do a search for the company name in Google.co.uk it returns the .ie site. The .co.uk site needs some localisation done and some links (really is brand new).

I was going to place hreflang tags as follows on both sites:-

The order would flip for the .co.uk site from the above order.

However, just to make things interesting, the .ie site was hit by Penguin and it hasn't recovered yet (and won't recover for another few months while I fix the issues).

So the question is, what should I do?  Do I go ahead an let Google know for sure that these sites are linked despite one of them having been penalized? Or do I let Google think that there is a .co.uk site with duplicate content to another .ie site?

[gazzerman1]

I have conformation directly from Google's John Mueller that this is not a problem and the penalty will NOT pass between domains with hreflang.