Old site penalised, we moved: Shall we cut loose from the old site. It's curently 301 to new site.

[SolveWebMedia]

Hi,

We had a site with many bad links pointing to it (.co.uk). It was knocked from the SERPS.

We tried to manually ask webmasters to remove links.Then submitted a Disavow and a recon request.

We have since moved the site to a new URL (.com) about a year ago. As the company needed it's customer to find them still. We 301 redirected the .co.uk to the .com

There are still lots of bad links pointing to the .co.uk.

The questions are:

#1 Do we stop the 301 redirect from .co.uk to .com now? The .co.uk is not showing in the rankings. We could  have a basic holding page on the .co.uk with 'we have moved' (No link). Or just switch it off.

#2 If we keep the .co.uk 301 to the .com, shall we upload disavow to .com webmasters tools or .co.uk webmasters tools. I ask this because someone else had uploaded the .co.uk's disavow list of spam links to the .com webmasters tools. Is this bad?

Thanks in advance for any advise or insight!

[Lumina]

Without seeing the data in detail, I'd have to give a pretty general answer: If your old site has a poor DA, been penalized, or is itself spammy, then having it redirect to a new site is only one step better than just staying on the old site. When you redirect, you're passing link-juice from website A to website B; both bad and good. It's the same reason why you disavow bad links in the first place, though in this case, the redirect is at least under your control.

Anything that points to your new site factors in its overall stats. It sounds like your old site is hindering your attempt to break away from the bad links. My recommendation would be to cut the redirect, and only reinstall the redirect when you've cleaned up website A.

[Carson-Ward]

1. Just to add to this, I'd look at the backlink profile and see the ratio of good to bad. If it's nothing but terrible links, I'd kill the 301 redirect. Though honestly at this point any damage that's done has probably already been done. Do you see any notice of penalty in WMT? If so definitely kill the 301. If not, and there are some good links, probably just move forward. If there are any pages with particularly good/bad ratios, you can do page-level redirects rather than domain-level redirects.

If you have no reason to believe you're under penalty, it's probably best to simply move forward. Try to have the worst of the worst removed, build or re-build links to the .com, and work on getting legitimate links going forward. It's all very hard to say without looking at the site or the links, but hopefully this is helpful.

2. Keep the disavow on the .com as long as spammy links are still more-or-less pointing (albeit through a 301) to your site.