Ryan,
Thank you for the great information. Was your last sentence cut off or was that the end?
We do not believe it will be possible to fix the penalty in time frame we have so we have decided to just go with a new domain.
We would like to try and maintain any customers that happen to stumble upon our old site but want to make sure we do not get penalized in any way. We were thinking of just putting up a generic single landing page stating that we have moved but are afraid to actually mention or link to the new site as we do not want the new one to be penalized. Is this something we should be afraid of or could we link to the new domain? Or should we keep our current pages in place and link to the new corresponding page?
Do you have a recommendation / procedure to shutdown the old site properly and remove from Google before the new site is launched? Is there a problem just making small changes to the site but pretty much making an exact copy of the old site?
Thanks,
Brad