Should I Forward Niche Site To Main Domain?

[inhouseseo]

I have a niche site that was hit by penguin. I was never hit with a manual penalty, but it is obvious the algo update hit the site. I have submitted a disavow file, but it doesn't seem to have made an impact. The site does have good rankings on Yahoo and Bing.

Should I close this site and 301 to the category page on my main site (i.e tshirts.com forwarded to mainsite.com/tshirts.html)?

The main site had a drop after penguin, but is now receiving more traffic than pre-Penguin. The impact is mainly keyword specific (i.e keywords that appeared in anchor text dropped).

Appreciate thoughts.

[DennisSeymour]

It usually take a long time for the disavow to kick in. Takes me up till the next major update usually.

I would not recommend 301'ing the old domain until I see signs of improvements (usually, a big bump in webmaster tools "impressions" change, since the penalty drops you to almost nothing, is good enough of a sign for me to take the next step)

[MoosaHemani]

If this not really a manual penalty then disavow will take a long time and seeing the rankings nad traffic back will take months. The reason I will suggest not to 301 to the sub category of the main site is because if it was really under the red light, it will hurt the main site as well instead of helping it.

What you ideally should do is to make sure you disavow all the bad links, now create some high quality links to different part so the website and see if this help you with rankings and traffic. One you see the rankings and traffic is recovered, then if you want 301 is a safe bet.

Hope this helps!