Site Penalized - 301 Redirect Question
-
Hello,
We have a website that was penalized roughly two years by Google for "Unnatural Links"...
We are experiencing a lot of problems with this site, completely unrelated to the penalty or SERPS, and we're debating doing a 301 Re-direct to another site we own that is totally clean and has no "Unnatural Links".
If we do a 301 from the penalized site to our alternative website, will there be any cross-contamination? Will the penalty carry over to our other site?
Please let me know what you guys think.
Thanks
-
Hi there,
In order to reduce the risk of passing the penalty but to ensure customers and repeat visitors get from site A to site B, you can try a 302 redirect, a meta refresh or a JavaScript redirect. Google traditionally does not pass authority or anything else through these types of redirects; however, there have been discussions lately in the SEO community about these types of redirects possibly carrying penalties over to the new domain as well.
However, I'd still say they're safer than a 301 if you ONLY want to take traffic with you, but essentially want to start afresh.
Cheers,
Jane
-
If you do a 301 redirect from Site A to Site B then you will be passing all (or close to 100%) of the link equity from Site A to Site B including the bad links. While there is a possibility that this new site might avoid a manual review, there's a good possibility it will get a manual review and be penalized. Also, most sites with a manual unnatural links penalty will have Penguin issues. If you 301 redirect a site with Penguin issues to a clean site then initially the clean site may perform well but the next time Penguin refreshes it will be affected.
There is potentially a way you can do this but I have not personally tried it and am hesitant to give instructions on how to do it. You can apparently pass links via an intermediate page that is blocked via robots.txt and then on to the new site. This will stop the link equity from flowing through the links. This could be a solution for you but you'd probably want some guidance from someone who has done it successfully.
-
The penalty will probably pass to site B if you do a 301 redirect. If it were that easy to get out of being penalized then you wouldn't have companies whose marketing is solely based on penalty recovery.
-
Good Morning and Thanks for all of the responses.
I guess I left out an important detail, so let me recap:
Site A <-- Unnatural Links Penalty From Google
Site B <-- No Penalty
Since Site A is having a lot of problems unrelated to the penalty (for example, the site is completely down right now), we wanted to redirect it to Site B. The goal is not to pass any link juice or influence/boost the rankings of site B, it is solely so that the repeat customers who have been purchasing from Site A for many years can now will be taken to Site B where they can purchase on a fully functional site, rather than seeing that Site A is down and searching for products somewhere else.
So the question is will the Penalty from Site A be applied to Site B if we do a 301 redirect at the registrar level?
-
I agree with Jane.
TBH I'd rather start with a brand new domain without the redirect, however sometimes we have to go with what the client wants, even if we advise against it, ultimately its their decision.
I have warned them that it's still early days and the penalty may still be passed. My suggestion was made to provide another response that didn't involve potentially destroying a second established domain via a redirected penalty.
-
It's generally accepted that penalties pass through redirects (this wasn't always the case - up until a couple of years ago, a 301 solved a lot of penalty issues). I have to guess that Silkstream's experience is uncommon in the long-term - a bad penalty will probably transfer over sooner or later. However, there are no set rules for this and perhaps several people who try this will get lucky.
I wouldn't rely on that though.
-
I've also seen this discussed a lot here on Moz, and have been involved in some of those discussions. You could try redirecting it to a new domain.
I have a new client who came to me suffering an obvious penalty (they weren't ranking for their own brand name), I asked them NOT to redirect the domain as I wanted to carry out some backlink research amongst other tasks to try to understand the problem. However they chose to go with the redirect against my advice - and it worked.
They went in at number 2 and a week later are at number 1. I cant say for sure how long this will hold, I'm concerned if there is a penalty of some kind that they may well disappear again in the next few weeks. But we are not losing anything in the meantime.
-
I would agree with Anthony on this. I would reiterate that if your existing site has some authoritative and valuable links, you should make sure that you have an equivalent page on your new site, and contact the linking site to change the link to your new site.
-
I've seen this debated numerous times as to whether or not a penalty will pass. Personally, I wouldn't risk a good clean site with another website's troubles. I mean, why risk a "totally clean" website?
A better route may be to simply contact the website owners of the good links your penalized website has and ask them to point them towards the same content you've put on your clean site.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Redirecting old html site to new wordpress site
Hi I'm currently updating an old (8 years old) html site to wordpress and about a month ago I redirected some url's to the new site (which is in a directory) like this... Redirect 301 /article1.htm http://mysite.net/wordpress/article1/
Technical SEO | | briandee
Redirect 301 /article2.htm http://mysite.net/wordpress/article2/
Redirect 301 /article3.htm http://mysite.net/wordpress/article3/ Google has indexed these new url's and they are showing in search results. I'm almost finished the new version of site and it is currently in a directory /wordpress I intend to move all the files from the directory to the root so new url when this is done will be http://mysite.net/article1/ etc My question is - what to I do about the redirects which are in place - do I delete them and replace with something like this? Redirect 301 /wordpress/article1/ http://mysite.net/article1/
Redirect 301 /wordpress/article2/ http://mysite.net/article2/
Redirect 301 /wordpress/article3/ http://mysite.net/article3/ Appreciate any help with this0 -
Redirect Question
We have a client that just did a redesign and development and the new design didn't really match their current structure. They said they didn't want to worry about matching site structure and never put any effort into SEO. Here is the situation: They had a blog located on a subdomain such as blog.domain.com - now there blog is located like domain.com/blog They want to create redirects for all the old the blog urls that used to be on the subdomain and not point to the domain.com/blog/post-name What is the best way of doing that - Through .htaccess?
