301 redirect after penalty to domain which currently 301 to the penalised domain

[artdivision]

Hello all,

As I have mentioned in another Q&A, one of our new clients got hit by manual penalty. I checked their link profile and there was a lot of black hat involved. Long story sort, I submitted a reconsiderationr equest which was not enough as it seems 99,9% of his links are bad links. We took the decision to move a newly launched web site from www.websitename.com to www.website-name.com with the latter being an old domain name with good authority and clean link profile.

The problem is that at the moment the www.website-name.com is set to 301 redirect to www.websitename.com and what we want to do now is take the web site off www.websitename.com and launch (not 301 as we dont want to pass the penalty to the clean domain) it to www.website-name.com. What is the best practise for this particular case and are there any things i should pay attention to?

I would appreciate your advise!

[KarlBantleman]

The first thing to consider is what type of penalty the website got hit by, if it was Penguin and 99.9% links built were spam then you can leave all your links and just take the content. If it was Panda then you can't even take your content and place it on the new/old website because you'd still get found. If it was both then don't even bother redirecting anything!

I'd question the importance of the website to any business if it wasn't worth spending time on finding ALL the spam links and fixing the penalty. The reconsideration request can take a while, you may have to submit 3 or 4 requests before it gets lifted. I know this can take a considerable amount of time, effort and money but it's got to be worth it to get the business back on the right footing. Put yourself in Google's shoes, they deal with these requests every day and have got a back log so if they see ONE link that looks spammy, then they aren't going to lift the penalty. Someone is going to have to sit down and look at your link profile manually!

If the www.websitename.com has bad links and poor content, then why 301 it? I know you are doing it for the customers but you could just put a banner on the homepage saying you've moved to www.website-name.com.

[artdivision]

Hello karl and thanks for the feedback, much appreciated mate!

The reason we wanted to redirect is purely for customer experience, this is a site with 10,000 visits per day. The web site was hit with manual penalty and I am right now on the second reconsideration request.

Allow to give a bit more details.

The website when launched bought 2 domains.

www.website.com and www.web-site.com with "website" being the brand's name.

Previous SEO guy uploaded 2 different versions, dont ask me why, I have no idea why. Few months ago they decided to take down www.web-site.com and redirect it to www.website.com so link juice and bookmarks would land people to one version  of the web site.

Now that the www.website.com got penalised, for brand purposes they want to use www.web-site.com  So my 2 questions are:

1. Is this safe considering that www.web-site.com redirects all this time to the penalised www.website.com ?

2. What if I set **302 redirects **instead of 301 from www.website.com to the www.web-site.com until the penalty is lifted? Or even an iframe?

Kind Regards and thanks a million

iframe, 302 redirect

[evolvingSEO]

Hi There

Karl's answer was fantastic - and I just want to emphasize as well - if this is decently strong brand I would put some more effort into recovering from the manual penalty. As tedious as this can be, if it was just a "churn and burn" site I'd say just axe it and re-build.

But go to Keyword Planner - how much brand search volume does the company receive? Try [brand] [brand.com] [www.brand.com] etc - if this number is at least in the hundreds or thousands of brand searches a month, I'd work to remove that penalty and let the brand signals help you recover. Also, does the main site receive a lot of direct traffic? It just sounds like if you can get the penalty lifted it will be an easier recovery than just some exact match domain that's not really a brand.

-Dan