Building a new website post penalty and redirects

[designquotes]

A website I'm working on is clearly algorithmically penalised.

I've spent a lot of time mass disavowing spammy links, but it doesn't seem to make a difference.

We have been planning to build a new website anyway since we are rebranding.

1. Is it possible to tell which pages are most likely to have a penalty applied?

2. If the website as a whole has a penalty, will redirecting certain pages to the new website carry the penalty?

3. Our website is structured as sales pages and blog content. It is the sales pages that have the spammy links, yet most of the blog content does not rank either. Would it be a good strategy to only redirect all the blog posts (which have natural links pointing to them) to the new website and not the sales pages?

4. The homepage has a mix of spam and very good editorial links. If I have disavowed links and domains, can I safely redirect this page?

[customerparadigm.com]

Daniel - No worries…

If there hasn't been a manual action (just a big drop in rankings), disavow is a great tool to use.

I think on the darker side of SEO, there has certainly been competitors in highly competitive spaces who have tried to create spammy links pointing to competitors as a means to win at this often zero-sum game.  So my hunch is that is why Google realizes that sometimes links show up beyond your control.

Best practice, though, is to contact the other website and ask for links to be removed.  But sometimes this can fall on deaf ears…  Thus, Google's disavow tool…

If it was my site, I'd try to get some of the bad links removed.

And then really focus on a high-quality end user experience…  including site load time, engaging content, etc...

Hope this helps guide the decision…

• Jeff

[designquotes]

Hi Jeff, thanks for your response.

There has been no manual action, just an algorithmic penalty evidenced by the fact that posts do not rank for ab almost exact match for the name and sales pages that used to be page 1 arent in the top 50.

I have literally disavowed any link that is not an organic link or a link from a partner website.

Is disavowing (for a anlgo penalty) enough, or do we need to contact websites and have the link removed?

[customerparadigm.com]

Daniel -

Have you had a manual action taken against the site?  The place to look for this is in Google Webmaster Tools, and this describes it in more detail: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35843?hl=en

If you have, you'll want to clean up everything and ask Google to reconsider the site.  This process can take weeks.

Google can either take action against your entire site, or just parts of it, according to their blog here:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2013/08/manual-actions-viewer.html

You might just want to start over, though, and do things with a clean slate.

Because repeat offenders, according to Google's Distinguished Engineer Matt Cutts, will face ever more challenging hurdles if additional manual actions occur.

If you haven't had a manual action against your site, you might want to do as much cleanup as possible, and monitor the performance.  Try focusing on the end customer experience.  What do they need to know?  What enriches their lives?  (Instead of what's great for the company's revenue.)

To answer the question about redirecting the blog posts - yes, that probably makes sense to do using 301 redirects, especially if that content is solid and has great inbound natural links.

Hope this helps!
-- Jeff