That's what I was thinking. A great one page wordpress site with some great content about wedding photography in New England.

Work on the linking issues and when I recover do the 301 to the new domain

3 weeks later and blamo! Dropped off the face of the earth. I think there is some negative penalty being passed from my old site to my new one.

I've been cleaning up the link profile of the old site, but many webmasters won't respond.

I'm at the point where I'm going to remove the 301 and set up a one page wordpress website on the old domain directing existing and past customer to the new site. Inelegant solution, but I can't think of anything else to do. Suggestion?

3 weeks later and blamo! Dropped off the face of the earth. I think there is some negative penalty being passed from my old site to my new one.

I've been cleaning up the link profile of the old site, but many webmasters won't respond.

I'm at the point where I'm going to remove the 301 and set up a one page wordpress website on the old domain directing existing and past customer to the new site. Inelegant solution, but I can't think of anything else to do. Suggestion?

It's working so far, but we'll see if the results hold true. I've been using the Copyblogger Scribe SEO wordpress plugin to make sure that my writing of posts and pages is natural and that keywords I'm trying to rank for are not over optimized.

| Keyword |   | Current Rank |   | Change |
| newport wedding photographer | 3 |      > 47 |   |
| boston wedding photography | 4 |      > 46 |   |
| newport wedding photographers | 4 |      > 46 |   |
| boston wedding photographers | 5 |      > 45 |   |
| boston wedding photographer | 5 |      > 45 |   |

I just went this route on Monday so I guess you can call me the lab rat.

I had a site ranking very well, and in the last 60 days with the latest panda and the penguin update it fell from page 1 with top 3 results for close to 50 money keywords to basically page 5 or below.

I am a photographer and was an engineer before so I love things that are technical like SEO. Before joining SEOMoz I did quite a few gray hat things that I learned from forums such as a ton of exact match anchor text on tons of irrelevant blogs, Senuke, forum profiles. Basically a ton of crap, but low and behold it worked and I ranked well until now. The problem was that I created such a huge mess with inbound links that it's impossible to clean it up. I have thousands of crummy irrelevant links (Rand would need to take me out behind the woodshed)

So what does all this have to do with a 301 redirect?

My old website was at the domain markandrewphotographer that I used the past three years (2008 to now). The good news is that when I started in photography full time in 2006 I used a domain markandrewphotography.com and in 2008 a branding consultant had me switch to the markandrewphotographer domain because it was more about me than the photography in attracting clients. (That was a big trend in out industry for a couple of years) I kept the old markandrewphotography domain as it had a page rank of 2 and did a site wide 301 to the markandrewphotographer domain.

This Monday I moved my site to the markandrewphotography domain and then decided to 301 the photographer.com domain that is penalized and we'll see what happens. The worst thing is I get the penalty passed and I can then just remove the 301 and slow work on changing the links cape of the site and then try again in a few months.

The markandrewphotography domain is a clean domain. It's almost 6 years old and has seven links. I will link using only white hat methods with this site within my niche. I started changing some of the inbound links yesterday on industry websites that I am listed such as weddingwire, marthastewart and that are considered authority sites. I plan on doing a few links a day and making sure that I use partial match anchor text and that my brand name keywords out number other keywords but a good margin, maybe 70% branded to 30% partial match.

I also wonder if I was outed by a competitor. The person ranking #1 for search terms like "boston wedding photographers" is a one man photography studio, but in opensiteexplorer her has 440,000 links?