301 redirection for penalized websites

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Pawan Pawar: Our website is been penalised with Google algorithmic penalties, in the past we even had manual actions, but now it isn't there we have tried to clean out links and even redone all website content, our rankings are still bad and there is no sign of any improvements, we are now planning to re do the site with new design, content and a new domain, is it advisable to do 301 redirection from old domain to new or we should just shut the old website? Please advise and also let me know the best practices for 301 redirection.
  
  Thanks,
  Pawan Pawar 
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  Jann Grond: Mr. Google might not like you:)
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  Blade S: Recovery takes time. Even if you clean your backlinks, rewrite your content, etc., you'll need to wait for Google to launch new updates, and that can take quite some time.
  
  If after the update(s), your rankings don't improve, it may still mean you are penalized.
  
  I wouldn't recommend doing a 301 redirect, especially if you had all kinds of penalties. Also, if you're not 100% sure that the current domain is clean and legit, you'll pass all the bad things to the new one and ruin it from the start.
  
  That domain is pretty much on the blacklist. You'll have to put too much time and effort to revive it. It will be much easier and faster to start fresh, like John Mueller recommends here - https://www.seroundtable.com/google-penalty-new-site-18200.html
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  Suraj Gadage: +Pawan Pawar ;Recovering from Google penalty wrath (especially manual) can take long time. You need to have patience. Since you have removed/disavowed bad links, your domain authority has decreased in Google's eyes. Just rewriting the content won't help you to get your rankings back. ;
  
  Now coming to your exist strategy, I personally won't advise you to buy a new domain (unless your website is just a 6-9 months old.) What you need to understand is establishing brand authority and identity online takes time, especially if you are competing in a highly competitive industry like travel, insurance, ecommerce etc. (I don't agree with John Mueller's point here). Besides the bad links which you have built there might be other natural, quality links that are pointing to your website. It won't be easy for you to get these links if you have a new domain.
  
  Mean time you get out of penalty, focus on other channels to drive traffic to your website. For an example- Sponsored post on the external blog to drive qualified referral traffic Or Publish an interesting blog article on your website and promote it using paid social media channels. The possibilities are unlimited but you just need to act smart here. ;
  
  Now presuming you don't have control over this situation and your management has already decided to buy a new domain, then here is what you need to do:
  
  1. Evaluate the backlinks of old domain and disavow the ones that are of low quality and spammy in nature. ;
  
  2. Use a server side 301 redirect to let Google know that you have moved your website to a new domain (make sure your old domain is active)
  
  3. Verify the webmasters account for new domain to monitor the search visibility
  
  Hope this helps!
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  Pawan Pawar: +Suraj Gadage ;Thanks for the advise. ;
  
  Our new domain is almost 14 months old and we haven't used it at all in the past, can we use it for our new site?
  
  Its been almost 2 years, we are trying to get our site back, but all our efforts are in vain, thats why we are thinking of having a brand new site... we are in 2 minds whether to shut the old site or use 301 redirection. ;
  
  Also, can we run parallel websites on different domain, content, but same services?
  
  Whats the best solution?
  
  Pawan.
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  Suraj Gadage: +Pawan Pawar ;Better if you can PM me your domain name so that I can take a closer look and tell you the best course of action.
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  Pawan Pawar: +Suraj Gadage I sent you the PM 
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  Justin Y: If the site is completely compromised and can't be recovered, I don't think a 301 redirect to a new tld would be the best choice. You may want to dig deeper and do some more forensic work . Those are my thoughts. 
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  Pawan Pawar: Thanks +Justin Y any suggestions on doing more research on links we have used ahrefs, cognitive, moz tools in the past, what's the best strategy? 
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  Justin Y: Np. Everyone has their own strategy, I would start on the technical stuff first like crawl status, indexing, robot.txt file, etc. I use SEM rush, majestic seo, screaming frog, and much more. 
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  Pawan Pawar: Thanks +Justin Y