Changing domain name and site design while recovering from penguin? Still SEO power in EMDs?

[MyOwnSEO]

Our website recently suffered from a penguin update courtesy of some black hat techniques used by an SEO company we hired a few years ago.  We are working on cleaning up and disavowing the old spammy links, but at the same time this penalty has hit us while we were working on making some major changes to our website.

As a law firm we have 2 separate practice websites we are planning to merge under 1 domain to help boost our local results.  Our problem is that the domain names for each practice are specific to the type of law they practice, so we will have to move both practices to a branded name domain that works for both practices.

I thought since traffic was already affected because of the penguin update this might be an opportune time to change the domain name, but since I am far from an expert at SEO I'm wondering if there are variables I am unaware of that might make this decision a very bad one.

Also we currently have exact match domains for our two different sites -- the way I understand it EMDs don't carry the same SEO weight they once did, but the firm is worried that losing the EMDs is going to cause a dramatic drop in traffic.  If we keep the EMDs but permanently redirect them to the new site, will it maintain their SEO value?  Would google consider that black hat and possibly penalize us for it in the future?

Thanks for any advice or insight!!

[paints-n-design]

What I realized last years, EMDs still have a lot of power. But when my clients changed to a branded Domain, the loss was not that big, as I expected. Mostly 3 month after changing the rankings where back. But thats just what I saw in europe in 4 or 5 cases..

[ImprezzioMarketing]

The good thing about EMDs is that sometimes (not always) they rank well for one specific query (the one that matches the domain) but unless they have all the other factors in place, they rank for nothing else. I had a client who was a lawyer who had multiple sites and the negatives way outweighed the positives.

If you're recovering from Penguin you might want to have a professional who specializes in this look at your site. I've seen cases where people disavowing links wrong had the opposite effect they were looking for (made them drop even further) because it wasn't done right. My recommendation would be Marie Haynes.

Most lawyer searches on Google show Google Places results first. How does your site rank in that section?

I read this article recently and I think it might be helpful: https://lawyerist.com/66919/stop-using-location-practice-area-attorney/

[JVRudnick]

Yup....Marie knows her Penguin stuff for sure...would highly recommend this Canuck!

[gfiorelli1]

A part what the others wrote, I would not recommend to redirect the old penalized websites (if they were penalized) to the new domain, because the penalization will be transferred to it.

What I'd do was to update the good backlinks from the old EMDs to the new domain, asking the owners of the "good" sites to do it.