Changing url to recover from algorythmic penalty

[EndeR-]

Hello,

If I think that a website was hit algorithmically, I would like to buy a new domain name and publish all the content from the first website there. I will take the first site down and this one would be the only one this content.

Will Google see that it's the same content than a penalized website posted before and will penalize the new domain name even though it has 0 links pointing to it?

Regards.

[GaryVictory]

Hi

Before you do anything, you need to specifically find out why you have been penalised?

[GaryVictory]

You may not know that that if you take your website and move it to a completely 'new domain' but you have not redirected the old domain to the new, that Google may also pass along the penalty without redirecting the URLs.

If you have a website site with a 'penalty' I strongly advise you to find out exactly what it is first.  If you are going to take the site and simply move it to a new domain, like you say, even without using site migration tools or setting up essential redirects, Google may or probably will in most cases figure out it was you and pass along the unwanted penalty juice.

[MarieHaynes]

This is probably not going to work well for you.

If you've been affected adversely by the Panda algorithm, then Panda is all about the content on your site.  If you take the same site and move it to a new domain then the same issues are there and the same demotion is going to happen.  You might rank well for a month or so and then when Panda refreshes you'd be back where you started.

If Penguin is the issue, then the problem is with links.  If you move to a new domain you're starting fresh with no links.  However, if the content is all the same then Google will usually apply an invisible canonical and apply all of the links from the old site to the new site.  You'll see something in WMT that says, "via this intermediate link" when this happens.  As such, the demotion that came along with having the bad links will affect the new site the next time that Penguin refreshes.

[JaneCopland]

Marie is correct - this is unlikely to work unless you are VERY careful to not let Google know that the websites are connected, as they're partial to transferring penalties from one site to another if you try to get rid of a penalty by starting a new, identical website. Simply redirecting a penalised site is a trick that used to work back in 2009, 2010 (you don't mention redirection, but it's worth noting that this used to work, so if you see it mentioned online it's probably old information).

Even if you do not redirect the old site, Google may still recognise that the content is identical to a website it previously penalised, especially if all the new site's registration information, hosting, template, etc. is the same as the old site.

That's not for sure - you may get away with doing this if there are no ties between the old, penalised site and the new site, but using identical content is a big give-away.

Assuming that your penalty was links-related, the safest way to do this is to remove the old site's content, wait until Google cache the old site with the content gone (so the content is completely out of the index), take the site down and re-publish on the new domain. That said, Google's ability to remember what it has seen before could result in the scenario Marie describes.