Technical SEO | | Beardo0 -
Sudden drop in Rankings after 301 redirect
Greetings to Moz Community. Couple of months back, I have redirected my old blog to a new URL with 301 redirect because of spammy links pointed to my old blog. I have transfer all the posts manually, changed the permalink structure and 301 redirected every individual URL. All the ranking were boosted within couple of weeks and regained the traffic. After a month I have observed, the links pointed to old site are showing up in Webmaster Tools for the new domain. I was shocked (no previous experience) and again Disavowed all links. Today, all the positions went down for new domain. My questions are: 1. Did the Disavow tool worked this time with new domain? All the links pointed to old domain were devaluated? Is this the reason for ranking drop? Or 2. 301 Old domain with Unnatural links causes the issue? 3. Removing 301 will help to regain few keyword positions? I'm taking this as a case study. Already removed the 301 redirect. Looking for solid discussion.Thanks.
Technical SEO | | praveen4390 -
301 redirect and search engines
How long until 301 redirects get recognized by search engines? I noticed my link on Google isn't forwarding over to my new domain even after the 301 redirect. If I go to the site directly, the 301 redirect works. Anyone know how long it takes for search engines to pick it up? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | timeintopixels0 -
301 redirects
Hello. Our site was recently rebuilt, and we switched from using index.php in all the urls to not using it at all. We also changed the names of many of our pages. So the urls have been renamed from "example.com/index.php/old_page_name/" to "example.com/new-page-name/". While we were at it, we changed from "_" to "-" as our word separators in the urls. In the .htaccess file, we have a small block of code that strips out "index.php/" from all requests. This code redirects a request for "example.com/index.php/old_page_name/" to "example.com/old_page_name/" For your information, the code that strips out "index.php/" is: RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^GET.index.php [NC]
Technical SEO | | nyc-seo
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} !/uSZWTLna/.
RewriteRule (.?)index.php/(.*) /$1$2 [R=301,L] Then we have 301 redirects from "example.com/old_page_name/" to "example.com/new-page-name/" QUESTION 1: Is this two-step redirect approach okay, or would it be better to skip the separate index.php stripping code and simply have 301 redirects that include "index.php" in the urls? QUESTION 2: Will we lose some of the benefit of the links that have to pass through a 301 redirect? QUESTION 3: We have 50 or so redirects. Will this affect performance of the site? How many redirects does it take to start affecting performance? Thank you!0 -
Windows IIS 7 Redirect Question
I want to redirect the following 4 pages to the home page: http://www.phbalancedpool.com/pool-repair/pool_repair_arizona.html http://www.phbalancedpool.com/About%20Pool%20Cleaning%20Arizona/About_Page_Pool_Cleaning_Arizona.html http://www.phbalancedpool.com/specials/Pool%20Cleaning%20and%20Pool%20Repair%20Specials.html http://www.phbalancedpool.com/service-areas-in-arizona/Chandler_Gilbert_Mesa_Queen%20Creek_San%20Tan%20Valley.html This is what I am currently using for my Web.config file: <configuration></configuration> <match url=".*"></match> <add input="{HTTP_HOST}" pattern="^phbalancedpool.com$"></add> <action type="Redirect" url="http://www.phbalancedpool.com/{R:0}" <="" span="">redirectType="Permanent" /></action> <location path="pool-repair/pool_repair_arizona.html"></location> <location path="About%20Pool%20Cleaning%20Arizona/About_Page_Pool_Cleaning_Arizona.html"></location> <location path="specials/Pool%20Cleaning%20and%20Pool%20Repair%20Specials.html"></location> <location path="service-areas-in-arizona/Chandler_Gilbert_Mesa_Queen%20Creek_San%20Tan%20Valley.html"></location> Only the first one is actually redirecting and I can't figure out why. What do I need to do to fix this?
Technical SEO | | JordanJudson0 -
Multiple Domains, Same IP address, redirecting to preferred domain (301) -site is still indexed under wrong domains
Due to acquisitions over time and the merging of many microsites into one major site, we currently have 20+ TLD's pointing to the same IP address as our "preferred domain:" for our consolidated website http://goo.gl/gH33w. They are all set up as 301 redirects on apache - including both the www and non www versions. When we launched this consolidated website, (April 2010) we accidentally left the settings of our site open to accept any of our domains on the same IP. This was later fixed but unfortunately Google indexed our site under multiple of these URL's (ignoring the redirects) using the same content from our main website but swapping out the domain. We added some additional redirects on apache to redirect these individual pages pages indexed under the wrong domain to the same page under our main domain http://goo.gl/gH33w. This seemed to help resolve the issue and moved hundreds of pages off the index. However, in December of 2010 we made significant changes in our external dns for our ip addresses and now since December, we see pages indexed under these redirecting domains on the rise again. If you do a search query of : site:laboratoryid.com you will see a few hundred examples of pages indexed under the wrong domain. When you click on the link, it does redirect to the same page but under the preferred domain. So the redirect is working and has been confirmed as 301. But for some reason Google continues to crawl our site and index under this incorrect domains. Why is this? Is there a setting we are missing? These domain level and page level redirects should be decreasing the pages being indexed under the wrong domain but it appears it is doing the reverse. All of these old domains currently point to our production IP address where are preferred domain is also pointing. Could this be the issue? None of the pages indexed today are from the old version of these sites. They only seem to be the new content from the new site but not under the preferred domain. Any insight would be much appreciated because we have tried many things without success to get this resolved.
Technical SEO | | sboelter0