Sudden drop in Rankings after 301 redirect

[praveen439]

Greetings to Moz Community.

Couple of months back, I have redirected my old blog to a new URL with 301 redirect because of spammy links pointed to my old blog.

I have transfer all the posts manually, changed the permalink structure and 301 redirected every individual URL. All the ranking were boosted within couple of weeks and regained the traffic.

After a month I have observed, the links pointed to old site are showing up in Webmaster Tools for the new domain. I was shocked (no previous experience) and again Disavowed all links.

Today, all the positions went down for new domain.

My questions are:

1. Did the Disavow tool worked this time with new domain? All the links pointed to old domain were devaluated? Is this the reason for ranking drop? Or

2. 301 Old domain with Unnatural links causes the issue?

3. Removing 301 will help to regain few keyword positions?

I'm taking this as a case study. Already removed the 301 redirect. Looking for solid discussion.Thanks.

[seovp]

Hi,

There have been cases were redirecting a domain that has been affected by an algorithmic penalty to a new domain has affected the new domain negatively.

Removing the 301 could remove the negative affect of the old domain, but any good links you have that point to the old domain will need to be changed to the new domain, so you still benefit from the good work you've done in the past.

You may also want to ensure that all of the links that are not in the disavow file are quality links and natural as there could be some that have slipped the net.

Regards

[Paddy_Moogan]

Hi there,

I've seen and heard a few examples similar to yours where someone has tried to remove a Google penalty by redirecting to a new domain. In most cases, it hasn't really worked and as you've described, it seems to take a bit of time for the negative links to the old domain to take effect on the new one. If you think about it from Google's perspective, this makes sense. If you could just remove a penalty by moving to a new domain and doing a redirect, then that would be far too easy in most cases.

If I were going to move to a new domain in order to escape a penalty, I think I'd probably not redirect the old pages and manually attempt to realign any good links I had so that they pointed at the new site. But this would definitely be a last resort, I'd rather do as much link removal and disavow as possible before trying to move to a new domain.

Cheers.

Paddy