Cheers Chris. Something like that would be a good fallback plan, but in our case the referral and direct traffic is way more important than organic search.

In the absence of any better solution and because we can't ditch the brand and all the non-SEO traffic we've decided to go down the cleanup route.  Even if it doesn't work it's better than sacrificing the referral and direct traffic the brand gets.  Sucks that there seems to be no better solution to this problem, it seems like a common issue.

I would still love to know if anyone has any more concrete information on this question.  At the moment it seems like people like my client find themselves in an intractable problem:

• Recovering is highly unlikely, so it's often easier to save the brand and move to a new domain

• But doing so means you have to relinquish all your previous brand recognition and loyalty (NOT your old site's SEO) because using a 301 OR a 302 redirect will pass along the penalty

So is there no way of redirecting a domain that will not pass any SEO value and/or the penalty?  If you don't care about the old site's SEO status or links and you just want to start anew, is it also impossible to retain the branded traffic & repeat visitors from the old site?

Thanks Greg,

I had seen that previous discussion, it's pretty much the most useful content I could find on the subject. Except it's well over 12 months old, and it pretty clearly establishes that 301 redirects do pass penalties immediately.

Given we're moving the site to escape a penalty it would be crazy to use a 301 redirect when we know that is going to pass on the penalty.

My question is whether a 302 redirect will pass a penalty. In theory it shouldn't because it doesn't pass PageRank or other SEO metrics, so would it pass a penalty?

It's nuts that there's no more definitive information on something that should be so easy to test and answer.  Is there no advice from Moz or any of the other authorities on this?

Thanks for taking the time to share your opinion Thomas, but respectfully it looks like you misinterpreted my question. I'm very clear that we're not trying to do this to benefit from any old spam links - we're doing this to wipe the slate clean on all that.  But this is a brand we're talking about - people reach the site from all sorts of sources, referrals & reviews, WoM, repeat/loyal visitors, etc.

We don't give a damn about the negligible SEO value of the old site but we care very much about not losing our non-organic search visitors as they're all that's sustaining the business right now.

So if it's true that both 301 and 302 redirects pass on a penalty that means that Google is screwing with us even when we're trying to wipe the slate clean.  That's just insane even by their standards - now they're trying to penalise people beyond the realm of organic search!

But does anyone have any incontrovertible proof that this is the case?  Have Moz or any other authorities done any experiments on this?

I'm having problems finding a definitive answer to this question, there is a lot of rumour and gossip out there but nothing I can rely on.

I'm working with a site that received an unnatural links notice followed by a massive drop in search traffic. Looking at the link profile it's pretty much jacked beyond repair and I have recommended that we move over to a fresh domain.

However, it's an established brand with many more sources of traffic than organic search. There's no way we can burn all their repeat visits, loyal customers, brand recognition that they've built up over the years so I want to redirect from the old domain to the new.  This is not to try and make any SEO gain from the previous site, frankly we don't give a crap about that. We just want to maintain the brand.

A 302 is a temporary redirect, this will be a permanent move BUT a 301 will pass on the penalty.  So can we safely use a 302 redirect in this situation or is there a better alternative (meta refresh?)

Thanks for your help!

MB.

Hi again Ryan/Gordon,

Sorry to bring this one up again, but we could use some more input if possible.  It turns out the number of referring URLs is way higher than we originally thought. I've also done some digging in OSE and have found a huge number of links from dubious sources. It's going to take some time to refine the list but we're probably looking in the thousands.

There's no doubt that this is malicious as we have never done anything to build links like these.

We've not yet noticed any penalty or received any warnings but in a case like this is it sensible to preemptively remove the links with the disavow tool?

One other thought:  it seems suspicious that this has happened around the same time that the site itself was hacked with similar links inserted into the homepage.

My best guess is that the site hasn't been specifically targeted but has been caught up in some kind of automated spam attack.  I've looked at some of the other offending sites and all the links are in odd places - hidden in the code or in strange anchor text.  Is it possible that a robot has crawled all these sites and inserted spam links to create some kind of massive "link wheel"?

In this case what's the best preemptive solution before we get slapped with a penalty?

Thanks again...

I appreciate your time & help Ryan.  I will pass all those suggestions on.

If they choose to bring in a security expert in to take a look, do you have any recommendations?

Thanks Gordon,

The links are no-follow so for the time being I'm not too worried about link spam penalties.  We'll try to contact the site owners first and will then disavow the links if nothing else works...

Cheers, Matt

Thanks for your detailed reply Ralph As for the client's site hacking, as far as I'm aware their webmaster & in-house team dealt with that when it happened. I will pass your notes on to the team and check they are 100% confident that the security lapses are fixed. We are in the process of identifying & contacting the webmasters of the referring sites to requests the links be remove. However, if our messages go unacknowledged, what else can we do about it? The links are mostly no-follow which is a minor blessing and we haven't seen any link manipulation warnings in GWT yet. Still confused on their motives/reasons though.

We noticed recently a huge amount of referral traffic coming to a client's site from various hard cord porn sites. One of the sites has become the 4th largest referrer and there are maybe 20 other sites sending traffic.

I did a Whois look up on some of the sites and they're all registered to various people & companies, most of them are pretty shady looking.

I don't know if the sites have been hacked or are deliberately sending traffic to my client's site, but it's obviously a concern.   The client's site was compromised a few months ago and had a bunch of spam links inserted into the homepage code.

Has anyone else seen this before?  Any ideas why someone would do this, what the risks are and how we fix it?

All help & suggestions greatly appreciated, many thanks in advance.

MB.

My company provides search & content marketing services for a number of high end / luxury travel brands.  We don't really share your problem.  We don't build sites ourselves, but the sites we work with have usually been well built by SEO standards. When we come across a site that does need some work, it's usually very easy to explain to a client why they need to take a second look at their architecture, and how they can do that without sacrificing their branding.

There's absolutely no reason that a luxury brand shouldn't have content on its site. In fact, I'd say the opposite: a luxury brand should be finding every opportunity to communicate its unique expertise and authority in its field, using a variety of content to do that.

When it comes to content creation and off-site SEO working with luxury brands can be trickier than most since the bar is often much higher in the level of quality that is expected.  So our luxury clients usually end up spending more on content development, which means we have to be very careful how we deploy that content to ensure they get best value.

We also spend a lot of time on publisher & blogger outreach and building relationships with high end publications that we can partner with to help promote our client sites.

But in some respects, this is actually easier than doing SEO for a non-luxury brand, because the client already has an understanding of the need to invest in quality, and they don't expect results from cheap, spammy tricks.

Regards, Matthew