Suggestions for a cost effective, SEO safe domain that was previously penalised

[doorguy88]

Hi, I will try to explain my situation as clearly as I can, and any positive advise would be greatly appreciated. Obviously please let me know if you have any questions but I'm sorry the domains are private.

I started by business 4 years ago and launched a website (site A) and worked hard to promote it in the best way I knew how. It brought in a good income for around 3 years but then was hit with some sort of google penalty/filter!

Knowing then what I know now would probably of avoided the problem altogether but that's another story...

So I brought another domain (site B) and started again with a new design and completely re-branded the company, and again have been working hard to promote it. It has been preforming well and there has been steady progress

However since then I have been steadily promoting the penalised site (site A) and keeping an eye on it to see if the penalty/filter may be lifted. It had initially lost around 75% of traffic, but recently has been doing much better in SERPS and is again on the increase.

My problem is that with my company now being completely re branded I want to keep consistency but (site A) looks old and dated compared the new one (site B) and I don’t want to be confusing users etc...

So I need a cost efficient and “safe” solution to this in terms of SEO and budget.

301 Redirect to site B

I thought of a 301 redirect “BUT” I'm concerned about the penalty/filter being passed onto the new site (site B) and have read this dose happen ?

Complete Redesign/brand for site A

This would probably be the best option except I'm limited on funds. I would need “another” full commerce site as its just way to much money at the moment.

Remove site A completely

Funds are tight and I'm still feeling the affects of the penalty so really can't afford to loose any traffic at all!

Use site A as a micro-site

I thought a micro site with just the main product landing pages being used. I would use the same design as site B, then re-write the text and then link everything to the new site. “BUT” I'm concerned about getting another penalty (duplicate) as all the anchor text links going to site B site would be identical!

EG. To use the same design as site B I would need to use the same layout etc including navbars, anchor text links in the footer etc.. and I'm worried this may trigger a duplicate content penalty ?

I hope there are some suggestion for my situation and thanks in advance for your help.

Thanks Chris.

[irvingw]

If you don't have the funds to do site A right you could create a landing page with safe navigation to the main site. That is if site A is getting most of it's traffic to the homepage, otherwise you will lose all of that internal page traffic.

I would not recommend redirecting a penalized site to a healthy site. Although if you think logically about it, if the bad karma is passed thru the redirect you could do negative SEO by pointing a hundred penalized spam sites to a healthy site and take it down so it seems too easy that way. Still I wouldn't redirect it.