If you have several doorway/spam domains that Google has decided to gray out the PR on, can you hurt a site who's rankings and reputation are solid by 301ing those penalized domains to the trusted one?
This is the question asked by adamclark at SEW. Ian Mcanerin chimes in with some good advice:
...A 301 officially tells a search engine that the old site is now the new site - for better or worse. If these sites have not been banned, are not members of a bad neighbourhood, etc then 301'ing them can only help you. If, however, they are considered to be untrustworthy and then you tell the search engine that this untrustworthy site is now someplace else with a different name, then how that is handled is up to the search engine - but that is what you are telling them...
But, bhartzer contradicts that idea:
I don't agree. If you 301 a banned domain to a domain that ranks well and is not banned the banned domain will not hurt the other domain. If that were the case, then I could get one of my domains banned, 301 it to my competitor and hurt their site and their rankings.
I'm on the fence. Google (and the other SEs) have been known to do shoddier things than this. It could be trouble for the unsuspecting site. If anyone's done testing on this, I'd be very interested to hear about it.
It's 6 years later, I know, but does anyone have any further insights on this? I've come across about 14 banned domains registered to my company that are pointing straight at my site and being redirected to a holding page. The joys of working on a site that gives out subdomains (and full domains) to its users.
Now obviously I want to can these domains, kill them completely, but I'm now wondering if this could be the cause for the filter/penalty we've been suffering for nearly six months now despite us working incredibly hard on white hat strategies.
Cheers :)
Whoa - It looks like I am nearly four years late posting on this one. But the post almost exactly describes the issue that I am having a
myname.com which has essentially been banned and my new myname.org, which is aleady in the rankings, despite being a relatively empty blog.
I want to move the content from the banned website to the new one. What's the best way to do this and not also get the new site banned?
And for the record - the site was banned after being hacked several times and being completely offline for about 6 weeks. The content and SEO strategies are all white hat.
- Ryan